From the time when he set out to create his first documentary, “The Artist as a Reporter”, Franklin himself was aware of the marvelous power motion pictures possess to convey social and political ideas. A creative innovator, he pioneered the use of camera moves on artwork to present ideas about the world around us. Not only social changes came under his keen eye; he could create memorable nostalgic portraits, as beautifully illustrated in his documentary on the wonder of a Chicago Christmas, a show of his that became a perennial television classic.
Franklin McMahon Sr. perfected “The Ken Burns Effect” of bringing still pictures to life through carefully designed camera moves well before Burns, a highly skilled documentary maker in his own right, used such techniques in his popular films. The first of Franklin’s first great series of political documentaries, a 90 minute television special outlining the events of the U.S. Presidential campaign in 1968, won him an EMMY award, the first of three EMMYs he would earn for his work recording and preserving the details and the flavor of national political campaigns over the generations from the 1960s through the end of the millennium. Other documentaries include his special on the Chicago Seven, and “The World of Vatican II” and “World Cities” which recorded for future generations the worldwide movement of people from rural areas to the cities in every region of the globe in the latter half of the 20th century.
In the haut world of fine art, Franklin is recognized as having similarities with French artist Honore Daumier (1808-1879). Both were painters and sketch artists of consummate skill, both produced not only fine paintings but sketches and lithos capturing the mood and shape of their societies, and each produced a prolific body of irrefutably the finest artistic work.
As a pioneer in the filmmaking art, Franklin was experimenting in areas where few artists before him had gone, and only with limited success. One is reminded of Walt Disney’s attempt to bring life to Salvador Dali’s work in the seven minute limited animation film short Destino or some of the artistic qualities of Walt’s full length feature Fantasia. But more than an experimental filmmaker, Franklin surpassed the Disney efforts in his own direction, with his own unique filmic techniques and artistic style—The McMahon Way—as he became a master at the storytelling art of blending his work into smoothly moving pictures. This was a time-consuming process in those pre-computer generation days, and yet the outcome provides today’s viewers with vivid images of the places and times of his life—as well as a decades-long record of the major events of his era.
Franklin’s film projects often provided rewarding moments for him, as when a camera pan or a zoom in or pullback would highlight or reveal some area of his work that he came to realize some viewers might not otherwise experience ‘what he was trying to get at’, as he would say. But they could be painful to the artistic side of him, as well. There were times when, upon seeing a painting he’d spent a great deal of time to create, that entire painting would slide by on the screen in perhaps ten seconds, and he would say something regretful like, “That took me a lot of work, you know…”, his voice trailing off as if maybe a bit more lingering on the scene was in order.
A friend of some of the most influential creative people of the time, on his travels to the West Coast Franklin liked to drop in on architect and designer Charles Eames and Charles’ wife Ray at their famous 901 studio office in Santa Monica, a place that was a popular hangout for famous post-World War II artists and musicians like Elmer Bernstein. The deal was, Franklin would screen one of his documentaries and Charles and Ray in turn would run one of their film shorts like “Powers of Ten” or “Toy Trains”. By that time, the Eames had made waves in the multi-media area for their exhibits at the 1959 Moscow and the 1964 New York World’s Fairs and were working on inter-active exhibits, and they were intensely interested in and enthusiastic about Franklin’s ability to fuse fine art and social commentary in his documentaries.
Today, Franklin McMahon Sr’s legacy lives on not only in his art and films, but in the work of his children, talented artists, sculptors and photographers all, perhaps most particularly in the work of his son Mark, who seems to have captured the essence of his father’s genius but with his own unique flavor. And this is as it should be, for didn’t Mozart have a talented father as well?
John Klawitter is a writer and film director living in Los Angeles. He co-produced and directed several of Franklin McMahon Sr’s documentary films, including “McMahon’s Politicians” and “World Cities”. His fond memories of Franklin include their trips together to screen their films for Charles & Ray Eames and the work Franklin did for his documentary “The Navajos Water the Desert”. John Klawitter’s recent writing includes TINSEL WILDERNESS, 2009 Epic Author Award winner for Best Non-Fiction Book, which contains a chapter titled “Tenacity In Art” the story their adventures in Manhattan pitching the first hour of “McMahon’s Politicians” to the networks.
