LEWISTON – A three-hour-long film about Lewiston artist Marsden Hartley was just the beginning.

As filmmaker Michael Maglaras toured the country with his movie – an adaptation of Hartley’s poem “Cleophas and His Own” that premiered here in May 2005 – Maglaras began to feel the tug of additional stories.

“I realized that I wanted to say more,” Maglaras said Friday in a phone interview from his home in Connecticut.

His newest project is a kind of documentary sequel.

Shooting has already begun along the banks of the Androscoggin River in Lewiston and will continue next month – on Sept. 13 and 14, inside the Bates Mill.

The film is meant to help put the Mainer in his place among the greatest of his era.

“Hartley was a monumental figure in American painting,” said Maglaras.

In the worldwide art community, Hartley is remembered mostly for his painting. He worked in a variety of styles and media and continues to be studied in art textbooks, decades after his death in 1943 at 66.

But it was Hartley’s poetry, particularly the narrative “Cleophas and His Own,” that Maglaras first fell in love with.

Maglaras, a former opera singer, so loved the poem that he recorded it on a CD, which he released on his own label, 217 Records. Shortly after, the self-described film fanatic decided to translate the story to the screen.

The poem and the movie were an account of Hartley’s experience living in coastal Nova Scotia with a family during the summers of 1935 and 1936. While the poet was there, two of the family’s sons and a cousin drowned in the hurricane of 1936.

The event scarred Hartley, who incorporated the emotion into his work. It proved to be a watershed moment.

“It’s only a short period in Hartley’s life, though,” Maglaras said. “This time, I want to do something more global.”

The tentative title is “Visible Silence: Marsden Hartley, Painter and Poet.”

His plan is to create a documentary that will last a little less than an hour and touch on Hartley’s many struggles.

He was born in Lewiston in 1877 and lost his mother at age 8. There were health problems, intolerance because he was gay and money struggles.

“It’s only at the end of his life that he had any real money,” said Maglaras.

“Hartley is an almost perfect example of a person who lives almost completely and totally for art’s sake,” he said.

His singular muse – following his art into so many different styles without taking along traces of his past work – is perhaps why he is not better known to the general public, Maglaras.

Work completed in Berlin looks nothing like what he did in New Mexico. And neither looks like what he did here in Maine.

“It’s difficult to get your arms around him,” he said.

It’s worth it to try, though.

“Some of it is magnificent,” Maglaras said. “Some is breathtakingly beautiful.”

A sampling of some of Hartley’s later work was in “Cleophas and His Own.” More, between 40 and 50 paintings, will be featured in the documentary.

When the documentary is completed, Maglaras hopes to take it on tour around the country, much as he did with the other film.

He plans to return to the National Gallery in Washington D.C., among other stops. He also hopes to tour Maine, stopping at small theaters, libraries and high school auditoriums.

The message goes to the heart of art, Maglaras said.

“I admire Hartley as a human being on a very basic level,” he said. “His work is a testament to a lifelong search for the truth. There is nothing fake about Hartley. There is nothing bogus about him.”