Frank Lloyd Wright: Murder, Myth & Modernism

Frank Lloyd Wright is an American icon - its most famous modern architect, and probably its most prolific - over 400 buildings in a 60-year career. But his most revealing constructions are his houses, revolutionary in their open plan design, and conceived as an expression of Wright’s philosophy of a perfect harmony between man and nature: ‘organic architecture’ as he called it. Wright’s houses also embody an ideal for living based on calmness and order, but his own life was characterized by public scandal, financial chaos and personal tragedy. The story begins with the most dramatic and terrible event in Wright’s life - the brutal murder in 1914 of his mistress and her two children and a terrible fire that destroyed the house, known as Taliesin, which Wright had built as a private sanctuary. Wright had invested so much of himself in Taliesin that, despite the tragedy, he could not bear to abandon it. He immediately set about rebuilding and over the next forty years the house became a piece of living architecture - continually extended and remodeled. Taliesin was, in effect, Wright’s alter ego: order born out of chaos. We then go back in time to examine the history of Wright’s early life and career leading up to that incident. It will show not only how Wright developed his unique style, but how he constructed his own myth and cultivated his reputation in his relationships with his wealthy clients. They, in turn, indulged his ‘genius.’ This film reveals the extremes and eccentricities of the man through interviews with individuals whose lives he touched: acolytes who knew and lived with him at Taliesin and those who encountered him during the construction of some of his most famous buildings. Frank Lloyd Wright: Murder, Myth & Modernism is a dramatic, surprising and entertaining portrait of a master builder whose most enduring edifice is his own legend.