Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright documentary, published by The Capital Times, November 11, 1998

Frank Lloyd Wright was utterly assured of his own genius. He even found the appellation “greatest living American architect” insufficient, rejecting such qualifiers as “living” and “American.”

“It’s extraordinary to me to see how deeply he believed in himself,” says Lynn Novick, co-director with Ken Burns of the new documentary film “Frank Lloyd Wright,” airing Tuesday and Wednesday night on WHA (Ch. 21). “Frank Lloyd Wright never doubted for one second, from what I can tell, that he was a genius and that he had terribly important things to say and do in architecture. He really never gave up. He was able to reinvent himself time after time because of that deep-down faith in himself that he never lost. Most people would have just crumpled up and died and just given up, given the obstacles he faced, even though some of the obstacles were, in fact, self-invented.”

“Frank Lloyd Wright,” took nearly two years to produce, taking the film crew all over the country to survey Wright’s legacy with a startling cross-section of eclectic structures — from a service station in Cloquet, Minnesota to an art museum in New York City.

There are the contributions Wright made to our local architecture as well, from the S.C. Johnson and Son Administration Building in Racine to the Unitarian Meeting House in Madison. Taliesin — his home for almost 50 years — is in Spring Green.

“It was a wonderful privilege for Ken Burns and for me,” says Novick. “We were able to travel all over the country and visit many buildings — and not just for an hour, but spend an extended amount of time in many extraordinary places. You really get to feel the buildings work on you and you are constantly amazed and delighted by some of the details that you don’t notice at first glance. Having the chance to really live in the buildings, to some degree, brought me a much deeper appreciation of what Frank Lloyd Wright was trying to do.”

Translating Wright’s three-dimensional craft to the two-dimensional television medium, however, created a new challenge for Burns and Novick.

“That was our greatest cinematic challenge,” Novick recalls, “trying to figure out ways to film these spaces and edit the material in such a way that gave the viewer some sense of the feeling that’s inspired by Unity Temple [in Oak Park, IL], for example, or the Guggenheim Museum in New York. That’s what makes our job really fun and exciting, to try to think of new ways or interesting ways that we can use old tricks and new tricks to try to bring architecture to life. I guess the viewers will have to be the judge of how good a job we did conveying on film what it’s like to be in these spaces.”

Burns first had the idea to do a film about Wright in the early ‘80s after seeing a film about the Wisconsin native’s architecture. Devoting time to many other projects, Burns finally began work on the film in the fall of 1995. During the project, Novick, who has worked with Burns since 1989, emerged to become the first person to share a directorial credit with Burns.

The routine of working with Burns for almost 10 years has become a familiar one for Novick, easing her transition from collaborator to co-producer and co-director.

“Every project is different, every project has its own challenges and difficulties and satisfactions and rewards. Yet, at the same time, every project is kind of the same film over and over because the process is the same. We begin knowing enough about a subject to know that we want to make a film about it — but not being experts by any means — and immerse ourselves in the subject [by] reading about it, talking to the experts, visiting the places that are relevant to the story. So we go through the same process for every project.”

In conducting that process, Novick came to discover in Wright a difficult and complicated man, one whose personal foibles provided an unsettling counterpoint to his exceptional artistry.

“The most interesting thing about Frank Lloyd Wright,” Novick says, “was the struggle we felt as filmmakers to reconcile who he was as a human being and the unbelievable art he created. He was a deeply flawed person. He did what he wanted to do, when he wanted to do it, because he wanted to do it. And he felt completely justified in that. As a result of that, he did a lot of damage to people who were close to him — to family members, to his wife, to clients, to other people — because he believed in himself and if he believed in it, then it had to be right. And that’s not terribly attractive as a human quality. It’s very hard to come to terms with that, on the one hand, and on the other hand, to recognize that he was an extraordinarily talented artist.”