A number of people have asked me over the past year or so when the documentary will be finished, and I believe now the end is in sight. I have marked 2024 as the year when we will finish production (filming) and then set about the task of post-production. If you’re not sure how all this works, what the production and post-production phases entail, and how much time these phases require, you can go to the page on this website, “Making a Feature Documentary.”
If all goes well, the film should be finished late 2025 or early 2026. However, I would like to show a rough cut to Franklin veterans and families in March of 2025 to mark the 80th anniversary of the March 19th attack. I hope to have more information about that relatively soon.
To begin 2024 and work toward the goal to finish production this year, we spent a couple weeks in February filming at three locations: Philadelphia, PA, Arlington, VA (just across the river from Washington DC) and Mt. Pleasant, SC (across the river from Charleston).
In Philadelphia, we interviewed Dr. Nancy Isserman and Dr. Bea Hollander-Goldfein, experts in generational trauma. They are the co-directors of a research project, the Transcending Trauma Project, that examined the transmission of trauma in three generations of Holocaust survivor families. What they have learned about the transmission of trauma in that project is applicable to other groups, like veterans and their families. At the Council for Relationships, they work within the program Operation Home and Healing (Nancy is the director and Bea is one of the therapists) which provides counseling and mental health services by specially-trained professionals for active military service members, veterans and their families. The program also provides training for therapists and clergy who wish to work with military personnel, veterans and their families. You can click the following link to learn more:
The interview with Nancy and Bea was insightful and will help to bring together different themes we have seen in the interviews that we’ve conducted with Franklin families. I contacted Nancy and Bea early in the project and discussed the documentary with them. They wrote most of the questions that I posed to those of you who participated in interviews for the film.
Then in Arlington, VA, we interviewed Gary Schurrpusch and Walt Gallagher. Gary is a retired Navy captain who is well-known by many of you who have attended the reunions, and who is one of the experts on the documentary project. You can read his bio on the “Meet the Team” page of this website. Mr. Gallagher is a Navy veteran who served on the USS Franklin and was on the ship for both the kamikaze strike on October 30, 1944 and the bombing on March 19, 1945.
Then we traveled to Mt. Pleasant, SC to film at the Patriots Point Naval & Maritime Museum, on board the USS Yorktown (CV-10). In my previous production update, I reported about my visit to the museum to meet the curators and archivists and to see the USS Franklin exhibit on the Yorktown hangar deck.
For this more recent trip, we conducted interviews with museum curatorial staff and filmed both the Franklin exhibit and a subset of the Franklin artifact collection. The exhibit about the USS Franklin on the USS Yorktown was conceived and funded by the USS Franklin Museum Association over 20 years ago. Many of the hundreds of items in the artifact collection were gathered together by the USS Franklin Museum Association from its membership and donated to the Yorktown museum, and some were donated directly by Franklin veterans and/or their families.
Photo #2: Meredith Kablick and Miranda Helton, Museum Registrar, unfold the USS Franklin flag with Tim O’Laughlin, the project’s director of photography, filming in the background. The flag is not on display because it is fragile and the environment on the hangar deck where the exhibit is located is not climate controlled. Meredith and her team brought out the flag in one of the collection rooms so we could film it for the documentary. This was the first time the curatorial staff had seen the USS Franklin flag because it’s been rolled up in protective storage for years. There is a photo of it hanging over the Franklin exhibit on the hangar deck.
Photo #3: Tim O’Laughlin films the interview with Meredith Kablick.
Photo #4: Tim filming the USS Franklin exhibit on the USS Yorktown hangar deck after the museum had closed. The exhibit was first installed in a room on one of the lower decks, but then was moved by the museum staff to a prominent location on the hangar deck where it receives a good amount of foot traffic by visitors to the ship.
With filming in Philadelphia, PA, Arlington, VA and Mt. Pleasant, SC successfully completed, we started to plan for filming later in the spring in San Diego and Phoenix, and I hope to start contacting people for final interviews in the Midwest and New England for the fall. Maybe you’ll hear from me!
(All photos by Anderson Clark unless specified otherwise.)