Photo credit: Flint Journal Hollyn Johnson
Annapolis attorney Michael P. Darrow recently had the opportunity to relive his family history and be apart of filming for a movie about Clarence Darrow and the Scopes Monkey Trial. Clarence Darrow, who is a distant cousin of Michael Darrow, is a well known attorney from the early 20th century. Michael Darrow was on set at the request of the producers who thought having a real Darrow would add interest to the filming process.
The Annapolis attorney traveled to Flint, Michigan to act as a courtroom reporter, sitting behind Brian Dennehey who was acting as Clarence Darrow.
“The experience was wonderful,” says Michael P. Darrow, partner of the Annapolis law firm Hillman, Brown & Darrow.
The story was also featured in The Flint Journal, written by Liz Shaw:
It must have seemed a little like having Clarence Darrow’s ghost sitting in the courtroom during Tuesday’s filming at Crossroads Village for “Alleged,” a new movie on the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial.
Up at the front of the old Clayton Township Hall, actors Brian Dennehy and Fred Thompson reenacted the famous litigator’s historic legal battle with William Jennings Bryan over the right to teach evolution in the schools.
Back in the crowd of courtroom spectators, a bespectacled gentleman in a dapper beige suit carefully watched the drama unfold.
This is no mere movie extra — Michael P. Darrow is the real-life grandson of Darrow’s first cousin and childhood coon hunting buddy in rural Indiana.
“They originally told me I’d be playing a reporter, but since I could only be here the one day, they made me part of the courtroom crowd,” said Darrow, a civil trial attorney who’s carried on the family law tradition for 32 years.