12/27/05: How could the Gilbreth estate have approved these stupid films?

I know it's pretty rare to admit such a thing, but I've actually READ the original "Cheaper By the Dozen" novel, and its sequel, "Belles On Their Toes". And it's interesting to point out that even back in the 1910s, when Frank Gilbreth first married Lillian and they decided to have exactly 12 kids, there were birth control technologies just getting off the ground, and talk not only of legalizing women to vote but of legalizing birth control and family planning, though such things were still a little controversial back in the bad old days, obviously.

But my point is that Pa Gilbreth was an engineer who pioneered efficiency methods to make factory work quicker and easier, and he applied many of these "motion studies" and charts and diagrams to his own home...partly because he was a control freak, but mostly for benevolent reasons, like lightening the burden on his wife. And since he died in his fifties of a heart attack, when the oldest girl was 18 and the youngest only two, these efficiency systems actually made the surviving family's job a lot easier than it would have been without them.

That's why I've been refusing to see these Steve Martin/Bonnie Hunt film versions. Not only are they an anachronism in the early 21st century, I consider them a truly dangerous illusion. I mean, the Dad is just this easygoing, Little League coaching NON-efficiency expert, and the Mom just slaps all the food on plates in a typical who-cares sloppy fashion of an overworked parent (according to Ebert's review), and we don't even see how she goes through all those loads of laundry every day?

And although the credits proclaim these scripts are based on the Gilbreth's novel, what do any of these Baker characters have to do with them? From what I can see, they resemble the original Gilbreths about as much as the characters of "Memoirs of a Geisha" resemble an Enron office. Now, the novels were published back in the early 1950s, so I'm sure the authors (two of the Gilbreth dozen) are no longer living, but what about their descendents? What possessed them to associate their famous title with this crazy family drivel? I hope it was just because the money was good.

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