Excellently crafted, exquisitely narrated and beautifully filmed, the WNED-TV documentary “Elbert Hubbard: An American Original,” is the best national production that the local PBS affiliate has done in recent years.

It is a work of art, heavily influenced by the documentary style and philosophy of filmmaker Ken Burns.

ELBERT HUBBARD; AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL

Four stars (out of four)

10 p.m. Monday, WNED

It helps that the life of Hubbard –the long-haired, so-called “original hippie” who founded the Roycroft artisan community in East Aurora –was so interesting, so complex and so scandalous.

The documentary premieres at 10 p. m. Monday on WNED and PBS stations across the country.

The narration by Liev Schreiber, the actor who has voiced many documentaries on PBS and HBO Sports, gives the Hubbard documentary an added dose of class.

Produced, written and directed by WNED Senior Producer Paul Lamont, the hour film focuses on the local and national influence that Hubbard had on the Arts and Craft Movement at the turn of the last century.

The hour also is full of nuggets about Hubbard that may even surprise residents of East Aurora. I say that having lived in East Aurora for several years. My daughter recently had her wedding reception at the Roycroft Inn, which has been part of the Roycroft Renaissance.

Lamont tells the story through old photos and footage, with the help of “City of Light” author Lauren Belfer and Hubbard historians and biographers. Each segment is set off with a quote from one of Hubbard’s favorite writers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau. Actor Adam Arkin reads some of Hubbard’s writings, with Michael Bacon providing the musical score.

Lamont explains how the former Larkin soap salesman used his business expertise, artistic qualities and marketing know-how to promote handcrafted furniture and other pieces of individual art to rebel against the Industrial Revolution.

Hubbard also was a one-of-a-kind, flamboyant entrepreneur who cheated on his wife and fathered a child with a lover he considered a soul mate and later married after divorcing his wife.

Lamont’s film highlights Hubbard as a man of contradictions. This was especially evident in his greatest writing success, “A Message to Garcia,” which sold 40 million copies. The 1,500-word essay advocated following orders without hesitation, which the film explains was counter to Hubbard’s lifelong philosophy of following one’s own path.

One imagines that this film will lead many tourists to beat a path to East Aurora to see what Hubbard started.

Warts-and-all portrait

In an interview, the 53-year-old Lamont said he has wanted to tell Hubbard’s story for a decade because he was a “fascinating character.” He said that the timing is right now because of the restoration and revitalization that are going on at the Roycroft campus.

“He is kind of like a storyteller’s dream,” said Lamont, who worked on the film for about a year and a half. “You couldn’t write a Hollywood screenplay any better than this man’s life. It is played out in almost an operatic fashion on the American stage.”

Schreiber, whose film credits include the “X-Men” series and “The Manchurian Candidate,” was an exceptional choice to narrate the story.

The warts-and-all portrait of Hubbard shines light on his scandalous affair with Alice Moore, who eventually became his second wife. They died together in 1915 with 1,100 passengers aboard the ocean liner Lusitania, which was torpedoed by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland.

“You might not like all of the things that he was about, you might not like the man in general, but there are certain things that you can understand and relate to,” said Lamont. “I think a lot of different people can relate to him on different levels. The idea of businessman, the idea of craftsman, the idea that someone is willing to start over again. . . . That’s what’s enlightening to me, the whole idea of Act 2 and realizing who you are as a person.”

Man of contradictions

The “Message to Garcia” story is only one of the contradictions that Lamont said made it so difficult to pin Hubbard down.

“You have to sift through all the people who paid homage to him, who worshipped the ground he walked on,” said Lamont. “Then you had the other camp that just detested him, who said he was a charlatan, a philanderer, he was using Arts and Crafts to propel himself. . . . And you had Hubbard’s writings, which were so bloated about himself. And you had to sift through all these things to try and get the man. . . . and deconstruct him piece by piece and then sort of rebuild him so people could see all these different contradictions.”

Lamont wants viewers to take their own message from the film. However, he likens Hubbard to an artist’s business manager, who knows how to make money off an artist but is not one himself.

“People who love Hubbard see him also as a man who was really true to his own beliefs and ideals. . . . That comes with this whole contradiction that was Elbert Hubbard. Was he truly altruistic about furthering the ideas of arts and crafts or was he doing it for his own profit? I don’t think anyone can truly answer that. I think he saw an opportunity. I think he believed in the philosophy of arts and crafts. . .. It is a whole way of life. I believe he felt it was good for himself and America at the time, but he was also a businessman.”