Carl Franklin

film director

Personal Information

Born c. 1949, in Richmond, CA; married twice (both marriages ended in divorce); two children.
Education: University of California, Berkeley, B.A., c. 1971; American Film Institute, M.F.A.

Career

Appeared in productions of Cymbeline, Timon of Athens, and Twelfth Night, New York City, early 1970s; appeared in film Five on the Black Hand Side, 1971; appeared on television series Caribe, Fantastic Journey, McClain's Law, and The A-Team; appeared in productions of Saint Joan and In the Belly of the Beast, Los Angeles; made short film Punk; directed features Nowhere to Run, 1988, Eye of the Eagle 2, 1989, Full Fathom Five, 1990, and One False Move, 1991; directed television film Laurel Avenue for cable channel Home Box Office (HBO), 1993; adapted screenplay for and directed Devil in a Blue Dress, 1995.

Life's Work

Describing the work of his favorite directors--Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, Charles Burnett, Francis Ford Coppola, and others- -in an interview with Sheila Benson for Premiere magazine, Carl Franklin noted a common preoccupation. "They're not so much interested in the action of the film," he observed, "as they are in the response of the characters to the dramatic action--whether it takes them closer [to] or further from God. If that doesn't sound too pretentious."

Franklin has earned accolades in his own work for focusing on character over plot gimmickry, exploring often dark material with both compassion and flair. Though he arrived at directing after spending many unsatisfying years as an actor, he was able to use his understanding of the actor's perspective in making his well-received features One False Move and Devil in a Blue Dress and the acclaimed television series Laurel Avenue. Actor Denzel Washington, who starred in Devil, described Franklin to Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times as "a history professor trapped in a movie director's body. You know he's always going to get deep into things."

Franklin was raised in the northern California town of Richmond; he never knew his father, who died before he was born. His stepfather, meanwhile, was frustrated and frequently abusive. "It was a scary situation," the filmmaker told Goldstein. "He was very loving, but when he drank he was a different person. It was worst on the weekends. If he was drunk on Friday night, he'd beat my mother up and it would go on all weekend. As a kid, it made me very terrified because these grownups twice your size are yelling at each other. It felt like the end of the world."

Richmond itself was a rough place to grow up; Franklin noted in an interview with the London Observer, "You had to have friends to fight with you and back you up because you'd pass through areas controlled by certain gangs and it was just too dangerous to go by yourself." Nonetheless, he survived to stand up to his stepfather and become the first member of his family to pursue a college education.

Franklin earned a scholarship to the University of California at Berkeley, arriving in the midst of the social and political ferment that rocked the 1960s. Yet despite his exhilaration at the burgeoning Black Power movement and other progressive causes, he remained largely an observer. "It was like a dream to me," he noted to Los Angeles Times contributor Goldstein. "I wasn't really sophisticated enough to join a particular movement." Though initially attracted to history as a major, Franklin was drawn into the theater arts department during his junior year.

In 1971 Franklin followed the call of the stage to New York, where he appeared in small roles in producer Joseph Papp's famed Shakespeare in the Park productions. "He had us dressed up as birds and stuff--I was a cockatoo, I think," Franklin recollected to L.A. Weekly contributor Ella Taylor. "One guy said he didn't expect us to get any work out of that unless they were casting for Disney on Parade."

Other small roles followed. Franklin gradually became more established and began earning larger parts; he has said that his finest moment onstage came in the play In the Belly of the Beast, presented by the trailblazing Los Angeles theater the Mark Taper Forum. Prior to this, he'd come to L.A. with a girlfriend and had gone along with her to a film audition. The film, Five on the Black Hand Side, was a "blaxploitation" action picture in which he was cast without even reading for a part.

Franklin later made the transition to television, co-starring on the series Caribe, but he found this work generally unrewarding. Indeed, even a high-profile role on the hit 1980s program The A- Team didn't raise his spirits. "That was a real bad time for me in my life," Franklin said in the Village Voice. "I'd gotten divorced from my first wife, I was redefining myself. Acting itself wasn't fulfilling me." He described his A-Team character, Captain Crane, as "kind of a movable prop. I knew I didn't want to act anymore."

Even so, Franklin told the L.A. Weekly's Taylor, "[acting] made a director out of me." He departed The A-Team and began writing for the screen, gravitating toward "creating something from nothing, and getting involved in a different part of the production line." He began studying moviemaking at the American Film Institute and embarked on his first project, a short called Punk. The tale of a black kid pursued by a child molester, the film made a profound impression on Hollywood. This was fortunate; with two children to feed and alimony payments to make, Franklin needed work. He had even lost his house after mortgaging it to finance his film.

Among those taken with Franklin's directorial gifts was veteran B- movie mogul Roger Corman, through whose low-budget ranks many a gifted filmmaker--including Coppola, Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante, Ron Howard, and many others--had risen. Corman enlisted Franklin to make a series of cheap action films in various foreign locales. "Thank God for Roger," Franklin declared to Premiere's Benson. "He financed my way through film school." Even so, the director has been chary of naming the features he made during this period, which include the low-budget pictures Nowhere to Run and Full Fathom Five. "A lot of people felt Corman was a springboard," said Franklin in the L.A. Weekly. "It's like what he said to Ron Howard--'If you do a good job for me, kid, you'll never have to work for me again.' I don't know how much I was influenced [by Corman's style]. Hopefully, not artistically."

Corman wasn't the only producer captivated by Punk; so was Jesse Beaton, who had developed a number of adventurous independent productions in the past. "I thought Punk had a very strong vision and original voice," she recalled to the New York Times. She was seeking a director for a gritty crime drama called One False Move and had met several young filmmakers who were more interested in "attitude" and style than character. "Then I met Carl," she told L.A. Weekly contributor Taylor, "and I knew he would be a terrific director. He so impressed me with his intelligence and articulateness, his warmth and maturity." She added that his being "African-American was not the issue, but an issue in the story."

Though One False Move--filmed on a $2 million budget and first released in 1991--begins with some extreme violence, Franklin has been outspoken about its moral context. "I didn't want people getting excited seeing how neat someone can be killed," he insisted in the Observer. "I want the audience to feel the emotional loss of life--the real violence is the loss, the violation of humanity. They've taken from us someone who had dreams, hopes, the same set of emotions we have."

Franklin's thoughtful approach to the story of three drug-dealing killers on the lam from Los Angeles to Star City, Arkansas, and to the complex undercurrents of race in the story impressed numerous critics. But One False Move scarcely earned uniform raves. A Time reviewer, for one, claimed that despite the film's "B-movie virtues," it was an overpraised and "modest melodrama." Cineaste, on the other hand, proclaimed that the production "extends film noir boundaries" and applauded Franklin's direction in particular. Video magazine--reviewing Move's debut on tape--hailed an "extraordinary feature film debut."

One False Move had a meager publicity budget, and it took a while for word of mouth to draw moviegoers to it. "In a left-handed way," Franklin declared to Taylor, "it worked out for the best. Every time the film would open in another major market, we would enjoy another wave of success. Critics loved the idea of championing this film." And Franklin's ethnicity was largely unknown at the time, which meant that rather than being deluged with "urban" scripts full of gangs and drugs, he was offered "all these mainstream white projects, art films, action movies--we were getting everything."

Franklin's next project, however, was directing the two-part production Laurel Avenue for the cable television network Home Box Office (HBO). An ambitious and dramatically complex tale of a black family in Minnesota, it earned strong reviews. Entertainment Weekly deemed it "a TV film that transcends the family drama" and noted that Franklin's sophisticated direction "makes this an important piece of work." Time ranked it among the best dramatic presentations of the year, "startling in its frankness yet leavened by a stubborn optimism, a far cry from TV's usual easy sentimentality."

Franklin remarked to Mirabella that while the program dealt with often sensationalized issues, he struggled to stay grounded in reality. "Drugs are a huge problem in the black community," he declared. "Not to include that would be a stupid oversight. But if the subject of drugs is introduced in the context of a hardworking family that has managed to maintain unity, and the audience sees drugs as a threat to that unity, they get a much greater understanding of the problem."

A fan of mystery writer Walter Mosley, Franklin jumped at the opportunity to direct a screen adaptation of the novelist's Devil in a Blue Dress. With Demme executive producing and Beaton sharing production credit, he was able to secure a larger budget and at the same time avoid the creative constraints often encountered as a result of such purse strings. He adapted the screenplay himself, though he informed Entertainment Weekly that he "called Walter whenever there was a departure I was making, just to get feedback." Devil follows Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins--played by Denzel Washington-- as he embarks on a rocky career as a private detective in late-1940s Los Angeles.

Franklin's historical acumen served him well in the telling of this tale; working with a gifted team of production designers and other filmic experts, he was able to reconstruct a lost South Central L.A. It was a challenge, however. "Nothing from Los Angeles in 1948 was saved," he reported in Entertainment Weekly. "We paid for a lot of security because we were shooting in neighborhoods that, let's just say, weren't the best." In another interview with Ella Taylor, this time for Mirabella, he pointed out that in "Mosley's work, you get such a strong sense of neighborhood, of history, of what black family values were. That's what you don't see on the screen about black people, those internal things that make us who we are."

Again, critics were divided over the film, though most admitted that the recreation of the old locales bordered on the magical. Still, Entertainment Weekly reviewer Lisa Schwarzbaum lamented that the director "might as well be a sociologist studying 'trends and conflicts in postwar urban Negro culture' rather than igniting those trends and conflicts." Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, on the other hand, hailed Devil as "the most exotic crime entertainment of the season." Franklin himself seemed less interested in the film's standing in the thriller sweepstakes than in larger concerns. "I love film noir," he told the New York Times, but "this film is really social realism married to film noir. It's about people I know, people I grew up with."

Though Devil in a Blue Dress did not meet commercial expectations, it made a decided impression on the film community; as a result, Franklin became highly attractive to top producers and writers. He discussed in various interviews a number of projects he planned to helm, including Reliable Sources, from a script by Hollywood bad boy Joe Eszterhas, a film version of Russell Banks's novel Rule of the Bone, and an adaptation of Alexandre Dumas's classic tale The Count of Monte Cristo. Having established a partnership with producer Beaton, he signed a three-film deal with Tri-Star Pictures and appeared ideally positioned to pursue his uniquely humanist vision. "I always look for a universal theme to unearth," he proclaimed to Taylor in the L.A. Weekly. "My ethnicity is a plus, a tool. It gives me ammunition in terms of the way I view the world. There are certain stories in the black community that inform us all."

Further Reading

• Cineaste, Fall 1992, p. 104.
• Entertainment Weekly, July 9, 1993, pp. 38-39; August 25, 1995, pp. 32-33; September 29, 1995, pp. 40-41.
• L.A. Weekly, September 22, 1995, pp. 20-25.
• Los Angeles Times, August 13, 1992, pp. F1, F4; September 24, 1995 (Calendar), pp. 3, 79; September 29, 1995, pp. F1, F12.
• Mirabella, September 1995, p. 32.
• New York Times, August 9, 1992, p. C1; October 3, 1995, pp. C1, C14.
• Observer (London), April 4, 1993, Arts 2 section, p. 54.
• Premiere, July 1992, p. 46.
• Time, August 3, 1992, p. 75; January 3, 1994.
• Video, November 1992, p. 73.
• Village Voice, October 3, 1995.

— Simon Glickman

• Born: Apr 11, 1949 in Richmond, California
• Occupation: Director, Actor, Writer
• Active: '70s-'90s
• Major Genres: Adventure, Action
• Career Highlights: One False Move, Devil in a Blue Dress, Out of Time
• First Major Screen Credit: Legend of the Golden Gun (1979)

Biography

While still recognizable for his recurring role as Captain Crane on The A-Team, former character actor Carl Franklin is now one of Hollywood's most versatile writer/directors. After a string of mind-numbing television roles forced him to go behind the camera in 1986, he has worked in every genre from war film to family drama and has been the force behind such different works as One False Move (1991), Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), and One True Thing (1998).

Franklin grew up in Richmond, CA, a working-class suburb of San Francisco. His father died before he was born, and he was raised by his mother, a homemaker, and his stepfather, a carpenter. As a teenager, Franklin excelled in school and dreamed of becoming a lawyer or teacher. He earned a scholarship to the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied history and began hanging around the theater department in an effort to meet girls. He soon caught the acting bug and moved to New York City immediately after graduation.

Franklin began his acting career on-stage at the New York Shakespeare Festival, performing in Cymbeline, Timon of Athens, and Twelfth Night. He went on to appear at New York's Lincoln Center and Joseph Papp Public Theater, and Washington, D.C.'s Arena Stage. Franklin made his film debut in the comedy Five on the Black Hand Side (1973), before finding steady work on television. From 1974 to 1973, he guest-starred on The Streets of San Francisco, Good Times, The Incredible Hulk, The Rockford Files, and Trapper John, M.D. He also starred opposite Stacy Keach on the short-lived detective show Caribe and with Roddy McDowall on the doomed sci-fi series Fantastic Journey. After a two season stint on The A-Team from 1983 to 1985, Franklin grew increasingly unsatisfied with acting. While continuing to appear on shows like MacGyver and Riptide, he attempted to write and produce a film independently, mortgaging and losing his house in the process. Then, in 1986, at age 37, he enrolled in the American Film Institute's directing program.

At AFI, Franklin discovered his own style while studying the films of celebrated European and Japanese directors. His master's thesis, Punk (1989), an intense 30-minute short about a downtrodden African-American boy dealing with his budding sexuality, impressed filmmaker Roger Coreman, who hired Franklin as an apprentice at his production company, Concorde Films. Like Coreman's previous protégé's, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Peter Bogdanovich, Franklin learned ways of fast-paced low-budget filmmaking, writing screenplays in under two weeks and shooting them only days later. Often working on location in the Philippines or Peru, he wrote, directed, and produced (and sometimes even acted in) a series of limited releases and straight-to-video flicks, including Nowhere to Run (1989), Eye of the Eagle 2: Inside the Enemy (1989), and Full Fathom Five (1990).

After completing his tenure at Concorde, Franklin wrote and directed One False Move (1991), an independent crime thriller about three Los Angeles drug dealers who seek refuge in Arkansas after a murderous drug deal. The film starred Billy Bob Thornton, Cynda Williams, and Michael Beach as the outlaws and Bill Paxton as the Arkansas sheriff awaiting their arrival, but had little commercial value at the time. As a result, its distributor, IRS Media, gave the film a minor and ineffective advertising campaign. Yet, rave reviews and positive word-of-mouth quickly made One False Move a surprise hit. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert voted it the Best Film of the Year, and Franklin's work earned him a New Generation Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, an Independent Spirit Award for Best Director, and an MTV Movie Award for Best New Filmmaker.

The success of One False Move put Franklin on the short list of Hollywood directors. Producers brought every type of script to his attention -- Disney even asked him to remake That Darn Cat (1965). For his next project, he settled on the HBO miniseries Laurel Avenue (1993), a drama about a working-class African-American family in St. Paul, MN. The well-received series starred John Beasley and Mary Alice, and featured cameos by Franklin's daughter, Caira, and son, Marcus. He went on to write and direct Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), his heralded adaptation of African-American crime novelist Walter Mosley's novel. The film featured Oscar-winner Denzel Washington as a private detective in 1940s Los Angeles, with Tom Sizemore, Don Cheadle, and Jennifer Beals in supporting roles. Devil in a Blue Dress was a critical favorite, but failed at the box office.

Looking to do something completely different, Franklin then signed onto direct One True Thing (1998), an adaptation of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anna Quindlan's autobiographical story of a New York journalist (Renee Zellweger) who is forced to return home when her mother (Meryl Streep) becomes fatally ill. He followed up this adventurous move with another, directing the high-profile courtroom drama High Crimes (2002), starring Ashley Judd, Jim Caviezel, and Morgan Freeman, before reuniting with Denzel Washington for the thriller Out of Time (2003). ~ Aubry Anne D'Arminio, All Movie Guide

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