An egocentric, often disparaged, flamboyant genius, three wives, massive debt, abandoned children, mass murder, burning houses, grave robbing, failure and resurrection. A new Dominick Dunne miniseries? No, it’s the very spare but all-too-real outline of the life of Frank Lloyd Wright.
This week on PBS, acclaimed historical filmmaker Ken Burns fills in the spaces with a two-part, three-hour exploration titled simply “Frank Lloyd Wright.” Anyone who makes it past the introduction that shows the remarkable span of Wright’s career from his first innovative home and studio to the Prairie Houses to the Guggenheim Museum will be hooked whether you like Wright or not.
The complicated genius who created wave after wave of unprecedented architecture while leading one of the messiest lives on record continues to challenge long after his death in 1959. Those who admire, even adore, Wright’s work still have to struggle with the contradictions of his life. That struggle is at the film’s core.
Co-directed with longtime associate Lynn Novick — the first time Burns has ever shared such a credit — the film is the third in a series of five biographies commissioned by PBS.
“Frank Lloyd Wright” is another installment in Burns’ search for answers to a core question: “Who are we as a people?” During a recent trip to Chicago, Burns blended quality time with reporters and a post-film repeat pilgrimage to Oak Park, the Mecca of Wright. Riding in the Suburbans provided by corporate sponsor General Motors
(Burns gets one of his own from the company every year), walking through Wright’s home and some of those he built for others, or, over the noise, dining at Oak Park’s chic but noisy Cucina Paradiso, Burns riffed on Wright, his life, his work, and the architect’s place in the Burns’ spectrum.
“I’ve essentially been making the same film over and over again; it’s just with different aspects. People see me on the outside as a historian. I’m a filmmaker and I’m practicing an art. I just happen to have chosen history the way a painter might choose oils over watercolors.”
As for Wright as a subject, Burns says, “You’ve got the greatest architectural genius in the history of the country, if not one of the greatest architects of all times, plus he’s got this rollercoaster of a personal life, which most people tend to ignore — the architects want to talk about the houses and the tabloid in us wants just to talk about the life.
“But you need to know about both and they need to talk to one another and they’re two seemingly irreconcilable tracks. What this film is an attempt to do is to try to see them and understand the art in relationship to the man and the man in relationship to the art — and that’s a pretty tough thing to do.”
It’s difficult not to think of Burns himself when he talks like this. Take the following quote and think of a Burns project like “Baseball” or “The Civil War,” films he can still remember word for word as he proves toward the end of lunch.
“We put our faith in process, which is what Frank Lloyd Wright was all about, taking the elements of nature, seeing something in it and beginning to transform it through will, through intention, through audacity, through ego, through all of the things and make something which, at the end, to me is utterly American. He holds up a mirror and tells us a lot about who we are, good and bad.”
Actually, it’s Burns who holds up the mirror and tells us a lot about who we are. For his groundbreaking “The Civil War” and for the other biographies in this series, Burns had to rely on records and experts. Burns and Novick use both again in “Frank Lloyd Wright,” but Wright’s 91-year life span and the even longer life of one of his sons brought the irreplaceable element of eyewitnesses. Interviewed before his recent death, son David Wright adds an unmatchable dimension.
David’s son, Tim, and his cousin Eric Lloyd Wright, the son of Frank Lloyd Wright Jr., make their own valuable contributions, including Tim’s description of his father’s attempt to physically hurt his grandfather when Wright abandoned his first wife, Kitty, and their six children for a scandalous life with mistress Mamah Borthwick Cheney. The narrative that deals with Mamah’s brutal murder and that of six others, including her children, at Taliesin, Wright’s retreat in Spring Green, Wis., is the most difficult moment of the film. Beautifully filmed images of the third Taliesin mixed with black-and-white photos illustrate the telling of the first Taliesin’s burning during the murders, making the moment even eerier.
Eric, born in 1929 when his grandfather was 62, also brings the experience of learning architecture in the Taliesin Fellowship, for apprentice architects.
The experts still fill necessary roles. The cast of “on-screen commentators” includes Harvard professor Neil Levine, an architectural historian and the author of a major study on Wright.
At its heart, “Frank Lloyd Wright” is about understanding genius and its complications, Burns says. He adds: “Having said that, I think really it’s coming away in our media age, where we are so dominated by the false dynamic of good and bad, yes and no, male and female, young and old, light and darkness, that it is possible to tolerate complexity, that a hero is not somebody who is perfect but, indeed, what makes a hero interesting is the very fascinating negotiation between strengths and weaknesses.”
Burns realized halfway through editing that his involvement with other projects meant that Novick had become the day-to-day director of “Frank Lloyd Wright.” Novick chose her career as a documentary filmmaker after hearing Burns speak in 1985. She joined Florentine Films in 1989 to clear pictures for “The Civil War.”
Wright, a man who abandoned his children, was a much more difficult subject for Novick, the mother of two, whose appreciation of the man as architect clearly showed during the visit to Oak Park.
No matter how great the talented Novick’s role was as co-director, the film written by Geoffrey C. Ward and narrated by Edward Hermann, is unmistakably a Ken Burns production. (Novick and Peter Miller are co-producers.) Don’t call it a formula, though.
“Formula is the negative media-driven description of what is style. Style is the intersection between an individual’s way of solving things and the thing that he is solving,” Burns says.
His appreciation of style and its evolution adds to his understanding of Wright. Listening carefully to the insights of architectural historian Levine as they walk through some of the great homes Wright designed for the residents of Oak Park, Burns noted with an aura of awe the changes Wright made as he applied a greater understanding of his craft to his constant need to be on the edge.
His fascination with the architect doesn’t include a desire to own a Wright house.
“I could never live in a Frank Lloyd Wright house it’s so loud. It’s always speaking to you. It’s asking you to subscribe to his vision . . . He wants you to not only be in his house but to sit in his furniture and to use his silverware, his napkin rings, you’re buying a whole kit and caboodle so you’re essentially subordinating your identity to him. For many people it’s a great, great privilege to have that occur.”
Burns is content to have people spend a few hours at a time with his vision, knowing that he is beginning a dialogue that will continue long after the television is switched off for the night.
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`Frank Lloyd Wright’
8 p.m. Tue. (pt. 1) and Wed. (pt. 2), WTTW-Ch. 11
