September 21, 2007 3:00

Ken Burns, the Interview: Episode 5--The Past, the Future, and Vietnam

The last in the series. I'm not sure whether this qualifies as a scoop or not, but I don't believe I've seen Burns say that he plans to make a Vietnam documentary elsewhere (not that I've scoured all the clips):

What kind of distance in time do you need from an event to feel comfortable making a documentary about it?

KB: I think what we're engaged in is a kind of temporal triangulation. You need to be 25 or 30 years from an event to make any kind of Judgment. Just look at Vietnam. The example I always use is that if you waited ten years and made a film in 1985, it would have been, America is in a recession, this was our only defeat, the symbol of our decline, Japan was ascendant. In 1995, we'd just won the Gulf War one hand tied behind our back, international coalition, greatest peacetime expansion, Japan is in recession and stagnation. There's another film. In 2005, we're in the lee of 9/11, we're involved in a war in Iraq, people are making parallels to Vietnam. You need to average out these perspectives.

LN: And yet no matter what you do, you'll always reflect the world you're in. It's not to say that there's any one pure truth that you'll arrive at if you wait long enough.

KB: When we made Jazz, we were severely criticized. It was one of the few films based on Jazz that come up to the present. We were severly criticized for taking a kind of impressionistic look at the last 30 years. And we just said we don't have the perspective to say that this person is as great as Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong or Charlie Parker.

So are you going to do Vietnam?

KB: Yes. Not today, but--there was a point where, with the same vehemence of conviction that I said it after The Civil War, I'd said that we'd never do another war. I felt just within the last few months that we absolutely had to do it. I think we have to wait enough time, several years, until the veterans are, not so much at the onset of death, but at the age where their advancing age will provide them with the kind of perspectives that we've been able to tap into for this film.

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September 21, 2007 3:00

Ken Burns, the Interview: Episode 5--The Past, the Future, and Vietnam

The last in the series. I'm not sure whether this qualifies as a scoop or not, but I don't believe I've seen Burns say that he plans to make a Vietnam documentary elsewhere (not that I've scoured all the clips):

What kind of distance in time do you need from an event to feel comfortable making a documentary about it?

KB: I think what we're engaged in is a kind of temporal triangulation. You need to be 25 or 30 years from an event to make any kind of Judgment. Just look at Vietnam. The example I always use is that if you waited ten years and made a film in 1985, it would have been, America is in a recession, this was our only defeat, the symbol of our decline, Japan was ascendant. In 1995, we'd just won the Gulf War one hand tied behind our back, international coalition, greatest peacetime expansion, Japan is in recession and stagnation. There's another film. In 2005, we're in the lee of 9/11, we're involved in a war in Iraq, people are making parallels to Vietnam. You need to average out these perspectives.

LN: And yet no matter what you do, you'll always reflect the world you're in. It's not to say that there's any one pure truth that you'll arrive at if you wait long enough.

KB: When we made Jazz, we were severely criticized. It was one of the few films based on Jazz that come up to the present. We were severly criticized for taking a kind of impressionistic look at the last 30 years. And we just said we don't have the perspective to say that this person is as great as Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong or Charlie Parker.

So are you going to do Vietnam?

KB: Yes. Not today, but--there was a point where, with the same vehemence of conviction that I said it after The Civil War, I'd said that we'd never do another war. I felt just within the last few months that we absolutely had to do it. I think we have to wait enough time, several years, until the veterans are, not so much at the onset of death, but at the age where their advancing age will provide them with the kind of perspectives that we've been able to tap into for this film.

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September 21, 2007 2:00

Ken Burns, the Interview: Episode 4--That War and This War

Did you conceive this project before--

KB & LN: --before 9/11.

KB: And most of the interviews were done--and I'm thinking particularly of Sam Hynes' interview--before the invasion of Iraq. So that when he says, in the beginning of the film, "There's no such thing as a good war, only necessary wars and just wars," and then we call episode 1 A Necessary War, we are not making even a veiled reference to Iraq. But I promise you, that when people see that, they'll think of that. That when Sam Hynes in Saipan starts talking about Japanese atrocities, and says, "And we thought we weren't capable of that, although I don't know what Americans would do under similar circumstances," people might think of Abu Ghraib or My Lai. When people complain in later episodes about not getting the right equipment--which is endemic to all wars--or generals making the wrong decisions, or politicians thinking about the upcoming elections, these are universal realities of war that just happen to be there accidentally. But we're not unmindful that they will engage people with questions about the current situation. That's the only reason why you do history. You're not going to change what happened on June 6, 1944, but you're going to ask questions that are going to help us on Sept. 11, 2007.

Do you think you made the same film you would have had the 9/11 attacks not happened?

LN: Definitely.

KB: I think so, with one exception. [To LN, who seems surprised or maybe chagrinned] And I've taken my cue from you. Which is that Sept. 11 is a watershed event like Dec. 7 [1941]. So in a country reeling as we have become in the last six years, by the time we are doing many of the interviews, by the reaction to Sept. 11, a lot of these people were very mindful that they had lived through the bookends, the parentheses of universal age-old things. So the same feelings that 9/11 provoked in us were not dissimilar to some of the same feelings that were provoked in them by Pearl Harbor. I think some of those post-Pearl Harbor feelings were available to them in a way that 9/11 helped to promote.

Do you expect The War to affect the discussion over the Iraq War?

LN: We're curious to see how people--we don't know how it will play out now. We got really interesting responses from [a screening at West Point]. Military community people loved it, because they feel that it's showing a realistic portrait of what war is. The cadets and the professors kept saying, "We want the American people to know what war is.This is what we have to go deal with when we go overseas. [Civilians] don't know. We have this alternative, parallel universe totally apart from the mainstream of society. This will really help people to understand what we go through and what happens when we come back, and who we are when we come back."

KB: We have a separate military class now that suffers all of its losses apart and alone from the rest of us. When we travel around, I always ask the audiences, "Who knows somebody in Iraq?" It's maybe two percent. I think people yearn for the kind of memory of shared sacrifice that the Second World War represents, and shared sacrifice that made us richer. I mean, that's the amazing thing. Now we're all free agents. We don't give up nothin'. We were asked after 9/11 to go shopping. I mean, we could be celebrating today our total freedom from dependence from foreign oil. We could have saved money to attend to our infrastructure so that our levees wouldn't breach and our bridges wouldn't collapse. You never know what could have happened if we had been asked a set of questions. But it was sort of, "Don't worry your pretty little heads about it--we'll take care of it." And in fact it hasn't been taken care of, and our military is strained, and when you arrive at West Point, the flag is perpetually at half staff and soldiers the age of my middle daughter are going to Iraq, and they want us to tell the story so that the American people actually know what's happening--that blew away a lot of our preconceptions.

LN: They [West Point students] asked the most interesting questions. They weren't interested in the tactics, which is what the future generals at West Point are learning about, the maps and the arrows and the strategies and the decisions. You'd think they would be drawn to that. But maybe because of the kind of film it is and the level of the military that they're at, they were interested in the spiritual, psychological and emotional aspects of combat. ... We get asked if the film will change people's view of Iraq, but it seems that you can look at it and find reflections and implications from many different points of view.

KB: The film that won the Palme d'Or at Cannes was this Romanian film about abortion. After [the screening] this woman came up to me and said, "Do you think that film was pro-choice or pro-life?" I said, "Both." Because it's the obligation of the art to transcend the dialectic. I wouldn't be surprised if enlistment went up and antiwar political will went up as a result of [The War].

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September 21, 2007 2:00

Ken Burns, the Interview: Episode 4--That War and This War

Did you conceive this project before--

KB & LN: --before 9/11.

KB: And most of the interviews were done--and I'm thinking particularly of Sam Hynes' interview--before the invasion of Iraq. So that when he says, in the beginning of the film, "There's no such thing as a good war, only necessary wars and just wars," and then we call episode 1 A Necessary War, we are not making even a veiled reference to Iraq. But I promise you, that when people see that, they'll think of that. That when Sam Hynes in Saipan starts talking about Japanese atrocities, and says, "And we thought we weren't capable of that, although I don't know what Americans would do under similar circumstances," people might think of Abu Ghraib or My Lai. When people complain in later episodes about not getting the right equipment--which is endemic to all wars--or generals making the wrong decisions, or politicians thinking about the upcoming elections, these are universal realities of war that just happen to be there accidentally. But we're not unmindful that they will engage people with questions about the current situation. That's the only reason why you do history. You're not going to change what happened on June 6, 1944, but you're going to ask questions that are going to help us on Sept. 11, 2007.

Do you think you made the same film you would have had the 9/11 attacks not happened?

LN: Definitely.

KB: I think so, with one exception. [To LN, who seems surprised or maybe chagrinned] And I've taken my cue from you. Which is that Sept. 11 is a watershed event like Dec. 7 [1941]. So in a country reeling as we have become in the last six years, by the time we are doing many of the interviews, by the reaction to Sept. 11, a lot of these people were very mindful that they had lived through the bookends, the parentheses of universal age-old things. So the same feelings that 9/11 provoked in us were not dissimilar to some of the same feelings that were provoked in them by Pearl Harbor. I think some of those post-Pearl Harbor feelings were available to them in a way that 9/11 helped to promote.

Do you expect The War to affect the discussion over the Iraq War?

LN: We're curious to see how people--we don't know how it will play out now. We got really interesting responses from [a screening at West Point]. Military community people loved it, because they feel that it's showing a realistic portrait of what war is. The cadets and the professors kept saying, "We want the American people to know what war is.This is what we have to go deal with when we go overseas. [Civilians] don't know. We have this alternative, parallel universe totally apart from the mainstream of society. This will really help people to understand what we go through and what happens when we come back, and who we are when we come back."

KB: We have a separate military class now that suffers all of its losses apart and alone from the rest of us. When we travel around, I always ask the audiences, "Who knows somebody in Iraq?" It's maybe two percent. I think people yearn for the kind of memory of shared sacrifice that the Second World War represents, and shared sacrifice that made us richer. I mean, that's the amazing thing. Now we're all free agents. We don't give up nothin'. We were asked after 9/11 to go shopping. I mean, we could be celebrating today our total freedom from dependence from foreign oil. We could have saved money to attend to our infrastructure so that our levees wouldn't breach and our bridges wouldn't collapse. You never know what could have happened if we had been asked a set of questions. But it was sort of, "Don't worry your pretty little heads about it--we'll take care of it." And in fact it hasn't been taken care of, and our military is strained, and when you arrive at West Point, the flag is perpetually at half staff and soldiers the age of my middle daughter are going to Iraq, and they want us to tell the story so that the American people actually know what's happening--that blew away a lot of our preconceptions.

LN: They [West Point students] asked the most interesting questions. They weren't interested in the tactics, which is what the future generals at West Point are learning about, the maps and the arrows and the strategies and the decisions. You'd think they would be drawn to that. But maybe because of the kind of film it is and the level of the military that they're at, they were interested in the spiritual, psychological and emotional aspects of combat. ... We get asked if the film will change people's view of Iraq, but it seems that you can look at it and find reflections and implications from many different points of view.

KB: The film that won the Palme d'Or at Cannes was this Romanian film about abortion. After [the screening] this woman came up to me and said, "Do you think that film was pro-choice or pro-life?" I said, "Both." Because it's the obligation of the art to transcend the dialectic. I wouldn't be surprised if enlistment went up and antiwar political will went up as a result of [The War].

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September 21, 2007 12:28

Survivor, Exporting America's Economy to China

SPOILER ALERT: This post reveals who was voted off last night's Survivor: China. Also, the Ken Burns posts reveal who won WWII.

Monty Brinton/CBS

We interrupt Ken Burns Day at Tuned In to prove that we're not all about lofty matters historical here. Survivor: China debuted last night, and while I can never judge the quality of any given Survivor season until a few episodes in, I was glad to see the show switch things up with an inland adventure for the first time, if I'm not forgetting anything, since Amazon. All those beaches and freaking coconut trees start to look the same after a while.

Otherwise, it was a largely typical first episode: you had the mandatory first episode puke, the standard fights over building the shelter and the usual dilemma over whether to vote off the bossy woman or the cranky old man first. (It was the latter, the aptly named chicken farmer and Robin Williams lookalike Chicken, who had his neck wrung.) And the obligatory nods to the indigenous culture (the survivors received copies of The Art of War, which, Jeff Probst informed them, was "written by the Chinese.")

What always amazes me about any cast of Survivor, however, is how it testifies to the bizarre breadth of the American economy. I mean, you can make a living doing damn near anything in this country. There was the professional poker player. The Christian radio host. (Who described herself, nonetheless, as "not a religious person," yet walked out of a Buddhist welcoming ceremony.) The lunch lady. The surfing instructor. The chicken farmer. The gravedigger. The parkour runner (OK, he's a college student now, but give him some time). And, in a how-could-they-not-have-already-done-this bit of casting, a professional wrestling diva, who has inverted the natural order of the universe by posing for Playboy before appearing on Survivor.

All this, appropriately enough, displayed on the home soil of one of the U.S.'s greatest economic partners and competitors. You can outsource poison toy manufacturing--but you can't outsource reality-TV humiliation! Made in America, baby!

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September 21, 2007 12:28

Survivor, Exporting America's Economy to China

SPOILER ALERT: This post reveals who was voted off last night's Survivor: China. Also, the Ken Burns posts reveal who won WWII.

Monty Brinton/CBS

We interrupt Ken Burns Day at Tuned In to prove that we're not all about lofty matters historical here. Survivor: China debuted last night, and while I can never judge the quality of any given Survivor season until a few episodes in, I was glad to see the show switch things up with an inland adventure for the first time, if I'm not forgetting anything, since Amazon. All those beaches and freaking coconut trees start to look the same after a while.

Otherwise, it was a largely typical first episode: you had the mandatory first episode puke, the standard fights over building the shelter and the usual dilemma over whether to vote off the bossy woman or the cranky old man first. (It was the latter, the aptly named chicken farmer and Robin Williams lookalike Chicken, who had his neck wrung.) And the obligatory nods to the indigenous culture (the survivors received copies of The Art of War, which, Jeff Probst informed them, was "written by the Chinese.")

What always amazes me about any cast of Survivor, however, is how it testifies to the bizarre breadth of the American economy. I mean, you can make a living doing damn near anything in this country. There was the professional poker player. The Christian radio host. (Who described herself, nonetheless, as "not a religious person," yet walked out of a Buddhist welcoming ceremony.) The lunch lady. The surfing instructor. The chicken farmer. The gravedigger. The parkour runner (OK, he's a college student now, but give him some time). And, in a how-could-they-not-have-already-done-this bit of casting, a professional wrestling diva, who has inverted the natural order of the universe by posing for Playboy before appearing on Survivor.

All this, appropriately enough, displayed on the home soil of one of the U.S.'s greatest economic partners and competitors. You can outsource poison toy manufacturing--but you can't outsource reality-TV humiliation! Made in America, baby!

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September 21, 2007 12:00

Ken Burns, the Interview: Episode 3--War and Gore

It's interesting from the standpoint of today to see the images of death and gore that made it into the popular media and newsreels at the time.

KB: And the sequencing of that, which went from absolute buttoned-down control, where no one knew until after the war the actual casualties and loss and materiel at Pearl Harbor, to that one Life magazine photograph [of dead soldiers' bodies] to the stuff at Tarawa [a U.S. newsreel about the battle], where they were literally showing stuff that our government doesn't show now. Dead bodies coming back in caskets, dead bodies at the beach, lapping up at the shore. I think it raises a lot of questions about what's the role of the populace in a democracy. If you're going to elect representatives to send you to war, you got to be damn well sure it's a necessary war, and the only reason why you know that is that you're inculcated with the mathematics, the costs, the calculus of what war is. And that's I think, in some ways what we've done.

It was amazing to see with the Tarawa newsreel, the White House not arguing that the footage would demoralize people but that it was necessary to bolster support for the war.

KB: Now, can we tell you the follow-up? Enlistment went down. Of course, right? No mother, after seeing that, is going to let her son enroll. And war bond funding went up. It wasn't what they had in mind, but it was one of those unintended consequences, and it issued from real political courage.

LN: I think they have to prepare people. By 1943, we only had, I'm going to guess, 15-20% of the total casualties. The government knew it was only going to get exponentially worse, as we moved forward, invaded France and got further in the Pacific. They wanted to prepare the public, to internalize what was going to happen, the bodies that were going to come home. To keep it at arm's length would have been counterproductive.

KB: In the Civil War, they looked at all those [Mathew] Brady photographs, the dead bodies, the maimed--people just couldn't get enough of it.

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September 21, 2007 12:00

Ken Burns, the Interview: Episode 3--War and Gore

It's interesting from the standpoint of today to see the images of death and gore that made it into the popular media and newsreels at the time.

KB: And the sequencing of that, which went from absolute buttoned-down control, where no one knew until after the war the actual casualties and loss and materiel at Pearl Harbor, to that one Life magazine photograph [of dead soldiers' bodies] to the stuff at Tarawa [a U.S. newsreel about the battle], where they were literally showing stuff that our government doesn't show now. Dead bodies coming back in caskets, dead bodies at the beach, lapping up at the shore. I think it raises a lot of questions about what's the role of the populace in a democracy. If you're going to elect representatives to send you to war, you got to be damn well sure it's a necessary war, and the only reason why you know that is that you're inculcated with the mathematics, the costs, the calculus of what war is. And that's I think, in some ways what we've done.

It was amazing to see with the Tarawa newsreel, the White House not arguing that the footage would demoralize people but that it was necessary to bolster support for the war.

KB: Now, can we tell you the follow-up? Enlistment went down. Of course, right? No mother, after seeing that, is going to let her son enroll. And war bond funding went up. It wasn't what they had in mind, but it was one of those unintended consequences, and it issued from real political courage.

LN: I think they have to prepare people. By 1943, we only had, I'm going to guess, 15-20% of the total casualties. The government knew it was only going to get exponentially worse, as we moved forward, invaded France and got further in the Pacific. They wanted to prepare the public, to internalize what was going to happen, the bodies that were going to come home. To keep it at arm's length would have been counterproductive.

KB: In the Civil War, they looked at all those [Mathew] Brady photographs, the dead bodies, the maimed--people just couldn't get enough of it.

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September 21, 2007 11:15

Ken Burns, the Interview: Episode 2--The Hispanic Controversy

Does Ken Burns have anything to say about the attacks by Hispanics for leaving them out of the original version of The War? Does he ever!

Didn't you have to take on faith that the four towns you picked would give you the whole scope of the war?

LN: Yes. We naively though that if you picked a big enough city, but not too big--if you picked New York, you could cover the entire universe, but it'd be too big. You couldn't really do justice to New York, or LA or Chicago, even. But if you picked a city that was big enough--there's 10,000 people from Waterbury [Conn.] who served in the military. But it turned out that actually we had to expand, because of that theoretical 10,000 there weren't that many still living in Waterbury that we could find, there weren't that many that were in combat, there weren't that many that were compos mentis or wanted to talk--

KB: Or were still alive.

LN: Exactly. So we did take a leap of faith that over time we'd find the battle of the Bulge, D-Day, Guadalcanal, the capital-I important battles. For the most part, we pulled it off, with the exception of D-Day. We didn't have anyone from our four towns who was at Omaha Beach. We had a paratrooper from Mobile, but not someone on Omaha Beach. And so we had to broaden [the interviewees] from our four towns.

This is probably a good point to ask about the Hispanic protests. You say up front in the film, and it would be hard to dispute this, that there's no way you can tell every story or cover every location. Was there ever a point when you wanted to just say, Sorry, this is the film we made?

KB: Yes. Of course, of course. Our initial response was "Wait a second. This is coming from people who haven't seen a frame of the film. We've advertised its arbitrariness. It's impressionistic stuff." Our feelings were hurt. We'd done a good job. And more to the point you can't take this film out of the context of 30 years of our body of work, where, for instance, in The West, we didn't tell the gunslingers' stories. We instead told a Hispanic story in every single episode. And we were told "No Anglo can tell our story" at the time. We've done Hispanic stories in The Statue of Liberty, in Baseball, in Jazz, in [the upcoming] National Parks. Not out of any political correctness, but because it's integral to the story.

Here, we set the precondition that we were not going to go out and seek, with the exception of Japanese Americans, any particular ethnic group. Hispanics were 1.4 percent of the population according to the 1940 census. They were not segregated like African Americans, with the exception of a Puerto Rican regiment. They were not interned, classified as enemy aliens and then segregated and used as cannon fodder like Japanese Americans, and the government didn't count them. What we found, circling back, was that many of those veterans, particularly a couple we contacted in Sacramento, never knew, even though we advertised our presence, or if they knew, they were reticent. They felt, like many WWII veterans, that the heroes were my buddies that I left on the ground and I'm not going to go and advertise my heroism.

You begin to lock horns in our modern-day media dialectic, and then we realized that the obligation of art is to transcend it, to take the high road. to see better. We'd already initiated with PBS all these films that have significant Hispanic content well before this incident. We asked them to consider one of their own filmmakers making a separate film. No, it had to be us. We considered all sorts of things and we realized, we're in the business of telling stories. We identified a couple of veterans. They wanted us do do one story, we did two. We put them in two different places and it didn't compromise our vision. ... And we also heard 20-plus years ago working on our series on The West about Joe Medicine Crow, who was a Crow Indian chief who is a Native American story that we tell at the end of the 5th episode.

[snip]

I was talking to Jeff Ward, our writer, today, and her said that this whole thing in retrospect proves how critical it is to know history. Every 30 years in the history of our country an immigrant group--first it was the Irish, then the Germans--became the villain. I mean, you've got Pat Buchanan saying, They're propagating faster than us and there will be more of them soon. And so you have an already defensive posture on the part of Hispanics. It's not about this film. In fact, I am an ally. We are an ally of their sympathies, and I spent 30 years telling stories that haven't been told. ... In the end--why not tell another story? And so we did it, and it's done, and our original vision hasn't been compromised. And we've made some people whole and there are other people who will never be satisfied, and identity politics goes on. And in 30 years we'll be talking about the new immigrant group from Mars that's not getting their due.

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September 21, 2007 11:15

Ken Burns, the Interview: Episode 2--The Hispanic Controversy

Does Ken Burns have anything to say about the attacks by Hispanics for leaving them out of the original version of The War? Does he ever!

Didn't you have to take on faith that the four towns you picked would give you the whole scope of the war?

LN: Yes. We naively though that if you picked a big enough city, but not too big--if you picked New York, you could cover the entire universe, but it'd be too big. You couldn't really do justice to New York, or LA or Chicago, even. But if you picked a city that was big enough--there's 10,000 people from Waterbury [Conn.] who served in the military. But it turned out that actually we had to expand, because of that theoretical 10,000 there weren't that many still living in Waterbury that we could find, there weren't that many that were in combat, there weren't that many that were compos mentis or wanted to talk--

KB: Or were still alive.

LN: Exactly. So we did take a leap of faith that over time we'd find the battle of the Bulge, D-Day, Guadalcanal, the capital-I important battles. For the most part, we pulled it off, with the exception of D-Day. We didn't have anyone from our four towns who was at Omaha Beach. We had a paratrooper from Mobile, but not someone on Omaha Beach. And so we had to broaden [the interviewees] from our four towns.

This is probably a good point to ask about the Hispanic protests. You say up front in the film, and it would be hard to dispute this, that there's no way you can tell every story or cover every location. Was there ever a point when you wanted to just say, Sorry, this is the film we made?

KB: Yes. Of course, of course. Our initial response was "Wait a second. This is coming from people who haven't seen a frame of the film. We've advertised its arbitrariness. It's impressionistic stuff." Our feelings were hurt. We'd done a good job. And more to the point you can't take this film out of the context of 30 years of our body of work, where, for instance, in The West, we didn't tell the gunslingers' stories. We instead told a Hispanic story in every single episode. And we were told "No Anglo can tell our story" at the time. We've done Hispanic stories in The Statue of Liberty, in Baseball, in Jazz, in [the upcoming] National Parks. Not out of any political correctness, but because it's integral to the story.

Here, we set the precondition that we were not going to go out and seek, with the exception of Japanese Americans, any particular ethnic group. Hispanics were 1.4 percent of the population according to the 1940 census. They were not segregated like African Americans, with the exception of a Puerto Rican regiment. They were not interned, classified as enemy aliens and then segregated and used as cannon fodder like Japanese Americans, and the government didn't count them. What we found, circling back, was that many of those veterans, particularly a couple we contacted in Sacramento, never knew, even though we advertised our presence, or if they knew, they were reticent. They felt, like many WWII veterans, that the heroes were my buddies that I left on the ground and I'm not going to go and advertise my heroism.

You begin to lock horns in our modern-day media dialectic, and then we realized that the obligation of art is to transcend it, to take the high road. to see better. We'd already initiated with PBS all these films that have significant Hispanic content well before this incident. We asked them to consider one of their own filmmakers making a separate film. No, it had to be us. We considered all sorts of things and we realized, we're in the business of telling stories. We identified a couple of veterans. They wanted us do do one story, we did two. We put them in two different places and it didn't compromise our vision. ... And we also heard 20-plus years ago working on our series on The West about Joe Medicine Crow, who was a Crow Indian chief who is a Native American story that we tell at the end of the 5th episode.

[snip]

I was talking to Jeff Ward, our writer, today, and her said that this whole thing in retrospect proves how critical it is to know history. Every 30 years in the history of our country an immigrant group--first it was the Irish, then the Germans--became the villain. I mean, you've got Pat Buchanan saying, They're propagating faster than us and there will be more of them soon. And so you have an already defensive posture on the part of Hispanics. It's not about this film. In fact, I am an ally. We are an ally of their sympathies, and I spent 30 years telling stories that haven't been told. ... In the end--why not tell another story? And so we did it, and it's done, and our original vision hasn't been compromised. And we've made some people whole and there are other people who will never be satisfied, and identity politics goes on. And in 30 years we'll be talking about the new immigrant group from Mars that's not getting their due.

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September 21, 2007 10:15

Ken Burns, the Interview: Episode 1--Why "The War"?

I spoke with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick for a good hour and a half, getting far more stuff than I could work into a 660-word column in Time. Burns, in addition to being thoughtful about the process and pitfalls of documentary making, is a saltier speaker than you might expect from a PBS type, as well as quite the unembarrassed salesman. (Among the passages I'm leaving out are various stories of other people telling Burns how much they loved his film.) There's a lot of material, so I'm breaking it up--Ken Burns-style--into several episodes. I couldn't get Wynton Marsalis to do a soundtrack for me, though. Herewith, episode one:

You called your Civil War documentary The Civil War. Why call this one simply The War? Was it a conscious decision?

Ken Burns: Very much so. That is what the people who lived through it called it. If you say "the war" in casual conversation, you mean the Iraqi war, the one that's happening right now. But if you remove yourself from a contemporary journalistic circumstance, that what even people who weren't involved in it called it. It was kind of a nod to the intimate bottom-up approach that we took to call it what everyone who lived through it called it.

A bottom-up approach meaning a people's history?

KB: I wouldn't say a people's history, because then that enters into the connotations of [historian Howard] Zinn, not that I have anything against what he's done. But "bottom up" means that there are no 'experts' in the film, that this is about about so-called "ordinary people," the privates that did the fighting and the dying, that they are from four towns that are more or less randomly chosen, so that they provide an almost lottery-like collection of experiences that in their totality, interwoven and set against the context of the Second World War, represent a kind of unmediated history. ... We said early on that if you weren't in this war or waiting anxiously for someone that you love to come back from that war, you're not in our film.

Lynn Novick: We wanted to give you enough of a sense of what decisions were made by important people that determined the fates of of the people that have no choice but to be involved and follow their orders. But we weren't going to be agonizing with Eisenhower over whether he should launch D-Day on June 5 or June 6. We stripped away from our original script a lot of those stories.

KB: Top-down storytelling always becomes susceptible to that kind of hagiography. Even in The Civil War, Lincoln becomes bigger than he was. Here Eisenhower passes through the film, as does Patton, as does MacArthur, as do a lot of people, but really it's the experiences of these folks that drive the action of any particular scene. ... There's no Rosie the Riveter; there's real people doing things. It's not that kind of iconic bullsh_t that gets trotted out every time you do the Second World War.

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September 21, 2007 10:15

Ken Burns, the Interview: Episode 1--Why "The War"?

I spoke with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick for a good hour and a half, getting far more stuff than I could work into a 660-word column in Time. Burns, in addition to being thoughtful about the process and pitfalls of documentary making, is a saltier speaker than you might expect from a PBS type, as well as quite the unembarrassed salesman. (Among the passages I'm leaving out are various stories of other people telling Burns how much they loved his film.) There's a lot of material, so I'm breaking it up--Ken Burns-style--into several episodes. I couldn't get Wynton Marsalis to do a soundtrack for me, though. Herewith, episode one:

You called your Civil War documentary The Civil War. Why call this one simply The War? Was it a conscious decision?

Ken Burns: Very much so. That is what the people who lived through it called it. If you say "the war" in casual conversation, you mean the Iraqi war, the one that's happening right now. But if you remove yourself from a contemporary journalistic circumstance, that what even people who weren't involved in it called it. It was kind of a nod to the intimate bottom-up approach that we took to call it what everyone who lived through it called it.

A bottom-up approach meaning a people's history?

KB: I wouldn't say a people's history, because then that enters into the connotations of [historian Howard] Zinn, not that I have anything against what he's done. But "bottom up" means that there are no 'experts' in the film, that this is about about so-called "ordinary people," the privates that did the fighting and the dying, that they are from four towns that are more or less randomly chosen, so that they provide an almost lottery-like collection of experiences that in their totality, interwoven and set against the context of the Second World War, represent a kind of unmediated history. ... We said early on that if you weren't in this war or waiting anxiously for someone that you love to come back from that war, you're not in our film.

Lynn Novick: We wanted to give you enough of a sense of what decisions were made by important people that determined the fates of of the people that have no choice but to be involved and follow their orders. But we weren't going to be agonizing with Eisenhower over whether he should launch D-Day on June 5 or June 6. We stripped away from our original script a lot of those stories.

KB: Top-down storytelling always becomes susceptible to that kind of hagiography. Even in The Civil War, Lincoln becomes bigger than he was. Here Eisenhower passes through the film, as does Patton, as does MacArthur, as do a lot of people, but really it's the experiences of these folks that drive the action of any particular scene. ... There's no Rosie the Riveter; there's real people doing things. It's not that kind of iconic bullsh_t that gets trotted out every time you do the Second World War.

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September 21, 2007 8:49

Dead Tree Alert II: Ken Burns Goes Back to War

Carrying wounded in Okinawa. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

In my column this week, I sat down with Ken Burns and his co-director/producer, Lynn Novick, and talked about--well, a lot of things, but the focus of this column ended up being on their WWII documentary The War and its parallels to, and implied comments on, the war today:

Burns' 1990 The Civil War first aired in wartime too, just after Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. Today the most powerful statement of The War is its simple, brutal willingness to show what war looks like. Without wallowing in gore, Burns and Novick combed through archive and newsreel footage to depict the war as GIs saw it: battlefield corpses, bomb-blasted civilians and waves lapping against bodies on beaches. Compare this with the Iraq conflict, during which the U.S. government has suppressed images of coffins, let alone casualties, often with the cooperation of the media.

The contrast is starker when The War presents a newsreel from the battle of Tarawa--issued on President Franklin D. Roosevelt's orders--that shows ghastly images of Marine dead. "This," the newsreel narrator intones, "is the price we had to pay for a war we didn't want." Today the government is loath to lay out a price, or ask one. "People yearn for the memory of shared sacrifice that the Second World War represents," Burns says. "Now we're all free agents. We don't give up nothin'. We were asked after 9/11 to go shopping. It was sort of 'Don't worry your pretty little heads about it.'"

As for the lot-of-other-things we talked about, I'll post some excerpts from our conversation later on today.

And the docu-series itself? I usually hate great-if-you-like-that-sort-of-thing reviews, but, well, it's great if you like that sort of thing. To be honest, I doubt I would have watched all 15 hours if not for professional obligation. It's vast, it repeats itself, it lags at times. Like most Burns documentaries, it's sometimes guilty of "overclosing" (I think I owe Matt Zoller Seitz for that term)--that is, adding an extra topcoat of sentiment, musical cues, what have you, where the subjects' words alone would be more powerful.

But it's also tremendously moving. The War--which interviews some 40 veterans and contemporaries from four American cities and towns--is not going to teach you anything new, factually, about this vastly chronicled war, at least not anything you could easily find elsewhere. It would be foolish to try, and that's not The War's point. The War is about one simple idea: explaining what it feels like to fight in a war, live through it and lose the people you love in it.

Emphasis on feels. The War is about emotional education, and while it may seem like an easy lay-up to tell people that war is awful and sad, it's tough to make an audience--that's seen Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, the History Channel, World at War and so on--actually feel it again on a gut level. Burns and Novick do it, or rather their subjects do, by dredging up memories and letting the emotions play on their faces and in their words as if they were living it again.

For all his sentimentalist tendencies, Burns has made a generally hard-nosed film, with ugly archival scenes of combat gore as well as footage of soldiers captured in quieter, lonely moments--trudging down a road, reconnoitering a staircase--that depict the brutality and banality of war. And while he clearly respects his subjects, he doesn't romanticize them; he gets them to recollect and confront not just the horrible things that were done to them but the horrible things that they and their comrades did, stories they retell unapologetically, regretfully or philosophically.

It's amazing to think that people could look at a 15-hour documentary and criticize it, of all things, for leaving too much out, but they have and will. In today's New York Times, Alessandra Stanley criticizes Burns for focusing entirely on the U.S. experience, and she has a point as far as that goes. Hispanics criticized the original version of The War for omitting Latino soldiers, and they had a point too. (I'll post an excerpt from Burns about the controversy later.) The two interviews he added with Hispanic soldiers, and one with a Native American, seem tacked on, but they do improve the scope of The War, which like most Burns documentaries is attuned to racial ironies. (In one scene, a Japanese American soldier recalls getting on a bus in the South and not knowing if he should ride in the "white" or "colored" section of the bus; he guesses "colored," and the driver corrects him.)

When it comes down to it, though, Burns wants to teach your heart, not your head. And whether you manage to watch all seven installments of The War or just one, the message will get through.

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September 21, 2007 8:49

Dead Tree Alert II: Ken Burns Goes Back to War

Carrying wounded in Okinawa. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

In my column this week, I sat down with Ken Burns and his co-director/producer, Lynn Novick, and talked about--well, a lot of things, but the focus of this column ended up being on their WWII documentary The War and its parallels to, and implied comments on, the war today:

Burns' 1990 The Civil War first aired in wartime too, just after Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. Today the most powerful statement of The War is its simple, brutal willingness to show what war looks like. Without wallowing in gore, Burns and Novick combed through archive and newsreel footage to depict the war as GIs saw it: battlefield corpses, bomb-blasted civilians and waves lapping against bodies on beaches. Compare this with the Iraq conflict, during which the U.S. government has suppressed images of coffins, let alone casualties, often with the cooperation of the media.

The contrast is starker when The War presents a newsreel from the battle of Tarawa--issued on President Franklin D. Roosevelt's orders--that shows ghastly images of Marine dead. "This," the newsreel narrator intones, "is the price we had to pay for a war we didn't want." Today the government is loath to lay out a price, or ask one. "People yearn for the memory of shared sacrifice that the Second World War represents," Burns says. "Now we're all free agents. We don't give up nothin'. We were asked after 9/11 to go shopping. It was sort of 'Don't worry your pretty little heads about it.'"

As for the lot-of-other-things we talked about, I'll post some excerpts from our conversation later on today.

And the docu-series itself? I usually hate great-if-you-like-that-sort-of-thing reviews, but, well, it's great if you like that sort of thing. To be honest, I doubt I would have watched all 15 hours if not for professional obligation. It's vast, it repeats itself, it lags at times. Like most Burns documentaries, it's sometimes guilty of "overclosing" (I think I owe Matt Zoller Seitz for that term)--that is, adding an extra topcoat of sentiment, musical cues, what have you, where the subjects' words alone would be more powerful.

But it's also tremendously moving. The War--which interviews some 40 veterans and contemporaries from four American cities and towns--is not going to teach you anything new, factually, about this vastly chronicled war, at least not anything you could easily find elsewhere. It would be foolish to try, and that's not The War's point. The War is about one simple idea: explaining what it feels like to fight in a war, live through it and lose the people you love in it.

Emphasis on feels. The War is about emotional education, and while it may seem like an easy lay-up to tell people that war is awful and sad, it's tough to make an audience--that's seen Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, the History Channel, World at War and so on--actually feel it again on a gut level. Burns and Novick do it, or rather their subjects do, by dredging up memories and letting the emotions play on their faces and in their words as if they were living it again.

For all his sentimentalist tendencies, Burns has made a generally hard-nosed film, with ugly archival scenes of combat gore as well as footage of soldiers captured in quieter, lonely moments--trudging down a road, reconnoitering a staircase--that depict the brutality and banality of war. And while he clearly respects his subjects, he doesn't romanticize them; he gets them to recollect and confront not just the horrible things that were done to them but the horrible things that they and their comrades did, stories they retell unapologetically, regretfully or philosophically.

It's amazing to think that people could look at a 15-hour documentary and criticize it, of all things, for leaving too much out, but they have and will. In today's New York Times, Alessandra Stanley criticizes Burns for focusing entirely on the U.S. experience, and she has a point as far as that goes. Hispanics criticized the original version of The War for omitting Latino soldiers, and they had a point too. (I'll post an excerpt from Burns about the controversy later.) The two interviews he added with Hispanic soldiers, and one with a Native American, seem tacked on, but they do improve the scope of The War, which like most Burns documentaries is attuned to racial ironies. (In one scene, a Japanese American soldier recalls getting on a bus in the South and not knowing if he should ride in the "white" or "colored" section of the bus; he guesses "colored," and the driver corrects him.)

When it comes down to it, though, Burns wants to teach your heart, not your head. And whether you manage to watch all seven installments of The War or just one, the message will get through.

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September 21, 2007 8:00

Dead Tree Alert I: O.J., the Threequel

The front Briefing section of TIME opens with something called The Moment, which is sort of like a blog entry in print---a riff of a few paragraphs about an image or incident from the week's news. I wrote this week's, on the class reunion of the O.J. Simpson media industry, and I may as well reprint the whole thing here:

History, they say, plays the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. But what about the third time? In the O.J. Simpson case--recalling his 1995 trial and O.J. 2, its 1997 civil sequel--it became nostalgia. As the Juice and his cronies stood accused of robbing a memorabilia collector at gunpoint, the coverage--O.J. 3: What Happens in Vegas--had the misty tone of a high school reunion. My, his daughter has grown! Doesn't his girlfriend look like Nicole? "A lot of these people I know from many years ago," said Dan Abrams on MSNBC almost wistfully.

There was the class of '95--Greta Van Susteren, Fred Goldman, Marcia Clark (reporting for Entertainment Tonight)--with thicker makeup and deeper laugh lines. There was O.J., menacing and pathetic on the leaked audiotape, a 60-year-old man allegedly staging a geezer commando raid to literally recover his past. The reminiscences, the gray hair, the reduced stakes--it's as if you had reunited the Greatest Generation in 1957 to liberate Luxembourg.

O.J. made today's media, after all--not just individual careers but entire channels, as well as cable's flood-the-zone philosophy. (Natalee Holloway, Britney and K-Fed--all bigger because of O.J.) O.J. 3 was also a showcase for the outlets that sprang up after O.J.'s first trial, each, like new species of velociraptor, sharper-toothed than the last and eager now to take a bite. Fox News and MSNBC didn't even exist circa O.J. 1, while O.J. 3's big scoop, the hotel-room tape, was reported (i.e., purchased) by muckraker website TMZ.com (owned, like TIME, by Time Warner)--which just happens to have launched a TV spin-off show on Sept. 10.

Court TV begat Fox News begat TMZ. O.J. begat Monica begat Paris begat ... O.J. again. This circle-of-life chain was a reminder of what had changed and hadn't, not just in the media but in the audience and the world. Yes, O.J. 1 was a freak show and a painful racial divider--and two people died--but it was also an artifact of that peacetime boom between the falls of the Berlin Wall and the Twin Towers. Then, at least, we had the luxury of wondering whether we didn't have bigger things to worry about. Today we know we do. And we watch--and cover--O.J. anyway, a dozen years older, not necessarily wiser.

There's also a big pretty picture, but evidently you have to shell out for the print magazine to get that.

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September 21, 2007 8:00

Dead Tree Alert I: O.J., the Threequel

The front Briefing section of TIME opens with something called The Moment, which is sort of like a blog entry in print---a riff of a few paragraphs about an image or incident from the week's news. I wrote this week's, on the class reunion of the O.J. Simpson media industry, and I may as well reprint the whole thing here:

History, they say, plays the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. But what about the third time? In the O.J. Simpson case--recalling his 1995 trial and O.J. 2, its 1997 civil sequel--it became nostalgia. As the Juice and his cronies stood accused of robbing a memorabilia collector at gunpoint, the coverage--O.J. 3: What Happens in Vegas--had the misty tone of a high school reunion. My, his daughter has grown! Doesn't his girlfriend look like Nicole? "A lot of these people I know from many years ago," said Dan Abrams on MSNBC almost wistfully.

There was the class of '95--Greta Van Susteren, Fred Goldman, Marcia Clark (reporting for Entertainment Tonight)--with thicker makeup and deeper laugh lines. There was O.J., menacing and pathetic on the leaked audiotape, a 60-year-old man allegedly staging a geezer commando raid to literally recover his past. The reminiscences, the gray hair, the reduced stakes--it's as if you had reunited the Greatest Generation in 1957 to liberate Luxembourg.

O.J. made today's media, after all--not just individual careers but entire channels, as well as cable's flood-the-zone philosophy. (Natalee Holloway, Britney and K-Fed--all bigger because of O.J.) O.J. 3 was also a showcase for the outlets that sprang up after O.J.'s first trial, each, like new species of velociraptor, sharper-toothed than the last and eager now to take a bite. Fox News and MSNBC didn't even exist circa O.J. 1, while O.J. 3's big scoop, the hotel-room tape, was reported (i.e., purchased) by muckraker website TMZ.com (owned, like TIME, by Time Warner)--which just happens to have launched a TV spin-off show on Sept. 10.

Court TV begat Fox News begat TMZ. O.J. begat Monica begat Paris begat ... O.J. again. This circle-of-life chain was a reminder of what had changed and hadn't, not just in the media but in the audience and the world. Yes, O.J. 1 was a freak show and a painful racial divider--and two people died--but it was also an artifact of that peacetime boom between the falls of the Berlin Wall and the Twin Towers. Then, at least, we had the luxury of wondering whether we didn't have bigger things to worry about. Today we know we do. And we watch--and cover--O.J. anyway, a dozen years older, not necessarily wiser.

There's also a big pretty picture, but evidently you have to shell out for the print magazine to get that.

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