Screen Gems

"We should all be so lucky as to be able to make a documentary about our fathers," according to Mark Everett. The singer, who in addition to creating "Parallel World, Parallel Lives" about the life of physicist/dad Hugh Everett III had previously tried to explain and explore in his book, a bachelor take on "Things the Grandchildren Should Know."

Everett younger takes viewers on a guided, albeit not comprehensive tour of the mind of Everett elder, the man who proposed various proofs for the concepts that other universes exist in places inaccessible to humans. Of course, what he is not discussing are the universes of other dads here on earth that we are just missing ... such as, for example that of central African mountain gorilla king Titus, who used his fathering skills — siring and protecting — to dominate his pack for nearly 17 years. Disappointingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, his many children haven't yet gotten around to learning the necessary movie making skills or adapting to the tools that would let them tell their father's story. So, his is currently a universe glimpsed and imagined only from the outside.

As is the parallel universes that is still be discovered within the mind(s) of a man who went crazy while writing of a man who went crazy. That tale is told by Immy Humes, daughter of burnt-out literary nova Harold L. Humes, whose unfinished novel "The Memoirs of Dorsey Slade" is the story that never got finished within a story within a story of his crack-up.

Perhaps the parallel universes of fathers were what Everett was really getting at and the proof can only be confirmed when we lay all their stories out? In that, we will surely all be lucky.