“I want to perform in front of thousands of people, shoutin’ my name…
(softly spoken) … Franklin. Franklin. Franklin. Laughin’.
You know, I suppose on an analytical level, uh… you could say that I was seekin’ approval. I mean, I don’t see anything wrong with that.
I wanna be a famous comedian. Like all the greats. And that’s my journey. That’s my goal. That’s where I wanna be. That’s where I hope this journey takes me.
(people chanting in background ‘Franklin, Franklin, Franklin. Franklin’)
And what else are we here for, but to try to do what we wanna do.
My dad called me a failure my whole life. I’m not a failure.”
– Franklin Marshall III Documentary Trailer [untitled]
Across the street, about one-eighth of a mile up the way from the destination I was walking to, I spot a very slight person dressed in grey dress pants, a zipped-up black sweatshirt with a black baseball cap covering most of his head walking, hunched over, like he was watching his feet as he moved along. Seemingly, he was an older man at first glance. However, as I noticed the fervor in his step, his age could have been anywhere between 30 to a 70-year-old fit man as he walked to the corner, stopped, and leaned his small bags against a “no parking” sign on 8th and Fairfax in Los Angeles. By now I had assumed this was the comedian-street artist-documentary filmmaker I had planned a rendezvous with at this very spot. I quickened my pace thinking I was late, when, actually, he was quite a bit early which is unusual for L.A.
Franklin Marshall the Third. Or FMIII, for short. Do you know him? You may. His face has been floating on walls and stencils etched into sidewalks in Los Angeles and other cities for about 10 years now. Maybe more.
I first noticed this face in 2015 when there were so many embedded in sidewalks throughout Hollywood as well as many other locations in Los Angeles that you couldn’t help but spot them every couple blocks or so. Repetitive and wide-spread, I found myself wondering if this was some kind of advertisement or promotional tool. But there was nothing connected to this face to explain its existence on this concrete floor beneath my feet. No slogan. No name. No clues to what this face really stood for. Who is this guy? Or, more embarrassingly, should I know this guy? What looked like a cartoon character with big ole’ glasses – staring up at me as if he was screaming out, “Look at me! See me!” – was kind of funny at first, but then it began to annoy me because it continued to remain a mystery. A puzzle I couldn’t solve. I just could not figure out what this face represented. And why did I even care?
Franklin Marshall the Third does not fit the mold of a typical American man. He stands about 5’5” with a curve in his back so pronounced that it makes him look like he’s collapsing into himself. Spot him in public and you’ll catch him wearing a white collared shirt, red suspenders, and a red polk-a-dot tie, which his mother made for him when he was a kid. Parted in the middle, his hair is slicked down and flattened so close to his head with so much hair product that the sun doesn’t even have to shine on it for you to see it glisten. It’s kind of sweet, really. Like what a mom in the 1940s would do to her kid to keep him impeccably groomed.
Physically he may seem odd to some people, but this guy has a heart of gold. Franklin did not start out as a street artist. “Art-streeting,” as he calls it, has been just a part of his journey. Franklin is first and foremost a comedian. He grew up on a farm as an only child tolerating a dysfunctional family which was at the mercy of his father who did not acknowledge his existence at all. He struggled with mental health issues, and had difficulties with studies at school, oscillating between school and in-home education. He had a lonely childhood, and so little confidence for any kind of purpose for himself in life. Until one weekend, when his father was away on a business trip, his mother took him into NYC for a Jerry Seinfeld show. He noticed how Seinfeld made her laugh, and, since Franklin felt he wasn’t good at anything else, he thought maybe this was something he could do for his mom. Make her laugh.
Shortly after seeing Seinfeld do his shtick, Franklin gathered every VHS tape he could get his hands on from neighbors and his mother and studied footage of different comedians. In his room in the barn located on his parents’ farm, he began to hone his comedic skills. He imagined the animals as his audience, and, through practice, his confidence grew on his secret stage in the barn where he found purpose, hope, and the courage to move ahead with his newly crafted unique sense of humor. He had finally taken himself out of his father’s world and created a world of his own. “It felt like that was where I was meant to be, or where I could find peace and acceptance from myself, for myself from others,” he told me. He felt that this was the path to connect with people, pulling him out of his childhood loneliness and offering him greater opportunities to experience the world.
“It felt like that was where I was meant to be, or where I could find peace and acceptance from myself, for myself from others,” he told me.
Years later, as he frequented comedy clubs, trying his best to achieve consent to get up on stage while enduring the demeaning manner of other comedians calling him fake, loser, and a nobody so many times that it’s hard to count, he met a street artist who went by the moniker “Fragile.” They found connection through a mutual fondness for the Banksy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop and quickly developed a bond of friendship. After having to work so hard at convincing people to allow him to perform on stage, this Banksy documentary demonstrated that through the avenue of street art, he didn’t need permission to express himself. He could depend on the streets as his stage.
Drawing on this revelation he had, Franklin shared with Fragile his desires for putting his face out on the streets, on t-shirts, and filming a documentary of him traveling the country and meeting the “peoples,” as he would say. Not more than a couple months later, they found themselves traveling together through more than 30 states with Fragile carrying a camera as Franklin knocked on doors, performed his comedy on stages, and placed his art up in the streets quickly winning people over as they saw past his physical façade gaining a better understanding of him, and him, in turn, gaining a better understanding of them.
I asked Franklin what he took away from his road trip experience and he told me, “People everywhere, from all backgrounds, are more than ‘nobodies’ and more than what we so quickly jump to label them [as] at first glance instead of taking the time to listen with our ears and hearts and minds in an attempt to see their circumstance and context and not just our own. I learned on my documentary that listening was the most profound way to speak.”
I don’t recall when or how I put two and two together. It feels now like it was through osmosis – that face holding steady in my subconscious for so long that somewhere along the way my mind solved the puzzle, and, without notice, I found myself visiting his YouTube channel whenever I needed a laugh.
“People everywhere, from all backgrounds, are more than ‘nobodies’ and more than what we so quickly jump to label them [as] at first glance instead of taking the time to listen with our ears and hearts and minds in an attempt to see their circumstance and context and not just our own. I learned on my documentary that listening was the most profound way to speak.”
Recently, a friend pointed me to his interview with the Paint the Town Podcast, a street art podcast which covers artists in Los Angeles and other cities. The episode aired November 2018, the month PTTP introduced Franklin to the street art community, seven or eight years following the emergence of the face. How did they figure out who was behind that face? James Shen, co-host along with Teachr of the podcast, and founder of the LA Street Art Gallery, answered that question, and told me that they came across Franklin’s Instagram account as a recommended connection and recognized his face from the stencils he first saw years earlier. Shen explained, “I can’t remember exactly when I started noticing it [the face], but it was all around Hollywood and L.A., 2011-ish, maybe?” He went on, “I thought it was someone spraying a Hunter S. Thompson stencil because of the glasses. I enjoy his writings, so I thought it was a cool stencil and didn’t give much thought to it. But I saw it everywhere.”
He continued to tell me about the first time they interviewed him, “We didn’t know what to expect. We saw his page on Instagram and we thought it would be a good episode since he was a comedian. We thought we’d be able to do an hour with him and make it fun. We also thought his persona was maybe an act. We didn’t really know what to expect, but we knew that it was a great case study for street art because the art of repeating an image led us to having him on the show.”
“We thought we’d be able to do an hour with him and make it fun. We also thought his persona was maybe an act. We didn’t really know what to expect, but we knew that it was a great case study for street art because the art of repeating an image led us to having him on the show.”
The episode with Franklin was shameless, fearless, and even a little bit raunchy. It was funny as hell. He spoke about everything from his love of connecting with people to his father paying him off to move to California, never wanting him to return again. With thriving confidence, he knew now how to fit himself in, and with his sense of humor, authenticity, and kindness, by the end of the episode, he had, as Shen expressed, “stolen their hearts.” And, to a greater extent, Shen and Teachr had discovered that his persona was not an act at all.
By now, I had reached the corner of 8th and Fairfax and introduced myself as Franklin sat down the small patch of dirt surrounded by the concrete sidewalk where he started sprawling out paste-ups and pasting tools underneath that no parking sign. It didn’t take three minutes before I was put under his spell. As he was offering me a tutorial of his pasting process, I noticed how smooth his skin is, how bright his eyes are, and the symmetry of his smile jumped out at me more than the deformity of his teeth. Besides, in spite of being from Connecticut, his speech had a slow, warm southern drawl, apparently, passed down from his parents, with a cadence and tone that quickly became familiar even though I’d never heard it outside of what I thought was only a character on those YouTube videos I would watch. But, this was the man, and only good vibes exuded off of his being which made me feel like I could talk to him about anything. So, now was my chance. I asked about the face. Did he consider it promotion? Or street art?
“I just wanted to create a sense of mystery,” Franklin explained, “but with the hope that every time a person saw a work of art on the street, such as the face, maybe they’d chuckle, maybe they’d start thinking about something good, maybe they’d say, ‘What the f is that?’ And they’d start thinking about anything but the mundane and cyclical life we all live from moment to moment.”
After slowly and methodically pasting his paste-ups on the utility box, he unzipped his black sweatshirt and slipped off his black hat unveiling his Franklin Marshall the Third uniform. He straightened his tie, repositioned his suspenders, and smoothed down his hair to get ready for the photo shoot as he was reminding me that the black cover-up was only so he didn’t stick out on the street while “art-streeting.”
Following the shoot, we both sat down on the patch of dirt surrounded by the concrete sidewalk on the corner of 8th and Fairfax talking about life, art, people and theories on meditations for another hour and a half. As I listened to his slow drawl sharing kind words, funny expressions, and intelligent thoughts, I couldn’t believe I was talking to that face that just years before was staring at me from the concrete under my feet – a face I knew nothing about, annoying me just because I couldn’t solve the mystery. Now, in these moments, in 2021, six years from the time I noticed it, that face was talking back at me. And, this time I wasn’t annoyed. I was moved.
“I just wanted to create a sense of mystery,” Franklin explained, “but with the hope that every time a person saw a work of art on the street, such as the face, maybe they’d chuckle, maybe they’d start thinking about something good, maybe they’d say, ‘What the f is that?’ And they’d start thinking about anything but the mundane and cyclical life we all live from moment to moment.”
