Cheaper by the Dozen movie with Steve Martin coming

Cheaper by the Dozen, one of my favorite books, is being made into a film (again), starring Steve Martin and the tween-heroine from Lizzy McGuire. The story is the memoir of two of the children of Frank Gilbreth, an obsessive-compulsive who invented and largely perfected the business of time-motion study and efficiency consulting. This is a man who used a stopwatch to determine the optimal method of buttoning a shirt — bottom-up/top-down — and had his enormous brood of children given sequential tonsilectomies which he filmed in order to establish today's familiar operating-theatre procedure. He also invented touch-typing and much of today's ergonomics and assembly-line best-practices. The memoir is utterly charming, a warm account of a man who was at least one-third tyrant but who was also the most loving of fathers. The style is strongly reminiscent of Heinlein's stories about entrepreneurs, like the Doorway into Summer, serving up an archetype of American commonsense find-a-need-and-fill-it business that feels as homespun as an Andy of Mayberry episode when compared to today's baroque B-school wisdom. I hope that Steve Martin does it justice — he's certainly the kind of ambiguous comic who could bring the character to life. Though, from the plot synopsis, it appears that rather severe liberties have been taken with the storyline.

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