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BENJAMIN
FRANKLIN:
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN is a documentary with a difference. While the series includes many traditional techniques, including interviews with some of the world’s most noted Franklin scholars and experts, TPT executive producer Catherine Allan and her team wanted to go beyond the conventional visual components of the historical documentary. Franklin lived in a time before photography, and although more portraits exist of him than of almost any other founding father, still images alone didn’t feel adequate for conveying the life and times of one of history’s liveliest thinkers. “Many of the portraits of Franklin reinforce the stereotype of a stiff and distant figure, someone irrelevant to our own times, whereas in fact, when you read his words, he is enormously accessible and down to earth,” says Allan. “We thought the best way to make Franklin and his world compelling for contemporary audiences was to bring his words to life through on-camera performances and cinematic recreations.” The challenge was how to do this on a documentary budget. Producer-Directors Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer began by assembling a cast of distinguished theatrical actors, including Tony Award-winning Broadway actor Richard Easton in the title role of Franklin, Dylan Baker as young Franklin, and television actress Blair Brown as his sister, Jane Mecom. Filmed in close-up, in a historically evocative setting, the actors address the viewer directly, drawing the audience into an intimate relationship. The words they speak are not scripted, but carefully assembled by writer Ronald Blumer from actual letters, essays and other original source material. Franklin’s own words, surely among the wittiest and most eloquent in American literature, form the backbone of the series, illuminating both Franklin’s brilliance and his humanity. “Much of Franklin's writing was startlingly modern in tone,” says Blumer. “Unlike many stiff and formal 18th century writers, he was a journalist who loved slang and a good joke. With other characters, it’s a struggle to find the words to bring them alive. With Franklin and his great stories, the only problem is what to leave out.” The series also draws liberally from the writings of Franklin’s friends and enemies—John Adams, Joseph Priestly, Mme. Brillon and Thomas Penn, among others—many of whom had a sense that they were making history, and were compulsive about writing it all down. The next challenge was to re-create the rich period settings, including the drawing rooms of England and the lush interiors of Paris that formed the backdrops for these on-camera readings. In composing the tight close-ups of costumed actors, the producers created the illusion of a full set using the clever device of rear screen projection. These scenes were filmed in a New York studio, with the actors, furniture and props set in the foreground, in front of large-scale projections twelve-by-twenty feet across. The projected images were often photographs of actual historic rooms, digitally modified on the computer using Adobe® Photoshop® to manipulate the scene. Director of Photography, Tom Hurwitz, and Lighting Director, Ned Hallick, were able to reproduce the angle and intensity of light shining through windows in the photographs used for the projections. They even created the illusion of an ocean-tossed boat by swinging a studio light source back and forth behind a projected photograph of a ship’s cabin. But that still left many exterior period locations to be filmed—from street scenes of Franklin’s Philadelphia to the slums of Louis XVI’s Paris—and it all had to be authentic. “These are the crucial scenes that show life as it was lived in the 18th century,” says Director of Research Jennifer Raikes. “This is especially important in a documentary about an era before photography or video. Every detail has to be painstakingly researched and recreated.” Fortunately, in the U.S., Meyer & Hovde were able to take advantage of a variety of faithfully preserved colonial settings. Portions of BENJAMIN FRANKLIN were filmed in Philadelphia and at historical sites such as Colonial Williamsburg, Historic Deerfield, Massachusetts, and the Yankee Candle Museum near Historic Deerfield, which stood in for the candle shop where Franklin’s father earned his living. Genuine scientific implements of Franklin’s time—lent by the Harvard Museum of Historic Scientific Instruments—were used in the sequences that illustrate his electrical experiments; authentic printing presses brought to life the print shops in which Franklin first found employment as an unhappy apprentice and, later, where he made his first fortune in business. In the European capitals where much of Franklin’s story takes place, recreating the Age of Reason on a budget proved to be more of a problem. The 18th century Paris that Franklin knew no longer exists, and London was too expensive as a location. “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to recreate 18th century Paris and London, what better place to look than Eastern Europe?” says Muffie Meyer of Middlemarch Films, Inc., co-Producer/Director of the series along with Ellen Hovde. After rejecting Prague and a couple of other former Eastern Bloc cities as too costly for a production on a tight budget and too modernized to stand in for an urban environment of 250 years ago, the producers turned to Vilnius, Lithuania. “Lithuania had been independent of the Soviets for ten years but was off the beaten path,” says Hovde. “Massive rebuilding and modernizing had not taken place. We looked at some picture books of streets and buildings in Vilnius, and were amazed when we compared these modern photos to period engravings of 18th century London and Paris. All we needed to do to film in a convincing environment was to put up some historic signage along the cobblestone streets and dress the area with some costumed extras and a period prop like a horse-drawn cart.” To clinch the argument, film studios that the Soviets had built in Lithuania now stood unused. They offered an extremely creative and cost-conscious production crew, hungry for work. Together with Production Designer Andrew Jackness and Costume Designer Candice Donnelly, the Lithuanian craftsmen were able to re-create the bonnets and breeches, the carriages, water-pumps, chicken coops and the other artifacts of the day for a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time than it would have required anywhere else. One of the series’ most carefully researched and engaging cinematic techniques is the recreation of Franklin’s handwriting. The camera follows an authentic quill pen in the hand of master calligrapher Brody Neuenschwander from Bruges, Belgium. Neuenschwander spent weeks practicing Franklin’s distinctive script and duplicated it for the series, using paper made the same way it was in Franklin’s day from a pulp of linen fiber dissolved in water and poured over a screen to dry. Leaving no detail to chance, the producers also researched an authentic recipe for ink from Franklin’s era that included the surprising ingredient of oak galls, a fungal growth caused by wasps—a recipe that has its origins in ancient Rome. Early Lithuania masquerading as London, actors who aren’t where they seem, American ink made from an ancient Roman recipe, the salons of Paris recreated through computer software and photographic projections, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN makes movie magic even as it animates history. Franklin himself, who never hesitated to try something new, might have approved. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN was produced and directed by Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer. Catherine Allan is executive producer; Ronald Blumer is writer and co-producer. Donna Marino, Eric Davies and Sharon Sachs are editors. Richard Einhorn composed the score. Sole corporate funding for the series is provided by the Northwestern Mutual Foundation. Additional major funding is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Public Broadcasting Service. Additional funders include the Humana Foundation and the Eberly Foundation. |
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