The Genius is a black comedy, a contemporary satire in which art and science collide explosively. The film follows the line of a video diary kept by the male protagonist, played by Joe Gibbons himself. It is set in a hypothetical Manhattan, where the American Family League has taken over all art galleries. The artist Kitty Church has been thrown out of her own gallery and blacklisted because of her controversial art. The scientist Desmond Denton had lost his research funding long ago after his notorious ‘flatwork fiasco’ experiments in the sixties. Since then he has developed a way of transplanting personality attributes from one brain to another. In his laboratory under the Brooklyn Bridge willing customers receive ‘genicular’ treatment.After meeting Kitty in the bar where she works, Desmond becomes obsessed by her to the point that he starts altering his own personality structure to win her over. He also wants to rescue her from her loutish boyfriend Les, an ambitious artist. Meanwhile Kitty with a series of terrorist acts committed under the nom de guerre ‘Eve of Destruction’ is taking her revenge on an art world that has rejected her. At first Desmond really thinks he is in love with Kitty, but in the end he realises that it’s not enough to be with Kitty, he actually wants to be her too.Before its completion Geoff Gillmore of the Sundance Film Festival called The Genius ‘the most exciting work-in-progress’.
