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Speaker 1: Joining me now is one of those you know, I'm
Speaker 1: I am A. I hate this cliche, but sometimes some
Speaker 1: people actually live the cliche. This person needs no introduction.
Speaker 1: It's ken Burns, and he is as I was joking
Speaker 1: with him before in my own team. I may season
Speaker 1: pass subscriber to ken Burns, and yet there are still
Speaker 1: ken Burns documentaries. I have not fully consumed. My biggest
Speaker 1: regrets so far, as Jazz, I have not fully consumed Jazz,
Speaker 1: I will make that confession. But you know, it's one
Speaker 1: of those cases where every time you think there isn't
Speaker 1: a new story to tell, there's a new story to tell,
Speaker 1: and Ken burnsfuys that story to tell. Ken, It's good
Speaker 1: to see you.
Speaker 2: It's good to see you too, Check, thank you. You know,
Speaker 2: I think if I were given a thousand years to live,
Speaker 2: which I will not, I wouldn't run out of topics
Speaker 2: in American history. And there's something just incredibly wonderful about
Speaker 2: saying that, particularly in tough times where we're sometimes avoid
Speaker 2: the tough times. But history's so instructive. You know, we're
Speaker 2: way more divided during our Revolution, way more divided obviously
Speaker 2: during our Civil War, way more divided during depression, way
Speaker 2: more divided during the Vietnam year. I mean, we tend
Speaker 2: to think, as kind of narcissist Dick Chicken littles that
Speaker 2: our time is the worst. It's got to be bad,
Speaker 2: and there's history is there to say, you know what.
Speaker 2: I had a friend in the financial services you'll appreciate
Speaker 2: this who came to me in the after the eight
Speaker 2: meltdown and he said, this is a depression, and I
Speaker 2: just I said, you know, in the depression, in many
Speaker 2: American cities, the animals in the zoo were shot and
Speaker 2: the meat distributed to the poor. And that happens.
Speaker 1: It's a depression.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a depression. And so like right now, we're not.
Speaker 2: I don't want to minimize whatever pain he was personally
Speaker 2: going through or professional going through. But I do think
Speaker 2: having perspective is a really important thing in history. Is
Speaker 2: the best teacher there is for giving you a kind
Speaker 2: of perspective?
Speaker 1: No, And obviously we're having an argument on history sometimes,
Speaker 1: right we're having I and I actually this I want
Speaker 1: to begin here. I think the most remarkable accomplishment you
Speaker 1: made with American Revolution was how limited the critiques were,
Speaker 1: what I would call the partisan critiques. I know you felt.
Speaker 1: I'm sure you saw them, and I'm.
Speaker 2: Sure you're right. You're right, you're right. I mean my
Speaker 2: feeling is and I do this with every film. You know,
Speaker 2: Mark Twain once said, if you if you tell the truth,
Speaker 2: you don't have to remember anything. So I said the
Speaker 2: same thing in the year of promotion of this thing
Speaker 2: last year to Joe Rogan and Theo vanas I said
Speaker 2: to the New York Times editorial board as I said
Speaker 2: to inner city school kids in Charleston and Detroit, and
Speaker 2: suburban kids in Chicago and the forty cities we went
Speaker 2: to in the eighty different screenings and the six million podcasts,
Speaker 2: I felt like I did, and all the other interviews,
Speaker 2: and because I was trying to reach everybody, this is
Speaker 2: a story for everybody. And problem is that right now
Speaker 2: we've gotten to a place where we want to limit everything.
Speaker 2: It's you have to pass a litmus test, you have
Speaker 2: to sign a loyalty oath and nda to your real feelings.
Speaker 2: And I want to speak to everyone. And so I
Speaker 2: assumed if I could just get to October before the
Speaker 2: mid November broadcast would be okay. Well, October came and went,
Speaker 2: and then November broadcast came, and in the middle of
Speaker 2: it there were a couple half hearted this is woke,
Speaker 2: sort of superficial dismissals. It was really clear that the people,
Speaker 2: the authors of two or three of these things had
Speaker 2: watched maybe twenty minutes of the thing.
Speaker 1: And this is a.
Speaker 2: Film, by the way, that suggests that the American Revolution
Speaker 2: is the most important event in world history in the
Speaker 2: last two thousand years, and that, oh, by the way,
Speaker 2: a guy I'm sure you've never heard of named George
Speaker 2: Washington is the person most responsible for our success in
Speaker 2: the creation of our country. And somehow because there were
Speaker 2: women in it, and somehow because they were oh my god,
Speaker 2: black people in it, and somehow because they were Native
Speaker 2: Americans and there were other people from other countries who
Speaker 2: were engaged in this World war in addition to our
Speaker 2: revolution and a bloody civil war, that somehow this is woke.
Speaker 2: And then you realize where is the wokeness? Actually is
Speaker 2: it in the litmust of one side of what it
Speaker 2: should be? And that's what it is. Wokeness is just
Speaker 2: a miss test that is fearful of the truth. And
Speaker 2: it occurs in both ends of the spectrum. And and
Speaker 2: in fact, I don't think there ends.
Speaker 1: I think there.
Speaker 2: You know, we discussed this before. You know, a third
Speaker 2: of Bernie's supporters stayed home, a third voted for Hillary,
Speaker 2: and a third voted for Trump. So you've got a
Speaker 2: circle here in which the far left and the far
Speaker 2: right are often much closer than we would think.
Speaker 1: No, I mean, that's why you know, we're all taught
Speaker 1: the pendulum right when it comes to that, is that
Speaker 1: at some point the two ends could meet. And you know,
Speaker 1: in fact, I like to warn some of my friends
Speaker 1: in the business community, watch out if there is a
Speaker 1: if the populace on the right drop their cultural grievance
Speaker 1: and you just have all of the economic grievance parts
Speaker 1: of the electorate unite, we would call it the FDR coalition,
Speaker 1: and it could It could end up not be pretty transformational.
Speaker 1: I don't want to say I agree.
Speaker 2: You know, for a couple of different times in a
Speaker 2: coup role of different positions standing in very different political
Speaker 2: ideological places, the Republican Party has been the most successful
Speaker 2: political party on Earth, and a lot of ways in
Speaker 2: the last fifty years, is getting.
Speaker 1: The most successful third party.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, exactly started it, by the way, in a
Speaker 2: schoolhouse in rip On, Wisconsin, in eighteen fifty four with
Speaker 2: one platform out of the Demond dispute.
Speaker 1: There's still a dispute between a place in Illinois and
Speaker 1: a place in Wisconsin.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know, I hear that all the time. I'm
Speaker 2: opting for rip But the whole idea is that they're
Speaker 2: anti slavery, you know. And so then you come full
Speaker 2: circle where you know it's successful in that it's gotten
Speaker 2: so many people to vote against their economic self interest
Speaker 2: because they've been able to interpose enemies. The great bugaboo
Speaker 2: of political distraction and ledger domain in sight of hand
Speaker 2: is to say it's oh, it's them, and to create them.
Speaker 2: And I can tell you right now, I mean, my
Speaker 2: bottom line is I've been making films about the US,
Speaker 2: but I've been also making films about us, right the
Speaker 2: lower case two lighter thing. And there's only us, there's
Speaker 2: no them. And whenever anyone tells you there's them, you're
Speaker 2: having the woe pulled over your eyes. You're having a
Speaker 2: distraction take place in order for you to think it's
Speaker 2: actually an economic interest that is of central value to
Speaker 2: me is not as important as the thing that those
Speaker 2: people might be doing to me.
Speaker 1: What's always helpful about your documentaries is that I do
Speaker 1: think they have a point of view, but it's not
Speaker 1: this left right point no, no, no, no, it is it
Speaker 1: is more of a larger, you know, sense of you know.
Speaker 1: Just so, how would you describe, for instance, your point
Speaker 1: of view for the American Revolution? You clearly at a
Speaker 1: framework that you want to do and check the story with.
Speaker 2: Not really, because what happens is when any whenever you
Speaker 2: say yes, and your heart and your gut, whatever you choose,
Speaker 2: you don't know anything about it. I mean, I got
Speaker 2: the general edgic, I got a good education. I know
Speaker 2: a lot about history. And yet when you say I'm
Speaker 2: going to do country music or I'm going to do
Speaker 2: baseball something I grew up playing, oh well, finally a
Speaker 2: subject I know about. Each day of baseball was a
Speaker 2: humiliation of what I didn't know. And so revolution you
Speaker 2: just automatically, so you're not looking. You've got a chronological structure.
Speaker 2: It's already there, that is to say, and then and
Speaker 2: then and then, so then how you begin to put
Speaker 2: it together. You're absolutely right that there's no political thing.
Speaker 2: You just want to say what happened, and you want
Speaker 2: to call balls and strikes. And I would suggest that
Speaker 2: in our media culture, as diverse and as multitudinous as
Speaker 2: it is a kind of tsunami of information, it's relatively
Speaker 2: the same. And so we become a kind of highlight reel.
Speaker 2: Babybruth only hits home runs. Well, Baybruth struck out way
Speaker 2: more times than he hit home run. And more importantly,
Speaker 2: bab Ruth only comes up once every nine times at
Speaker 2: bad So sometime as the last World Series showed you
Speaker 2: a second basement, a middle infielder, not the star, becomes
Speaker 2: central to the outcome of a very dramatic thing. And
Speaker 2: so what we've tried to do is always keep that
Speaker 2: in mind. Do you scrimp on your biography of Babe Ruth, No,
Speaker 2: you tell a complete one. In this case, the Babe
Speaker 2: Ruth is George Washington. We don't have a country without him.
Speaker 2: But then you also introduce people to scores of other
Speaker 2: characters that are bottom up, probably for the most part,
Speaker 2: but they also are central to what happened. They're the
Speaker 2: calling of balls and strikes, and I think there's something
Speaker 2: exhilarating in that complexity. And this notion that, certainly among authoritarians,
Speaker 2: that you want to reduce it to some simplistic slogans
Speaker 2: is ridiculous. Ridiculous.
Speaker 1: How do you deal with you know, one of my
Speaker 1: one of the things that obviously the more you read
Speaker 1: up on an historical event. I'm obsessed right now with
Speaker 1: the period between eighteen sixty five and nineteen twenty eight.
Speaker 2: We're making a film on it called Emancipation to Excess,
Speaker 2: about reconstruction and the filon.
Speaker 1: Period, and you know, it's it's you know Garfield's the
Speaker 1: you know, I view Garfield as of all of our
Speaker 1: assassinated presidents. You know what the modern myth making around
Speaker 1: Kennedy was, actually that could have been Garfield, and Garfield absolutely,
Speaker 1: you know, Garfield could assigned.
Speaker 2: The Civil Rights Act has a great book on this right.
Speaker 1: And there's a couple of them that I've read now.
Speaker 1: But in order to understand eighteen eighty, you got to
Speaker 1: understand eighteen seventy six. And this is my long winding
Speaker 1: road to get to the eighteen seventy six. A lot
Speaker 1: of people have written the book about the eighteen seventy
Speaker 1: six election. There's all sorts of scholarship on it. And
Speaker 1: what I've noticed is that the author's politics matter a
Speaker 1: lot when you read, when you consume these books, and
Speaker 1: it's become to the point where I am get frustrated
Speaker 1: sometimes by his history books when you realize, no, the
Speaker 1: author has their own point of view and they start
Speaker 1: with it. And then and then it's sort of I
Speaker 1: don't want to say it poisons it, because if you
Speaker 1: know it in advance, you know it.
Speaker 2: Does poison it. Chuck, because you're smart and discerning and
Speaker 2: have read enough. But for the people who are picking
Speaker 2: it up. They then become.
Speaker 1: What if it's the only thing they read about it,
Speaker 1: only that's what I always worried about it, Then that's
Speaker 1: what I worry about too, And that's why I can't
Speaker 1: do that.
Speaker 2: I can't ignore that George Washington owned hundreds of human beings.
Speaker 2: You can't, as the writer Rick Atkinson said, and you
Speaker 2: know he's now two thirds the way through his Marvel's trilogy,
Speaker 2: you can't square that circle that he makes, you know,
Speaker 2: tactical mistakes, that he's rash on the battlefield. But all
Speaker 2: the other things add up to something. And you don't
Speaker 2: need to throw the baby out with the unforgiving revisionist bathwater.
Speaker 2: Nor do you have to subscribe to the Parson Weems treaqily.
Speaker 2: You know, never tell a lie, chop down on Jerry Dreeley,
Speaker 2: throw a coin across the doll. You can you can
Speaker 2: unsubscribe from both of these tyrannies and come to a
Speaker 2: much more complex thing. And that's where you bother people.
Speaker 2: Because they want things to fit in. They just want
Speaker 2: it to be white, or they wanted to be male,
Speaker 2: or they wanted to be simple, or they wanted to
Speaker 2: be still entrusted with the barnacles. But we don't even
Speaker 2: have to look at the big ideas that we're supposed
Speaker 2: to be protecting, because if you look at those big ideas,
Speaker 2: you begin to understand even further the complexity and the beauty.
Speaker 2: You have to go into fiction. You have to go
Speaker 2: into William Shakespeare to see all that.
Speaker 1: So what I'm curious about is when you're dealing with
Speaker 1: source material. Maybe it is Abigail Adams letters, right, maybe
Speaker 1: it's Ben Franklin letters, and you really have to understand
Speaker 1: the language of that day to get certain nuances. You've
Speaker 1: got to understand that a turn of phrase that may
Speaker 1: be meaningless to somebody reading it two hundred years later
Speaker 1: actually was incredibly important. And I often find that sort
Speaker 1: of what I would call the amateur historian, and I
Speaker 1: would put myself in that where I could misinterpret reading
Speaker 1: something because I'm reading it through the prism of today's
Speaker 1: American English language, and I just think about those issues. So,
Speaker 1: you know, when did you realize as you went through
Speaker 1: this over decades that you've done this. I assume over
Speaker 1: time you've now you're now almost an expert at seeing this.
Speaker 1: But when you first ran into this challenge. You know
Speaker 1: what were the what are the different ways to deal
Speaker 1: with it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know what? It manifested. I think I'm quite
Speaker 2: lucky it manifested less as a challenge. It is always
Speaker 2: a challenge than an exhilaration. The idea that information could
Speaker 2: be delivered in a way that I wouldn't or you
Speaker 2: wouldn't speak it suddenly becomes I mean, Lincoln didn't go
Speaker 2: around saying four score and seven years ago. He was
Speaker 2: just trying to ask you to think about eighty seven
Speaker 2: years in a different way, that's all. And it was
Speaker 2: a great rhetorical device for score in seven. So you
Speaker 2: have to do the math yourself. He's got you. As
Speaker 2: you're doing the math intention you're paying attention, and you've
Speaker 2: been sucked in, and you begin to understand. And so
Speaker 2: what you find in all of these parsing the last
Speaker 2: sentence of the first inaugural taking, the Declaration of Independence,
Speaker 2: A few phrases past the pursuit of happiness, we can
Speaker 2: get to that which is really loaded and wonderful, particularly
Speaker 2: for today. He says, all experience has shown that mankind
Speaker 2: are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable. Maybe
Speaker 2: you've read it at the picnic before on the fourth
Speaker 2: of July, and just let it go over. Think about
Speaker 2: what he's saying. He says, all experience has shown that
Speaker 2: mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable.
Speaker 2: Not hard to parse means Heretofore everybody, he has been
Speaker 2: under an authoritarian's boot and have been willing to suffer
Speaker 2: for that for a thousand years working someone else's land,
Speaker 2: you know, for a thousand years being a slave without
Speaker 2: even earning a farthing. Right. But this is going to
Speaker 2: be a new era. This is going to be a
Speaker 2: place where we're going to replace your subject hood with
Speaker 2: something much more responsible, coled citizenship. So let's go back
Speaker 2: to pursuit of happiness. So we've always assumed this is
Speaker 2: the American license for freedom. He didn't follow John Locke
Speaker 2: and said life, liberty, and property. He said pursuit of happiness.
Speaker 2: And so happiness was not the acquisition of things in
Speaker 2: a marketplace of objects, but lifelong learning in a marketplace
Speaker 2: of ideas. If you did that, you would become more virtuous.
Speaker 2: That was the free electron word throughout every episode of
Speaker 2: the revolution. As we began to gather stuff. John Adams
Speaker 2: is worrying about virtue. Abigail's worrying about that. George Washington, everybody,
Speaker 2: even the folks at the so called bottom, are thinking
Speaker 2: about it. And so virtue becomes a thing reaching back
Speaker 2: across the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, back to antiquity,
Speaker 2: the virtue that was going to make you able to
Speaker 2: assume the mantle of this, and Adams, at one point
Speaker 2: great worrier says, you know, there's too much avarice and ambition,
Speaker 2: too much lust for profit, not enough virtue that I
Speaker 2: wonder whether we have the ability to create a republic.
Speaker 2: So what happens is by isolating these words, by getting
Speaker 2: great actors, I have the best cast I think for
Speaker 2: anyone ever made, bringing them to life in a way
Speaker 2: that you say, oh, I now know what that means.
Speaker 2: I get it, and you begin to see that those
Speaker 2: differences which have held these people. They're wearing hoes and
Speaker 2: breeches and they've got you know, powdered wigs.
Speaker 1: They're not me.
Speaker 2: There's no photograph of anybody, so they can't be like me,
Speaker 2: and they are exactly like us, and they are. One
Speaker 2: of the more moving things Chuck to me is that
Speaker 2: they're speaking to us like all the time Washington and
Speaker 2: Jefferson Adams too says about the millions yet unborn. They
Speaker 2: are taking an idea that's never been tried. The chances
Speaker 2: of success that, like Sington Green, are zero, and yet
Speaker 2: they're thinking about you and me. And so the strawdinary
Speaker 2: story of our founding is the fact that, as the
Speaker 2: Old Testament says, there's nothing new under the sun, guess
Speaker 2: what on July fourth, seventeen seventy six, there was something
Speaker 2: new under the sun. Now does that mean that there's
Speaker 2: not the same quantities of virtue and venality and generosity
Speaker 2: and greed. Nope, that's the same thing. And you can
Speaker 2: find him in our story then, and it will echo or,
Speaker 2: as Mark Twain said, rhyme with the present moment. But
Speaker 2: you have to be disciplined as a storyteller not to
Speaker 2: date your film by pointing arrows at isn't this so
Speaker 2: much like today? I began this film when Barack Obama
Speaker 2: had thirteen months to go in his presidency, right, lots
Speaker 2: of water under the brid No one was talking to
Speaker 2: fifty no one was celebrating. Now people are saying, oh,
Speaker 2: you're so smart, you figured this out. You came out
Speaker 2: exactly the right time. I went the total total luck
Speaker 2: of the draw.
Speaker 1: History is always the right time.
Speaker 2: History is always the right time. There is no clearer
Speaker 2: statement than that. And then when you do that, and
Speaker 2: Mark Twain is right if he said he says history
Speaker 2: doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes, you are aware. I mean,
Speaker 2: I'll tell you there's a if our film is just like,
Speaker 2: by chance, come out a year earlier than it did
Speaker 2: in the Fall of twenty four. You knew what was
Speaker 2: going on in the Fall of twenty four. Well, we follow,
Speaker 2: among dozens of characters, one hundred and fifty different characters
Speaker 2: in the film, the wife of a German general who's
Speaker 2: heading to join Burgoyne's army and her husband for their
Speaker 2: triumphant victory at Saratoga. Doesn't happen. The French come in
Speaker 2: blah blah blah. I'll give away the punchline. However, she's
Speaker 2: doing the perilous Atlantic crossing a little bit nervous because
Speaker 2: she hears that Americans eat cats. Now, nobody said anything
Speaker 2: this fall, but if it had come out, they'd go burns.
Speaker 2: You know what he's trying to do, You know, I
Speaker 2: mean there was a letter that didn't make it into
Speaker 2: the film. But Jefferson's trapped during the Constitutional Convention in Paris,
Speaker 2: and he writes a Madison who's writing the code. The
Speaker 2: Constitution is not pros except for the preamble written by
Speaker 2: Goriuvenor Morris in New York, but says what if someone
Speaker 2: should lose an election and pretend false votes and reap
Speaker 2: the whirlwind?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: I mean they were trying to reverse engineer for all
Speaker 2: the things. So the founders are no.
Speaker 1: I mean I I look, the Constitution is such a
Speaker 1: brilliant document.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, four pieces they are still.
Speaker 1: And it anticipated all of these issues we're dealing with today.
Speaker 1: The thing that the Constitution that those that wrote this
Speaker 1: Constitution didn't anticipate was that they were going to be
Speaker 1: these five hundred and thirty five individuals who didn't bother
Speaker 1: to read Article one. That's exactly what I was just
Speaker 1: going to say.
Speaker 2: Uve El eleven, the conservative scholar told me the Scott
Speaker 2: the founders would not be surprised that someone who was
Speaker 2: seeking monarchical powers is that Article one, the first article
Speaker 2: that Article two is the executive that's the manager of
Speaker 2: what Article one did. And the third article. Is the
Speaker 2: judicial that is going to judge this and pass on
Speaker 2: it is that they had abdicated their power. That would
Speaker 2: be the great overwhelming disappointment on the part of the founders.
Speaker 2: If they look they'd be happy that we'd survive, surprised
Speaker 2: and so many of the changes, and not surprised that
Speaker 2: there could be you know, power grabs.
Speaker 1: You know, it's funny. I keep going backwards about like
Speaker 1: when did Congress start to abdicate? And you know, you
Speaker 1: can keep going back. I've taken it all the way
Speaker 1: back to nineteen twenty and the decision no longer to
Speaker 1: expand the size of the House of Representatives. That moment
Speaker 1: in that decade when they chose to stop expanding the House,
Speaker 1: they actually stopped. They stopped implementing the founder's vision.
Speaker 2: And you had a complex modern world, a twentieth century
Speaker 2: that is going to be within ten or fifteen years
Speaker 2: working at a kind of lightning speed. That always makes
Speaker 2: the argument of authoritarians that I need to decide this
Speaker 2: in advance of your cumbersome democratic process. Trust me.
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Speaker 1: use the code Chuck Podcast. I would argue we basically
Speaker 1: one hundred years of congress eroding away its own and
Speaker 1: they did it to themselves. They did it to themselves.
Speaker 2: But I would say it's been most noticeable in the
Speaker 2: last few years where you've just the century just all
Speaker 2: all of this, you know, undeclared war stuff all well.
Speaker 1: It goes back to nine to eleven. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: and and fear does that right, Fear.
Speaker 2: That's exactly right? And whether it's real or not. The
Speaker 2: manufacturer of fear in a populace allows them to say, okay, please, Mussolini,
Speaker 2: make the trains run on time for me. Please. All right.
Speaker 1: Let me ask a few questions because missus Todd wanted one,
Speaker 1: which is, does does your Ben and Franklin doc change
Speaker 1: if this had come out first, if American Revolution had
Speaker 1: come out before Ben Franklin.
Speaker 2: Well, it's funny that it's a really that's a very
Speaker 2: smart question. First of all, we'd already been well underway
Speaker 2: on the American Revolution before we even said yes to
Speaker 2: Franklin and began working.
Speaker 1: On Oh interesting, So you were how simultaneous was this?
Speaker 2: Well, I you know, when I say this took ten years,
Speaker 2: nine years and eleven months to do, it's true. But
Speaker 2: I also released ten films during that time. So I've
Speaker 2: got different production teams and we're working on stuff. And
Speaker 2: it's very symbiotic. When you leave to work on Leonardo
Speaker 2: da Vinci or Muhammad Ali, it helps you come back
Speaker 2: to the revolution, It helps you come back. Well, what
Speaker 2: Ben Franklin represented was an opportunity to practice on the
Speaker 2: absence of photographs and newsreels, and we could because it
Speaker 2: was only two episodes, do it without doing any recreations
Speaker 2: with except for the print shot stuff. But here, as
Speaker 2: soon as I said it, I knew we were fully invested.
Speaker 2: So rather than get people to have them reenact a
Speaker 2: specific thing I'm not crazy about, why not make a
Speaker 2: feature film. We just spent seven years collecting a critical
Speaker 2: mass of people doing reenactments in an impressionistic way, sometimes
Speaker 2: way up above from a drone, sometimes intimately where the
Speaker 2: musket the hammer hits the flint and the gunpowder explodes,
Speaker 2: or the cannon goes off, or you see women tending
Speaker 2: to a burned hand or slashing blood off a tile floor.
Speaker 2: And then what you have is yet another resource. You've
Speaker 2: got paintings, you've got drawings, you have lithographs, you have
Speaker 2: print you have maps, maps, maps, you have live cinematography
Speaker 2: devoided people of the real star of our film, the
Speaker 2: magnificent country that we have, the prize that had animated
Speaker 2: this fifth Global war over it the land, And so
Speaker 2: then it could work in and you'd find a volley
Speaker 2: sort of out of focus and muzzy of redcoats firing,
Speaker 2: and all of a sudden you're panning across a painting
Speaker 2: in which on the left side of the painting are
Speaker 2: a bunch of red coats firing, and then all of
Speaker 2: a sudden, you treat the paintings like they're live, and
Speaker 2: you treat the live like their paintings, and you've got
Speaker 2: a wonderful dynamic. We didn't have that in Ben Franklin
Speaker 2: because you could always return to a portrait of him.
Speaker 2: And it's over two. So this is six with as
Speaker 2: I said, one hundred and fifty different characters.
Speaker 1: It's six feature length movies. It makes you know, I
Speaker 1: mean it is you know it was not this is
Speaker 1: not six episodes of six.
Speaker 2: So I have a friend who's a noted a director
Speaker 2: in Hollywood who wrote me after I think I'd send
Speaker 2: him a link, and he wrote back how much he
Speaker 2: had loved it. And then after Christmas he said, I
Speaker 2: looked at it again, this time to look at characters.
Speaker 2: And so you realize there's there's a lot that goes
Speaker 2: into it, and it rewards sometimes second, third, fourth.
Speaker 1: You need one hundred percent. And it's sometimes easier to
Speaker 1: watch you a second time than read the book a
Speaker 1: second time. Yes, that sort of historical event, right like yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah you know that you that you that's I.
Speaker 2: Could spend an hour on that paragraph and really get it.
Speaker 2: But in a film, I'm controlling how long you see something,
Speaker 2: and I've got lots of things going. There's lots, and
Speaker 2: it's not we're trying to do it to be confusing.
Speaker 2: It's just that it is complicated. As my neon sign says.
Speaker 1: I want to throw another one at prohibition. So I
Speaker 1: now understand prohibition better after COVID than I did before COVID,
Speaker 1: And right, you just sort of I get it, You're like,
Speaker 1: And frankly, I look at the current anti VAXX movement
Speaker 1: and I sort of see it as sort of familiar
Speaker 1: to how we ended up with prohibition and then how
Speaker 1: within a decade we realized, well, this is crazy. Well
Speaker 1: it is.
Speaker 2: Different in some ways in that using government as an
Speaker 2: instrumentality of social change is different from suspecting government and
Speaker 2: therefore not doing what the government says might be efficacious
Speaker 2: with regard to measles or COVID.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, no, I get that. But I guess what
Speaker 1: I'm saying is that sort of I looked at it,
Speaker 1: not in the specific, but sort of in this respect
Speaker 1: after the pandemic in nineteen seventeen and eighteen, you know,
Speaker 1: and what we all learn is everybody loses their minds
Speaker 1: a little bit, like we all go a little because
Speaker 1: of the different and so something that seems so radical,
Speaker 1: like prohibition or you know, or you know, or calling
Speaker 1: it the temperance movement, right, which was had We've been
Speaker 1: there a long time, but it had never really gotten huge
Speaker 1: traction until we had this perceived moral decay, you know,
Speaker 1: and the whole what happened with the pandemic. And that's
Speaker 1: where you sort of like, okay, we can sort of
Speaker 1: you see, how we can go down sort of rabbit
Speaker 1: holes almost as a collective society when you go through
Speaker 1: a shared trauma like a pandemic is right in a
Speaker 1: fairly organized society, I guess I ask, I'm curious, do
Speaker 1: you think you would have Do you think you end
Speaker 1: up spending more time in the pandemic in nineteen seventeen
Speaker 1: and eighteen if you're doing prohibition today post, well.
Speaker 2: I think prohibition was already about to happen before the
Speaker 2: pandemic hit. It may have sped it along. I don't
Speaker 2: think it's that a determinant, I understand, And it's a
Speaker 2: really really good argument.
Speaker 1: This is something that I've like' and I totally accept
Speaker 1: the premise. It's my own interpretation, but I know it's
Speaker 1: sort of like, okay, I think I understand.
Speaker 2: How we talked a lot about it with scholars. I
Speaker 2: think what happens is that you have a rare sort
Speaker 2: of eclips like situation where you have a conservative movement
Speaker 2: that is starting first with temperance, which means moderation, that
Speaker 2: all of a sudden becomes absolute. The Anti Saloonty League
Speaker 2: takes over and it's all about no and it's a
Speaker 2: conservative thing, and a lot of it's based on immigration.
Speaker 2: Catholics are coming in, and so you want to take
Speaker 2: away the sacrament. Blacks have the vote, you want to
Speaker 2: take away the bottle. You know, you've got these these
Speaker 2: other ulterior, sort of darker motives. And it's a conservative movement.
Speaker 2: And then you the progressive movement, which you can say
Speaker 2: is liberal or not. It doesn't really fit quite great,
Speaker 2: but they're going along saying that government, as I said,
Speaker 2: could be an instrumentality of social change. So if you
Speaker 2: reverse engineer it. We have an amendment of the Constitution,
Speaker 2: the only one that's been repealed, the only one that
Speaker 2: limited human freedom, that was prohibition, and you had people
Speaker 2: on both sides of the aisle buying into it for
Speaker 2: different reasons. I'd say a much more determinate part. And
Speaker 2: again it's based chuck on fear. So your pandemic of
Speaker 2: the influenced Spanish influenza thing is not is the First
Speaker 2: World War. So Germans were brewers, and it became very
Speaker 2: easy to say they had been equating all the nineteenth
Speaker 2: century that it's grain, beer equals bread, it's the milk
Speaker 2: of human kindness. And suddenly they're the enemy, and so
Speaker 2: it becomes possible to begin to rev up your population
Speaker 2: in that sort of the thing that happens when people
Speaker 2: react by fear. And I would think it's more the
Speaker 2: anti German sentiment. Most of the brewers, if not all
Speaker 2: the brewers were Germans. And then this sense of social
Speaker 2: change combining with the anti immigrant, anti black, anti Catholic
Speaker 2: sort of sentiments, and the idea too but very legitimate
Speaker 2: idea that, as our first episode of three was called,
Speaker 2: we were a nation of drunkards. Alcohol was a big,
Speaker 2: huge problem. What we learned is that we couldn't address
Speaker 2: it by you know, as Twain said, again, never wrote
Speaker 2: a bad sent in his life. The prohibition of anything
Speaker 2: makes it worthwhile, you know, or as he also said,
Speaker 2: nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits. You know,
Speaker 2: that's what prohibition is, reforming other people's habits.
Speaker 1: So you know, when I look at your your overall
Speaker 1: and you say that you want to hit reconstruction, I
Speaker 1: mean in some ways there are still more stories to tell.
Speaker 1: On other ways, you've hit a lot of the big stories.
Speaker 1: But there are different slices you could always go at.
Speaker 1: That's different. You have religion, you always historically note, but
Speaker 1: you've you've never I say never you did. I'm not
Speaker 1: going to say never you did the early on the Shakers.
Speaker 1: But you know, I think so I go in political
Speaker 1: science curriculum, you're never And I think it's a huge
Speaker 1: mistake by universities. If you're trying to study the politics
Speaker 1: of any society and you don't understand the following three things.
Speaker 1: It's religious history, it's sort of economic engine, and its
Speaker 1: demography demographic history, then you're not going to understand. These are,
Speaker 1: by the way, three classes that no political science community
Speaker 1: makes requirements. It's one of these I find the whole
Speaker 1: You know, political theory is fine to know, but you
Speaker 1: need to know other things. I agree, and you know,
Speaker 1: I believe and I always I. I uh, when I
Speaker 1: got to college, I didn't know who ponnscious Pilot was really,
Speaker 1: and I just didn't. I grew up. I was basically
Speaker 1: I say, basically, I'm Jewish, but I didn't really I
Speaker 1: had no knowledge of the New Testament. And you know,
Speaker 1: I think of myself as incredibly well read. My parents
Speaker 1: were well read, and yet I remember, and I got
Speaker 1: shamed about it. It happened. I was a music composition
Speaker 1: major for a brief period and I was having to
Speaker 1: write write in the style of Bach and my teacher
Speaker 1: got my professor got mad. He said this is too
Speaker 1: upbeat for ponscious Pilot. And I went like, okay, who's
Speaker 1: ponscious Pilot? And he goes, well, I'm not telling you.
Speaker 1: And that's so I literally went and read read the
Speaker 1: New Testament. I just sort of like realized, Okay, I
Speaker 1: lacking education. And then I got upset. I'm like, you know,
Speaker 1: we don't teach the history of religion because we're so afraid.
Speaker 1: I know why we don't write. I know in the
Speaker 1: public school system we can have huge fights over it, right,
Speaker 1: and so our fear of it. Sometimes we just leave
Speaker 1: it out too much because those that are devoted don't
Speaker 1: like when people deal with it as scholarship, and those
Speaker 1: that aren't devoted don't, you know, in some ways are
Speaker 1: like you're giving it too much attention. Yeah, and no
Speaker 1: thing that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well i'll tell you, Chuck, I'm so glad you
Speaker 2: brought that up because I said something the other day
Speaker 2: in some conversation.
Speaker 1: I confessate that conscious pilot story, but I always want it.
Speaker 1: I get it, but I also want it as a Look,
Speaker 1: we all, no matter who you are, there's certain things
Speaker 1: you don't know that you're embarrassed to say. And it's
Speaker 1: like you got to learn to say it.
Speaker 2: This is what I agree with you one D. And
Speaker 2: there's always a spiritual dimension to the films that we've made.
Speaker 1: You always doing it.
Speaker 2: Because look, let's just take Article one. I mean, you know,
Speaker 2: Amendment one of the Constitution, the first Amendment. It does it?
Speaker 2: You ask anybody on the street, you take your camera
Speaker 2: out there and you stick the mic, and they say
Speaker 2: it's freedom of speech, right, And then maybe you get
Speaker 2: somebody who says freedom to redress your grievances, you know,
Speaker 2: protest whatever it might be. And then those are the
Speaker 2: second and third parts of a three part thing, the
Speaker 2: first of which is that the Congress will make no
Speaker 2: establishment of any religion. And so one of my favorite
Speaker 2: sections in all of the Revolution film is one on deism,
Speaker 2: which becomes this sort of aggregate not default, but kind
Speaker 2: of aggregate conscious choice of many of the mostly Protestant Founders,
Speaker 2: you know, capital ab Founders, and the whole idea. And
Speaker 2: our scene begins with Thomas Jefferson saying, if my neighbor
Speaker 2: believes in twenty gods or no god at all, it
Speaker 2: neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. So we've
Speaker 2: all religion has heretofore, the Founders understood, always been the
Speaker 2: cultural every country's had in this state bablished faith, and
Speaker 2: that has been the source of a great deal of
Speaker 2: the problems. But in fact, as we begun.
Speaker 1: To enlightened to understand that back then, it's actually it is.
Speaker 2: We are an enlightenment and.
Speaker 1: Invent This is what it is, is.
Speaker 2: That God we always you know, you hit a home
Speaker 2: run and you thank God. You know when you hit
Speaker 2: into a game ending doubles play, you don't thank God, right,
Speaker 2: And that's and somehow God is always responsible for this
Speaker 2: and the anthropomorphosizing and the narcissism that's involved. The Founders
Speaker 2: came to some very incredibly amazing enlightened idea that they believe,
Speaker 2: almost all of them believe in a supreme being, supreme architect,
Speaker 2: divine providence. You hear those words, right, And they believe
Speaker 2: that that God has takes no interest in the daily
Speaker 2: affairs of mankind and makes obviously therefore no distinctions between religions.
Speaker 2: So it then becomes, in pursuit of happiness that our
Speaker 2: obligation to make ourselves better and then closer to whatever
Speaker 2: that being is, because if you're worse, you're cruder, and
Speaker 2: you're devolving, and you're closer to the animals. And many
Speaker 2: might say Satan, but there is such an I've spent
Speaker 2: a lot of time looking at Deism and I find
Speaker 2: it such an interesting thing, and nobody wants to do.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm traveling around the country and people say, well,
Speaker 2: this is a Protestant a Christian nation, and you go, well,
Speaker 2: you know, they're Jews and they're Catholics, and there's you know,
Speaker 2: all the animals religions that are brought over in the
Speaker 2: slave ships, including Muslim relationship, and then Native Americans have
Speaker 2: their own stuff. This is really polyglot, and people are
Speaker 2: in different parts of the country susceptible. One of the
Speaker 2: things that they resented in the back country of the
Speaker 2: Carolina is and Georgia was that if it was the
Speaker 2: Anglican Church or the Presbyterian Church, or not Presbyterian, but
Speaker 2: some other church that was the favorite of the governor,
Speaker 2: then you had to pay for the minister's salaries. And
Speaker 2: you didn't like that if your own Methodist or a
Speaker 2: Baptist or a Presbyterian, and so you have this sense
Speaker 2: of being suspicious of somebody trying to tell you their
Speaker 2: way is the only way, and that the government should
Speaker 2: in any way favor any one flavor faith, whatever you
Speaker 2: want to talk. And if you go to Deism and understand,
Speaker 2: it's just you'r and my responsibility to move closer to God.
Speaker 2: However we see that to divine providence to the miracle
Speaker 2: of this snowfall out my window or the sunset that
Speaker 2: will come in a little bit.
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Speaker 1: you've got a growing family. I mean, it's honestly, it's
Speaker 1: quite surprising that the founders were this enlightened, considering how
Speaker 1: important you know that the place, in some ways, the
Speaker 1: reason many of their their found their parents came here
Speaker 1: was for freedom to worship.
Speaker 2: That's correct, and I think that what they realize, I
Speaker 2: mean that you have to say that that we are
Speaker 2: the manifestation of the enlightenment in the form of a country.
Speaker 2: The first ever I've said it on the road. I
Speaker 2: didn't say it in the film per se. I mean,
Speaker 2: I said it's consequential revolution in the history, but I
Speaker 2: said it's the most consequence it's the most important event
Speaker 2: since the birth of Christ in world history, because it's
Speaker 2: set in motion revolutions for two centuries, but in set
Speaker 2: in motion, which for two hundred and fifty years is produced,
Speaker 2: you know, one of the greatest countries.
Speaker 1: Now. Have there been.
Speaker 2: Series of mistakes, Yes, indeed, and I've spent most of
Speaker 2: my professional life not ignoring them in favor in some way,
Speaker 2: chronicling them in some ways. But you know it. But
Speaker 2: it's not all dark either. It's it's an incredibly positive story.
Speaker 2: And if you listed all the good things, I don't
Speaker 2: know any other country on Earth that could put up,
Speaker 2: you know, starting with the Declaration, the Constitution and the
Speaker 2: Bill of Rights, and then you just go on, whether
Speaker 2: it's land grant colleges or National Park or Homestead Act,
Speaker 2: or you know, child labor laws or anti trust or
Speaker 2: you know the GI Bill, or Social Security, labor's right
Speaker 2: to organize, Interstate Highway, Man on the Moon, affordable care medicaid,
Speaker 2: medicare you know voting? I mean, this is like an
Speaker 2: amazing stuff and it has tangible things. William Luckdeberg the
Speaker 2: latest Story and died recently at A one hundred and two,
Speaker 2: was an advisor for almost all the films that we
Speaker 2: worked on. But he was in our Roosevelt thing. He said,
Speaker 2: you land at LaGuardia FDR New Deal, you go across
Speaker 2: the bridge FDR New Deal, you go through the Lincoln
Speaker 2: Tunnel FDR, you go down the Skyline Drive and the
Speaker 2: you know, Blue Ridge Parkway. The thing if you do
Speaker 2: the Lincoln Highway, if you do this ten thousand landing strips,
Speaker 2: you begin to understand all of the ways in which
Speaker 2: just that one presidential administration transformed the country.
Speaker 1: How long? What is you know? I've been I was
Speaker 1: looking to see what's the shortest amount of time between
Speaker 1: in this historical event or era that you would then
Speaker 1: feel comfortable making talk about it. I guess the Central
Speaker 1: Park five is the shortest. Is that?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I think I think that's the correct All that
Speaker 2: we've had things like the Shakers and baseball and jazz
Speaker 2: country music, the.
Speaker 1: Present comes up to the press.
Speaker 2: We unlocked the narrative and are more impressionistic for the
Speaker 2: last twenty five third years. That's what I've said. So
Speaker 2: the actual event of the Central Bark Jogger, that's a
Speaker 2: film that came out in twenty twelve twenty thirteen, was
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty nine. So that's still twenty five years, still
Speaker 2: under twenty five years, but it's enough. Things are collaps
Speaker 2: You Know. What's interesting is I've had the great privilege
Speaker 2: of interviewing Barack Obama for eight two hour interviews. I've
Speaker 2: got a couple more to go, but there's no rush
Speaker 2: because what's happened in the recent political administrations is that
Speaker 2: it's constipated the scholarship. So by this time there'd normally
Speaker 2: be twenty five books of scholarship on Barack Obama's presidency.
Speaker 2: But it hasn't happened, and so there's no urge to
Speaker 2: go and do it till you can get to that
Speaker 2: point of triangulation, that is to say, the perspective that
Speaker 2: comes from new scholarship and new things in which you're
Speaker 2: not solely dependent on.
Speaker 1: Well, I'll give you a perfect example of how my
Speaker 1: view has changed about this century and how my views
Speaker 1: get or frankly, the Cold War you know, I'm now
Speaker 1: more comfortable understanding that the Cold War was an outlier.
Speaker 1: It's an outlier in American history, it's an outlier in
Speaker 1: the history of the media, it's an outlier in all
Speaker 1: sorts of It's an outlier in our streamism and politics.
Speaker 1: But you don't fully appreciate it until you get farther
Speaker 1: away from it.
Speaker 2: That's correct.
Speaker 1: Barack Obama's election, You're going to have one interpretation based
Speaker 1: on it when you look at it through the prism
Speaker 1: of starting at say twenty fifteen. Now I look back
Speaker 1: now from a perch of twenty twenty six, and you
Speaker 1: now see that Obama and Trump are are more intertwined,
Speaker 1: and they're going to be more intertwined in American history
Speaker 1: fifty years from now than I think either gentleman wants
Speaker 1: to what a wants to admit would be. That's sort
Speaker 1: of you know, your successor whoever that person is in
Speaker 1: fifty years. You can't explain Trump without Obama, and you're
Speaker 1: not gonna be able to explain Obama without Trump, like
Speaker 1: you agree, going to be intertwined. Yet you couldn't tell
Speaker 1: the Obama story in twenty seventeen completely. No, I don't
Speaker 1: know and maybe that you can't tell this story completely.
Speaker 1: And maybe it's twenty thirty eight, maybe it's twenty three.
Speaker 1: Don't so, I guess, Mike, when do you feel comfortable me? Okay,
Speaker 1: I think I can tackle it. I can tackle an
Speaker 1: era now where new information isn't going to change.
Speaker 2: I used to say twenty five thirty. I still believe it.
Speaker 2: I do believe that because of the rate of information.
Speaker 2: I wish there was more scholarship, and I will wait
Speaker 2: for that before I really begin to try to structure
Speaker 2: and put together. The Obama thing is really just unbelievable stuff.
Speaker 2: But I'll give you an example that's close to tell you. So,
Speaker 2: we did a film that came out in twenty seventeen
Speaker 2: on the Vietnam War. It was ten episodes, eighteen hours.
Speaker 2: If I had done it ten years after the fall
Speaker 2: of Saigon in nineteen eighty five, America was in a recession.
Speaker 2: There's a Pacific rim but we're not talking about us.
Speaker 2: We're talking about Japan is a scendant, and we would
Speaker 2: see Vietnam as this ball and chain, this sort of
Speaker 2: like perpetual rain cloud over a.
Speaker 1: Star on ours a star.
Speaker 2: So if you wait, if I waited twenty years, So
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety five, we are the sole superpower. We're in
Speaker 2: the middle of the largest peacetime economic expansion. We have
Speaker 2: just fought a Gulf War without all all of the
Speaker 2: you know, assembly of people. We would say Vietnam is important,
Speaker 2: but it's you know, we've liberated, we've escaped the specific gravity.
Speaker 2: If I've waited thirty years and it's twenty two thousand
Speaker 2: and five, we're bogged down in both Iraq and Afghanistan,
Speaker 2: and people are using Vietnam analogies to talk about that.
Speaker 2: And then you know, the film comes out essentially ten
Speaker 2: years after that, forty years, forty two years after that,
Speaker 2: and you begin to realize that your job is to
Speaker 2: use the passage of time as triangulation, to use the
Speaker 2: scholarship as triangulation, to figure out how to more firmly
Speaker 2: understand an event by what you've done and sort of
Speaker 2: average out those things. Disaster not a disaster, disaster again,
Speaker 2: And so Vietnam undergoes lots of things, and of course
Speaker 2: it's none of those things. It's never history doesn't repeat itself.
Speaker 2: No event has ever happened twice, never has, never will,
Speaker 2: And so the trope of that becomes a kind of
Speaker 2: prison for us to get in. And so what you
Speaker 2: have to do is be dispassionate. You have to sort
Speaker 2: of like a dissease, tie yourself to the mass so
Speaker 2: you can hear seriously sound, but you don't want to
Speaker 2: like point arrows. Isn't this so much like today? Because
Speaker 2: as I said, you're dated instantly by that, and you've
Speaker 2: become you know, the historical profession has gone through many
Speaker 2: fashions of historiography. Right, so after World War Two, narratives bad,
Speaker 2: it's bankrupt. So we're going to replace it with a
Speaker 2: Freudian interpretation, a psychosexuality, and it's going to be Marxist
Speaker 2: economic determinism. Somewhere along the line. It's symbolism, it's semiotics,
Speaker 2: it's deconstruction, it's queer studies, it's afrocentrism, it's whatever it is.
Speaker 2: None of those give you what all of those give you,
Speaker 2: which is a multitude of modes of inquiry, multitude of perspectives,
Speaker 2: like the spokes on a wheel that make the wheel
Speaker 2: engineered to great strength, to able to bear a great load.
Speaker 1: So we draw in.
Speaker 2: Scholars on Vietnam or the Revolution that represent all sorts
Speaker 2: of different areas of scholarship, and we take in what
Speaker 2: their knowledge is, but not necessarily their total interpretation. So
Speaker 2: scholars of Native Americans, one of us dollars, Christopher Brown
Speaker 2: is a student of eighteenth and nineteenth century British economy.
Speaker 2: He's a black man to go, no, no, no, he must
Speaker 2: want to talk about slavery, and does, but only in
Speaker 2: the context of economic So you get a wonderful dynamic
Speaker 2: without having to subscribe to anybody's theory of how American history.
Speaker 2: That's why, you know, and we're constantly being bombarded with
Speaker 2: what is the correct way to see this? You know,
Speaker 2: it's seventeen seventy six, or it's sixteen nineteen, or it's no,
Speaker 2: it's from eighteen seventy it's from seventeen seventy five to
Speaker 2: seventeen eighty one or seventeen eighty three, depending on whether
Speaker 2: it's Yorktown or the British Slavy Board.
Speaker 1: So well, let me ask about the Cold War. That
Speaker 1: feels like a ken Burns project.
Speaker 2: It is we do you know what we've been talking about?
Speaker 2: The Cold War? I can't believe you brought that up.
Speaker 2: Check it's so we're on the same wavelength. So we've
Speaker 2: been talking for probably two decades about the Cold War,
Speaker 2: and about a year ago I said, I want to
Speaker 2: make it the CIA. So we're doing a big but
Speaker 2: we're just beginning to sort of unload and create the space.
Speaker 2: I like took all the books and stuff like that
Speaker 2: and put it in a corner of my house and
Speaker 2: I put a sign up over and said, Langley, you know,
Speaker 2: because that's where we're going to collect all the CIA
Speaker 2: notes and papers.
Speaker 1: We talked to something.
Speaker 2: We know how we're going to do it because you'll
Speaker 2: get the Cold War, which you also get all the
Speaker 2: intimacies of the stories, you know. Like I was just
Speaker 2: talking to Rick Atkinson the History and he described a
Speaker 2: friend that he knew, a Russian who disappeared because Alder
Speaker 2: James betrayed him. He was an asset for the United
Speaker 2: States working at the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Poof gone.
Speaker 2: So all of a sudden, the abstractions of talking about
Speaker 2: Cold wars and stuff like that goes down to the
Speaker 2: minutia of somebody in Geneva doing this to somebody else.
Speaker 1: So my obsession with Cold War, with the Cold War
Speaker 1: has come from when people lament to me I wish
Speaker 1: we were like this, you know, whatever it is. I
Speaker 1: wish our politics were this way. I wish our media
Speaker 1: were this way, and I wish and I go back
Speaker 1: and I'm like, you're a child of the Cold War era,
Speaker 1: and you don't realize you live in an outlier. And
Speaker 1: then I'll go through, you know, and say, you know,
Speaker 1: we're actually we're reverting. Today's America is no different from
Speaker 1: nineteenth century America. There's a lot of differences and as
Speaker 1: far as people's freedoms and not but in some ways
Speaker 1: our politics is not this similar. We're still fighting about
Speaker 1: who gets to be an American and who isn't. We're
Speaker 1: still fighting about you know, shares of the pie and
Speaker 1: things like that. And oh, by the way, the nineteenth
Speaker 1: century was superpartisan, our media was superpartisan. And where are
Speaker 1: we today, you know? And then it has made me
Speaker 1: look at the Cold War as an outlier as far
Speaker 1: as in political history, right, we had I love to
Speaker 1: remind people are closest. We've had six of the last
Speaker 1: seven presidential elections been decided by five points or less
Speaker 1: in the entire twentieth century, when we had five, and
Speaker 1: it's like, okay, why and yet the nineteenth century. My gosh,
Speaker 1: we had twenty I'm obsessed with the seven presidents between
Speaker 1: Jackson and Lincoln in twenty eight years. Like you want
Speaker 1: to talk about instability, there's instability.
Speaker 2: You know, the popular vote in seventy six, eighteen seventy six,
Speaker 2: Tilden wins the popular vote, and we had three elections
Speaker 2: with Grover Cleveland. He all won the popular vote three
Speaker 2: times and lost the middle one.
Speaker 1: And what I love to also remind folks is that
Speaker 1: we've had three straight one term presidents. We never had
Speaker 1: that once in the twentieth century, but we had it
Speaker 1: two different times. We went five straight one term presidents
Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century. So it is I think we
Speaker 1: haven't fully appreciated. And this is where obviously it's sort
Speaker 1: of like why does experience matter? Because you have to
Speaker 1: sort of live to see it. You have to be
Speaker 1: able to look backwards in the world I grew up,
Speaker 1: you know, I always think now that that I grew
Speaker 1: up in the wrong I always think I grew up
Speaker 1: in the right of the way the media worked, And
Speaker 1: it's like, no, in some ways, I grew up in
Speaker 1: the wrong era because it was a false premise.
Speaker 2: So you could make an argument therefore, with regard to
Speaker 2: I think your excellent theories about the Cold War is
Speaker 2: that when the Soviet Empire collapsed, the total destabilizing of
Speaker 2: American politics was assured. That is to say, destabilize from
Speaker 2: what you're calling the outlier of a kind of general
Speaker 2: consensus that had been built not since just forty five,
Speaker 2: but I would say back to the progressive era, where
Speaker 2: you had people in both parties wishing to use government
Speaker 2: as an instrumentality of progress, or at least, as tr
Speaker 2: would say, a countervailing force between labor and capital.
Speaker 1: And instead we basically were a period of just security.
Speaker 2: So what happens just surviving the thing, and so that
Speaker 2: when you take this away, you don't have an enemy anymore.
Speaker 2: And so who do you make the enemy?
Speaker 1: No? Right, well, well, I love to remind people the
Speaker 1: Berlin Wall falls in eighty nine, and within three years
Speaker 1: the isolationist wing of the Republican Party sprouts up again,
Speaker 1: and Donald Trump's first campaign is launched. It's called Pat
Speaker 1: Buchanan's campaign for President, and so and it's and I
Speaker 1: you know, and in fact, two of our closest presidential
Speaker 1: elections were followed by two of our biggest blowouts. So
Speaker 1: seventy two and sixty four were blowouts because each party
Speaker 1: went off the reservation, But sixty and seventy six were
Speaker 1: two of our closest presidential elections because both parties went
Speaker 1: back on the reservation and it was anyway. It's just
Speaker 1: one of those where I feel like you have to
Speaker 1: capture this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I'm trying. I'm trying. Give me time, I'm
Speaker 2: taking vitamins, I'm walking, I'm doing my exercises. It's I've
Speaker 2: got that look, Chuck, I have the best job in
Speaker 2: the country.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I do. Well, you're you are you are this
Speaker 1: this guy for us. When do you suspect you'll do
Speaker 1: your first twenty first century you know, an event in
Speaker 1: an era which the most obvious would be nine to eleven.
Speaker 1: But when do you feel like you'll tackle your first
Speaker 1: twenty first century event era?
Speaker 2: Well, you know, I think that part of the Central
Speaker 2: Park five begins in the early is resolved in the
Speaker 2: twenty first century. The update of baseball, called the Tenth
Speaker 2: Inning ends in two thousand and nine. We've done some
Speaker 2: stuff on housing. I was executive producer. My daughter Sarah,
Speaker 2: who's one of our main directors, and her husband, David
Speaker 2: McMahon have done things on public housing. I think the
Speaker 2: Obama one will be fully potentially. I mean, my first
Speaker 2: question to him is, of course, where were you born?
Speaker 2: But you know, you should see the way I.
Speaker 1: Said it was it's a log cabin in Kentucky. Right,
Speaker 1: that had been funny?
Speaker 2: You mean him Madras in Pakistan or Indonesia.
Speaker 1: Well, I've always said, you know, if he were this
Speaker 1: sort of counter this secret you know, idea of like,
Speaker 1: you know, to take over America, Right, that was what
Speaker 1: a brilliant move, right to incubate him through Hawaii and
Speaker 1: all this stuff. Why would you name him Barak Husain?
Speaker 1: Why wouldn't you call him Thomas Jefferson.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. So the log cabin is to your point, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's it's a pretty great story. I've I've dealt with
Speaker 2: Race Chuck forty plus films that have been out. I
Speaker 2: can count on the fingers of one hand.
Speaker 1: When is Race not a part of it? And I
Speaker 1: say this because it's always a part. And I always
Speaker 1: apart art.
Speaker 2: Fingers of one hand and self enough time to snap
Speaker 2: my fingers. And I've gotten a lot of criticism over
Speaker 2: the years about it from people from critics, from even historians, friends,
Speaker 2: other colleagues, and they said, what are you going to stop?
Speaker 2: And when Barack Obama was inaugurated on December twenty, two
Speaker 2: thousand and nine, they said, now are you going to stop?
Speaker 2: And I held up the Onion magazine and it said
Speaker 2: black man given worst job in nation. And I just said,
Speaker 2: watch what happens. And at least to their credit, most
Speaker 2: people have come back and apologized. Is that you're right.
Speaker 2: Race is central, it's the story. How can you say
Speaker 2: that we know exactly when we were founded, and we
Speaker 2: know what's our catechism, and it begins, we hold these
Speaker 2: schoos to be self evident, that all men are created equal,
Speaker 2: and the guy who wrote it owned other human beings.
Speaker 2: And so how are we not constantly both ennobled and
Speaker 2: also stricken by this, by that contradiction and that hypocrisy.
Speaker 1: All right, let me let you play critic on historical fiction.
Speaker 1: What's your favorite historical fiction out there?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 2: To me, it's Michael Sharra's Killer Angels. I read it
Speaker 2: and finished it on Christmas Day nineteen eighty four, is
Speaker 2: visiting my dad in Michigan, and I said, I now
Speaker 2: know what I'm going to do for my next subject.
Speaker 2: And he said what's that? I said, the Civil War?
Speaker 2: And he said what part? I said, all of it.
Speaker 2: He just shook his hand and walked out of the room, like,
Speaker 2: my idiot son, what's.
Speaker 1: My son doing? But yeah, he's never going to succeed
Speaker 1: in this career. I mean, you know, there's no way
Speaker 1: people are going to watch nine.
Speaker 2: In the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. May they rest in peace?
Speaker 2: The first time three didn't turn this down. They said, look,
Speaker 2: you know, people watch an hour an hour and a half, ken, Yeah,
Speaker 2: are you really that we do a proposal five one hours.
Speaker 2: It only became because the editing was going well, the
Speaker 2: nine episodes in the eleven and a half twelve hours
Speaker 2: that it is, And so even at five one hours,
Speaker 2: my biggest source of our funding over the years wasn't
Speaker 2: sure that it would work well.
Speaker 1: Have you ever wanted to dabble in either dramatize?
Speaker 2: She just wanted to be a filmmaker. My mom died
Speaker 2: when I was eleven. When I was twelve, my dad,
Speaker 2: who never cried during her sickness or death or funeral,
Speaker 2: cried at an old movie. Let me stay up and
Speaker 2: watch with him, and I thought, right then and there,
Speaker 2: I get it. I want to be a feature filmmaker.
Speaker 2: That means I'm David Lean, it means I'm Howard Hawks,
Speaker 2: I'm John Ford, I'm Alfred Hitchcock. And then I went
Speaker 2: to Hampshire College where they were doing nothing but social documentary,
Speaker 2: still photography. So I realized, truthfully that there is as
Speaker 2: much drama, if not more, in what was and what
Speaker 2: is than anything that human imagination dreams up. But I
Speaker 2: think about it all the time. But I don't have to,
Speaker 2: you know, Shelby called me up in the middle where
Speaker 2: editing had this huge problem. I called him up and
Speaker 2: I just said, I can't figure out how to do
Speaker 2: Vicksburg and Gettysburg. And he said, God's the greatest dramatist,
Speaker 2: I said, he said, I said, what goes? God's the
Speaker 2: greatest dramatist. So I hung up, and I realized, just
Speaker 2: tell it the way it happened. So everybody either puts
Speaker 2: Vicksburg after Gettysburg or Vicksburg before, but actually Vicksburg happens
Speaker 2: before and during and after a Yettysburg. And that's exactly
Speaker 2: the way. And then he called me up and he
Speaker 2: said it again. He said, maybe a couple of years later,
Speaker 2: he goes, God's the greatest dramatis. Who would have thought
Speaker 2: that Lee would surrender the grant and a few days
Speaker 2: later Lincoln would have enough free time after eighteen hour
Speaker 2: days prosecuting the war to go to the theater. God
Speaker 2: is the greatest drama.
Speaker 1: No, it just tell the story.
Speaker 2: Just tell the story. And then and people say, what's
Speaker 2: your structure? I go and then and then, and then
Speaker 2: if you look at our World War two drama, we
Speaker 2: land d day, go back to the reaction, and then
Speaker 2: go to Saipan, because that's what the front page of
Speaker 2: the paper is looking at. Everybody does, Oh, we'll do
Speaker 2: the European. Then we'll go to do the Pacific. And
Speaker 2: then you have no idea of their continuity. And so
Speaker 2: we then go back and they're having trouble breaking out
Speaker 2: of the hedgerows. And then you go back to the
Speaker 2: middle of the Battle of Sidepark.
Speaker 1: I wish you were put in charge of the World
Speaker 1: War two memorial here. I'm not going to make you
Speaker 1: criticize it. It frustrates me to all end. How it is,
Speaker 1: how it just barely scratches the surface. I get it.
Speaker 1: It's what happens when you have a committee. Whenever you
Speaker 1: put a committee in charge of something.
Speaker 2: The greatest gotaclosm in human history. We can do better.
Speaker 1: We can do so much better than that. So America
Speaker 1: two fifty, How do you celebrate? How do you tell
Speaker 1: how do you tell somebody to celebrate? How would you Well, it's.
Speaker 2: All individual and independent, right, We're all citizens. We've got
Speaker 2: that great special privilege. What I've done every year is,
Speaker 2: with maybe one or two exceptions over the last forty years,
Speaker 2: is at our late cottage, I get out on the
Speaker 2: front porch and before I let anybody eat, I read
Speaker 2: them the Declaration of Independence. And it ends with we
Speaker 2: mutually pledged to each other our lives, our fortunes, and
Speaker 2: our sacred honor. And you know who, George Washington was
Speaker 2: probably the richest person in America, or one of the
Speaker 2: richest at the time of the revolution, certainly before he was,
Speaker 2: and he risked everything, his life and his fortune and
Speaker 2: his sacred honor. You know, you make we make a
Speaker 2: joke now of Washington slept here, But he spent between
Speaker 2: when he was named the head of the Continental Army,
Speaker 2: not the East Coast Army, but continental. We knew where
Speaker 2: we were going. By the Continental Congress, we knew where
Speaker 2: we were going. In the early summer of seventy five,
Speaker 2: he gets back to my Mount Vernon for four nights. Right,
Speaker 2: he comes back to Mount Vernon in December of seventeen
Speaker 2: eighty three. So who would And this is an idea
Speaker 2: that's never been tested. Now we've tested it for two
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty years. And could you imagine somebody in
Speaker 2: the top one hundred risking their lives, their fortunes, and
Speaker 2: their sacred honor for something as important as our founding.
Speaker 2: And so that's what the celebration of two fifteen. Nobody
Speaker 2: can tell you what it isn't nobody can tell you
Speaker 2: what it is. It's always complex, that's the nature of
Speaker 2: human beings, and we should be reveling in that complexity.
Speaker 2: Let me give you one slight example. The bell cow
Speaker 2: of the conservative movement at this time is the television
Speaker 2: series Yellowstone Right. Right, This is finally they've made liberal.
Speaker 2: Hollywood made a story for us, right, And what is
Speaker 2: at the heart of that story A a patriarch who
Speaker 2: is the George Washington of the series, who also kills
Speaker 2: people who piss him off. Just as his father and
Speaker 2: grandfather have done, dumping their bodies wherever they went. He's
Speaker 2: got a daughter cut from his same cloth, as ruthless
Speaker 2: as he is. He's got two sons. One is tortured
Speaker 2: by the relationship to the land and the Native American
Speaker 2: story that has been superimposed without any questions over that,
Speaker 2: and he's married a Native American.
Speaker 1: Woman, right.
Speaker 2: The other son is Benedict Arnold, right. And then the
Speaker 2: daughter is in love with the chief foreman of this thing,
Speaker 2: who's in charge of a group of ranchers who are
Speaker 2: young and old, white and black, gay and straight, and
Speaker 2: over and surrounding them is this larger Native American issue,
Speaker 2: and over that this idea of development. If that isn't
Speaker 2: as complex a storyline as anything I've said in which
Speaker 2: it's got undertow and all of the American experience. We
Speaker 2: made a film on the American Buffalo, and I remember
Speaker 2: looking at one scene where Kevin Costner plays the lead.
Speaker 2: John Dutton is explaining to somebody just about it, and
Speaker 2: in three seconds I just turned to my daughter and
Speaker 2: I said, that was our four hours on the Buffalo,
Speaker 2: you know, And he did it in like three sentences.
Speaker 1: Have you ever spent. Do you know Taylor Sheridan.
Speaker 2: I know Kevin and he's one of the great guys.
Speaker 2: So anyway, yeah, it's it. Anybody trying to tell you
Speaker 2: how it was, or to simplify it or to take
Speaker 2: down a plaque is scared and only authoritarians. And by
Speaker 2: the way, we follow in our film, and maybe this
Speaker 2: is a way to ram this out. We follow, among
Speaker 2: the one hundred and fifty different characters, we follow a
Speaker 2: German Hessian soldier named Johann Evld. He's openly contemptuous of
Speaker 2: these rebels, and he arrives in episode three at Staten
Speaker 2: Island when we send the first big batch there, but
Speaker 2: he's there in three, four or five and six, but
Speaker 2: he's part of the surrounding army at Yorktown. And he says,
Speaker 2: after Yorktown, who would have thought one hundred years ago
Speaker 2: that out of this multitude of rabble could rise of
Speaker 2: people who could defy kings. These German soldiers who didn't
Speaker 2: get killed, who escaped and blended into the German communities,
Speaker 2: those who stayed and then got shipped back home. A
Speaker 2: lot of them came back with their families because they
Speaker 2: had seen the promised land who would have thought one
Speaker 2: hundred years ago, out of this multitude of rabble could
Speaker 2: rise of people who could defy kings johanney Vov.
Speaker 1: You didn't have to make up the script. Nope, it
Speaker 1: was right there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, God's the greatest dramedis right there.
Speaker 1: You go.
Speaker 2: Thank you, sev.
Speaker 1: Ken. It's always a pleasure to talk with you. Like
Speaker 1: I said, you've got you've got the job that many
Speaker 1: of us political journalists wish we could. We wish we
Speaker 1: could be you for a day.
Speaker 2: Come on over, it's all fine where you know. We're
Speaker 2: up in rural New Nay.
Speaker 1: I'm going to stay in my lane of campaign history,
Speaker 1: so I'm messing around in that world. I think, you know,
Speaker 1: I think people you know, don't don't try to do
Speaker 1: something you're not capable of it.
Speaker 2: No, I agree. That's the thing. I'm so lucky because,
Speaker 2: as I said, at twelve, I knew that, eighteen I
Speaker 2: knew what kind, and at twenty two it was history.
Speaker 1: So well it is, you know, and you never half asset.
Speaker 1: Sorry for the colorful language.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, this is there's a.
Speaker 1: Lot there's a lot of people in your space. You
Speaker 1: could start, you know, Ken Burns presents somebody else's version
Speaker 1: of history, and you could license your name and make
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of money and not have to work anymore. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I don't I get the sense that you wouldn't
Speaker 1: be proud of that.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, And and the work's the thing, you know,
Speaker 2: why would you take a shortcut?
Speaker 1: If?
Speaker 2: If? I mean, every film is a million no exaggeration,
Speaker 2: a million problems. But we don't see the problems as pejorative.
Speaker 2: We see them as inevitable friction that every marathon runner knows.
Speaker 2: I don't want to pick up my foot this next
Speaker 2: time I picked up my foot. I don't want to
Speaker 2: pick up the night I pick up my foot. And
Speaker 2: you just you figure this out? How do you tell
Speaker 2: this story? How do you do Vicksburg? And Getty's all right?
Speaker 1: There you go. Look, I think the more remarkable thing
Speaker 1: is not how many you start, it's how many you finish.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 1: And we've been so flushing is the hard part.
Speaker 2: We have finished. We have not abandoned a project once
Speaker 2: we started shooting. Been very lucky, lucky.
Speaker 1: So lucky. Well we're the lucky ones. Ken always a pleasure,
Speaker 1: Thank you, check, see you next time. Happy Birthday America.
Speaker 2: Thanks Yeah, happy birthday. Let's let's have a real celebration.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, thank you.