William Cran, ‘Frontline' documentarian, is dead at 79

Boston Globe

a day ago

He began his career with the BBC, but he mostly worked as an independent producer, toggling between jobs on both sides of the Atlantic.
He was most closely associated with WGBH's 'Frontline,' for which he produced 20 documentaries on a wide range of subjects -- some historical, like the four-part series 'From Jesus to Christ' (1998) and 'The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover' (1993), and some focused on current events, including 'Who's Afraid of Rupert Murdoch' (1995).
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He won a slew of honors, including four Emmys, four duPont-Columbia University awards, two Peabodys, and an Overseas Press Club Award.
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In 1986, he produced 'The Story of English,' an Emmy-winning nine-episode series for the BBC and PBS about how English became the world's dominant language. He, with journalists Robert MacNeil, the PBS news anchor, and Robert McCrum, turned it into a book.
Mr. Cran produced two multipart documentaries based on books by historian Daniel Yergin: 'The Prize' (1990), a Pulitzer-winning history of oil, and 'The Commanding Heights' (1998, with Joseph Stanislaw), about the history of the modern global economy.
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These were complicated stories, but Mr. Cran was able to frame them around characters and narrative threads that kept viewers engaged over several nights.
'I learned from him that less is more, that the script is not a shortened version of the book, but rather captions to go with the picture,' Yergin wrote in an email. 'He always stuck to the facts, but he always wanted dramatic tension.'
Both documentaries were well-received, despite their potentially dry material. 'Using every familiar element of the documentarian's art, producer-director William Cran has created a masterpiece,' The Washington Post wrote of 'The Commanding Heights.'
William Cran was born Dec. 11, 1945, in Hobart, on the island state of Tasmania, Australia. His mother, Jean (Holliday) Cran, was a teacher, and his father, John, was a science lecturer. The family moved to London when William was 6.
He studied classics at Oxford, and though he knew early on that he wanted to make documentaries, he also dabbled in theater, directing two plays in London.
After graduating in 1968, he became a trainee at the BBC, where he rose to producer, using then-novel techniques such as reconstructed scenes, and pursuing new genres including true crime. One early documentary was '1971 Luton Postmaster Murder,' about two men who were wrongly convicted of killing a British postmaster.
But Mr. Cran grew tired of being what he called a 'company man,' and left the BBC after eight years.
He moved to Toronto in 1976, becoming a senior producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.'s investigative news program 'The Fifth Estate.'
Two years later, David Fanning, an executive at WGBH in Boston, reached out to him about a documentary program he was creating called 'World.'
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Mr. Cran flew to Boston for a meeting -- and got stuck in the blizzard of 1978. While holed up at Fanning's home, the two cooked up an idea for Mr. Cran's first documentary for the program, 'Chachaji: My Poor Relation,' a story of modern India told through the family of writer Ved Mehta.
'What was particular about Bill is that each one of his films is different,' Fanning said in an interview, adding, 'He would do these surprising things. He would say: 'I think I want to build a set. I want to build a bedroom in the studio.''
Fanning trusted Mr. Cran so much that in 1983, when 'World' was rebranded as 'Frontline,' with a tighter focus on current events, he asked Mr. Cran to produce its first two documentaries, with the first about corruption in the NFL.
The next 'Frontline' subject, '88 Seconds in Greensboro,' probed the 1979 deaths of five people after a pro-communist march was attacked by members of the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party in North Carolina. Four local camera crews had filmed the bloodshed. Mr. Cran and his team 'edited the combined footage into an amazingly complete anatomy of a murder,' wrote TV reviewer David Bianculli in the Akron Beacon Journal.
In 1993, Mr. Cran led a 'Frontline' documentary team that looked into possible abuses and compromises by the longtime FBI director in 'The Secret File on J. Edgar Hoover.' The four-part series built a case that Hoover, who led the agency (and its forerunner) from 1924 to 1972, potentially made concessions to organized crime and other groups to avoid public disclosures of his gay relationships.
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'Our investigation found that this master of political blackmail was wide open to blackmail himself,' Mr. Cran said. 'There is overwhelming evidence that the mob knew it had nothing to fear from Hoover's FBI.'
One of Mr. Cran's most historically expansive documentaries, the series 'From Jesus to Christ' (1998), took shape after Fanning met with a WGBH producer, Marilyn Mellowes, who was working on a documentary to bring more cultural and political context to the life of Jesus and the New Testament.
Fanning agreed to bring aboard additional resources, including Mr. Cran as a senior producer and director. 'We make no judgment about faith, and we make no judgments about divinity,' Fanning told journalists.
The documentary framed the life of Jesus in the wider realities of Roman-controlled Galilee, described by scholars as a center of Jewish resistance and activism. Jesus, meanwhile, was not raised amid a pastoral idyll - as portrayed in some accounts - but mingled with people from across the Roman world and was probably well aware of the political foment around him, the documentary suggested.
Mr. Cran's first marriage, to Araminta Wordsworth, ended in divorce. His second wife, Stephanie Tepper, who worked with him as a producer on several films, died in 1997. His third wife, Polly Bide, died in 2003. He married Vicki Barker, a CBS journalist, in 2014.
She survives him, as do three daughters from his second marriage, Jessica, Rebecca and Chloe Cran; his sister, Vicki Donovan; and a granddaughter.
Many of Mr. Cran's films continue to be watched.
'Two months ago,' Yergin said, 'I was walking up Madison Avenue and someone -- out of the blue, startled to see me -- stopped me to say that watching 'Commanding Heights' had changed his life.'
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Material from The Washington Post was used in this obituary.