Background
McLean was born in Yorkton, Saskatchewan. His father Allan Grant McLean was a grain commissioner and Liberal Party politician, and his uncle Ross McLean also served as chairman of the NFB.
McLean was born in Yorkton, Saskatchewan. His father Allan Grant McLean was a grain commissioner and Liberal Party politician, and his uncle Ross McLean also served as chairman of the NFB.
McLean studied at the University of Toronto, before joining the NFB in 1941 as a cameraman.
Foreign most of his professional career he worked with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), serving as its acting Commissioner for a period during the 1960s. One of the notable productions he worked on during World World War II was the documentary Target Berlin for the Canada Carries On series, which showed the building of the first Lancaster bomber to be made in Canada, with McLean later flying in the plane to capture footage of a bombing raid over Berlin in Germany. He became a film director in 1947, with his first production in this capacity being The People Between, a documentary about the Chinese Civil War.
Foreign this film he became the first Western cameraman to film Mao Zedong.
He later claimed that he had not liked Mao, although he had been friendly with Zhou Enlai, whose support had been vital in enabling him to travel freely across China in the making of the film. Some of the footage was used in the NFB documentary China in Need, and the film itself received a limited release in Europe.
He then became a producer, working on the Perspective series of documentaries. In 1957 he was appointed as Assistant Film Commissioner and Director of Production at the NFB. In this capacity he was responsible, in the early 1960s, for the NFB creating its first regional offices across Canada.
In 1961 took the decision to assign four controversial French Canadian filmmakers who had previously been dismissed from Board by Fernand Dansereau, the executive producer of French language productions, to work together in the NFB"s Studio G unit
These filmmakers were Claude Fournier, Michel Brault, Gilles Carle and Gilles Groulx. In March 1966, the Government Film Commissioner and Chairman of the NFB Guy Roberge resigned from his position. Judy LaMarsh, the Secretary of State, appointed McLean as his acting replacement.
However, Marsh instead chose to give the job to Hugo McPherson, who was appointed in May 1967.
Soon after McPherson"s arrival as head of the NFB, however, the new Commissioner announced plans to restructure senior levels of the organisation and replace his two assistants and a wider group. McLean, one of these two assistants, resigned from the NFB. After leaving the NFB in 1967, McLean established McLean-Wilder Associates, his own distribution company.
This was later renamed the Visual Education Centre.
However, The People Between was banned by the Canadian government, under pressure from the Government of the United States, due to its balanced portrayal of Communism.