Speaker 1: I'm Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to Here's the
Speaker 1: thing I think of a recent documentary you've loved. The
Speaker 1: slow pan over still photos, the tight queue of period music,
Speaker 1: the subtle shift from a personal story to a historical one.
Speaker 1: These techniques have become so associated with Ken Burns that
Speaker 1: the word burns in is found everywhere from the New
Speaker 1: Yorker to the Times of Israel. And like any great artist,
Speaker 1: Burns has created a whole studio of talent to carry
Speaker 1: out his vision. In nine he brought on board the
Speaker 1: brilliant Lynn Novic, with whom he just wrapped up ten
Speaker 1: years of work on PBS's The Vietnam War. The series
Speaker 1: wades deep into every possible angle of a conflict still
Speaker 1: seared into the American consciousness. I invited them on the
Speaker 1: show to talk about Vietnam, their paths to a making,
Speaker 1: and they're ridiculously packed production schedule. We are planned out
Speaker 1: to and we can waste most of your time telling
Speaker 1: you even the thumbnail descriptions of all the things we're
Speaker 1: doing on the American Revolution and Ernest Hemingway and Muhammad
Speaker 1: Ali in the History of Reconstruction lb J and civil rights,
Speaker 1: the possibilities must be infinite. Is budget a factor? No,
Speaker 1: who's the decider? No, I'm at work, I'm the decider.
Speaker 1: So far, how do you settle on? Hemingway is supposed
Speaker 1: to fit general. So here's what it is. It's sort
Speaker 1: of like friends and love and intimacy. We have lots
Speaker 1: of ideas, as you're saying, the cauldrons are all boiling
Speaker 1: over with potential projects, and we think about them. We're
Speaker 1: making lists all the time, but their ideas, they're the
Speaker 1: pink bong balls of the lottery. But every once in
Speaker 1: a while, something goes down in here. So for example,
Speaker 1: Jeff Ward our principal writer, and Lynn and I've been
Speaker 1: talking about Hemingway. Jeff and I have been talking since
Speaker 1: the eighties. Hemingway has been on shortlist of things. And
Speaker 1: then finally it's just the gut feeling it comes down
Speaker 1: and say yes, it's time to do Hemmingway. Um, now, Lynn,
Speaker 1: I want to ask you, tell me what film and
Speaker 1: you studied American studies at Yale. Yeah. Were your parents
Speaker 1: and the biz at all? No, not at all. They're
Speaker 1: both sort of more in science and math. My father's
Speaker 1: a biologist, my mother's a neuropsychologist, so I'm kind of
Speaker 1: the outlier in the family. It was a neuropsychologist who
Speaker 1: does evaluations of kids with learning issues and tries to
Speaker 1: figure out what's going on in their brains and then
Speaker 1: helps figure out how to fix it. And you went
Speaker 1: to Yale four. I thought I was going to be
Speaker 1: premat actually, and that lasted about six weeks and I
Speaker 1: sort of checking it down. Yes, exactly. And when I
Speaker 1: sort of evolved into realizing I wanted to work in
Speaker 1: documentary film, they kept saying, Okay, but how's that going
Speaker 1: to work? Where are you? Where are you going to
Speaker 1: actually work? Are you ever going to have a job?
Speaker 1: What are you going to do with yourself? Are you
Speaker 1: gonna move out? Yeah? Exactly. There was some of that too.
Speaker 1: So where did it begin for you in terms of
Speaker 1: when you shouted American studies at Yale? Did you go
Speaker 1: to graduate school? I didn't. I thought about going to
Speaker 1: film school, but at the time that I graduated, most
Speaker 1: film schools really focused on narrative scripted. Um you know
Speaker 1: drogs they are now, No, they weren't there. You couldn't
Speaker 1: really study it in film school. I don't think we
Speaker 1: talk about that, but when you get out of Yale.
Speaker 1: So what's the path too? It was a very non
Speaker 1: linear path. Um. I worked for a while as a
Speaker 1: research assistant at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, and
Speaker 1: then I realized I didn't want to be a historian
Speaker 1: and work in a museum, and I wanted to work
Speaker 1: on historical documentaries. And I eventually got an internship at
Speaker 1: w n E T here and got some some production experience.
Speaker 1: I've freelanced. I worked for Bill Moyers for several years.
Speaker 1: That was wonderful. It was I was going to graduate
Speaker 1: school basically in how to do this, And then, luckily
Speaker 1: for me, I figured out that ken Burns was working
Speaker 1: on a film on the Civil War, and I just
Speaker 1: waited until I've heard that he might have an opening,
Speaker 1: and then I applied. And that was what do you
Speaker 1: think he hired you? Four? What do you think ken
Speaker 1: burn saw in you? That's a very good question. I
Speaker 1: guess maybe. Um, I was passionate and interested and I
Speaker 1: wanted to learn, I will say those things. And I
Speaker 1: think having worked with film Moyer's helped a little bit.
Speaker 1: So So, first of all, where I went to Hampshire
Speaker 1: College and study film and photography every single semester, every
Speaker 1: single semester, every single semester, and started we did organize
Speaker 1: a little film company in the college to do uh
Speaker 1: completely at cost films for nonprofits in western Massachusetts. And
Speaker 1: so following that model, I started a company called Florentine
Speaker 1: Films after I graduated, and the first one was one
Speaker 1: on the Brooklyn Bridge. I moved out in Manhattan up
Speaker 1: to up to the wilds of New Hampshire then, but
Speaker 1: we were finishing the Civil War. It was done or
Speaker 1: a month or two from locking, and I had lost
Speaker 1: an associate producer who just sort of very unceremoniously left,
Speaker 1: and friends suggested that I talked to Lynn, and she said,
Speaker 1: you know, I'd love this job. You know, all of
Speaker 1: her credentials seemed perfect and and but she was going
Speaker 1: to get married and go on her honeymoon. She wouldn't
Speaker 1: be able to start until mid July. Said that's fine,
Speaker 1: that's fine, that's fine. We take the long view this
Speaker 1: this project had taken five and a half years, and uh,
Speaker 1: she was gonna attend to some rights issues for the
Speaker 1: photographs and other things. And the previous person told me
Speaker 1: they thought it would be done the following February. By
Speaker 1: August fifteen, she had it done and we've been working
Speaker 1: together ever since, like a month. So so Moyers was
Speaker 1: more shall we say, agit prop than a lot of
Speaker 1: other people. He was a very political guy, was the
Speaker 1: projects I worked with him on. Joseph Campbell's series was
Speaker 1: not really political, sort of existential and really deep way
Speaker 1: about philosophical Yeah, and that was surprising to me that
Speaker 1: I when I was working on it, I thought, she,
Speaker 1: I don't know if American people are gonna want to
Speaker 1: watch six or eight hours of talking about philosophy and
Speaker 1: the meaning of life, and turned out to be a
Speaker 1: huge hit because there's such a hunger for that kind
Speaker 1: of conversation. Um. Just watching Bill work and seeing how
Speaker 1: he related to the people that he spoke to and
Speaker 1: the kind of quality that he expected of all the
Speaker 1: producers that worked there was a great education for you. Ken,
Speaker 1: I'll go with you first, and then Lynn, what did
Speaker 1: Vietnam mean to you personally? At the advent of the project.
Speaker 1: So I always picked things I don't know about and
Speaker 1: want to know about. Rather telling you what I know,
Speaker 1: I'd rather share with you our process of discovery. So
Speaker 1: two films Baseball, which Lenn and I produced together uh
Speaker 1: In in the nineties. I thought I knew something because
Speaker 1: I've been a wild about baseball from the moment I
Speaker 1: could remember anything, and I instantly found out how little
Speaker 1: I knew. I grew up in Antarbora, Michigan. I was
Speaker 1: present for the first teaching against the war and demonstrations,
Speaker 1: and I had a high draft number. But it was
Speaker 1: very politically active campus, very politically active campus, and a
Speaker 1: politically active father, and you know, I was just thought, well,
Speaker 1: I know everything about it. And basically for ten and
Speaker 1: a half years, it was daily humiliation of what we
Speaker 1: didn't know. And what's so great is that to basically
Speaker 1: lose your baggage early on, lose that conventional wisdom that
Speaker 1: actually is wrong, and then be able to avail ourselves
Speaker 1: in a very clean way of more than forty years
Speaker 1: of new scholarship in every single department, so that we
Speaker 1: got excited because we dissembled all these scholars there, and
Speaker 1: as we're working first with proposals, then with early scripts,
Speaker 1: then with advanced scripts, then with assemblies and rough cuts
Speaker 1: and fine cuts, they're all blown away, not by what
Speaker 1: they've contributed, which is significant but what their colleagues have
Speaker 1: contributed because they don't know that stuff. And then all
Speaker 1: the other colleagues are saying the same thing about their stuff,
Speaker 1: and you begin to realize, Wow, we are aggregating in
Speaker 1: here the latest stuff. You know, the centrality of Ho
Speaker 1: Chi Minh to the leadership of the Vietnam we assume,
Speaker 1: you know, we so we we we have in episode one.
Speaker 1: It turns out it's another guy who's really in charge,
Speaker 1: and he'll be a character in old ten episodes. But
Speaker 1: everybody presumed Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh and LF is
Speaker 1: gonna win, and nobody asked another question about that. I
Speaker 1: know Lynn will agree with me. When Americans talk about Vietnam,
Speaker 1: we just talk about ourselves, and that what what we
Speaker 1: needed to do was to triangulate with all the other perspectives,
Speaker 1: not just the enemy. This isn't just Clint eas We're
Speaker 1: doing postcards and all of that sort of stuff. It's
Speaker 1: finding out what the civilians felt, the enemy felt, the
Speaker 1: viet Cong felt, But then our our our all the
Speaker 1: South Vietnamese who get treated like you know what all
Speaker 1: the time, and their civilians and their protesters, as well
Speaker 1: as all the servicemen that we did in the air
Speaker 1: or marines or army guys and everybody all the way
Speaker 1: out to deserters and draft dodgers across the American spectrum.
Speaker 1: And if you then do that, then the kind of
Speaker 1: political dialectic loses its its force because you realize that
Speaker 1: more than one truth could obtain at any given moment.
Speaker 1: From my money, what I walked away with that project
Speaker 1: was that ho Chiman was a man who understood his
Speaker 1: people and what they wanted and what he needed more
Speaker 1: than his American counterparts. From the moment Kennedy is assassinated
Speaker 1: to the moment that Nixon resigns. Yes, you go, there's
Speaker 1: a line from sixty three all the way down to
Speaker 1: seventy three. There's ten years there was out of power
Speaker 1: when he died in sixty nine, and by sixty four
Speaker 1: he had essentially neutralized himself on the Polite Bureau. From
Speaker 1: there on end he had opposed the tet offensive vehemently,
Speaker 1: and his secretary was throughout the fifties and then on
Speaker 1: in the early sixties. And you get to some point
Speaker 1: in this project and go, my god, I'm just no,
Speaker 1: My my next project is going to be about the
Speaker 1: boy Scouts. No, Because Lynn came in and we looked
Speaker 1: at each other and realized we had to do Vietnam,
Speaker 1: inviting exactly what you just talked about. The Second World War.
Speaker 1: Our first episode is called a necessary war. But what
Speaker 1: would happen if you took a war in which there's
Speaker 1: not a positive that. You know, we didn't unite the
Speaker 1: Union and free slaves, we didn't end the world of
Speaker 1: militarism and fascism. And Americans particularly are susceptible to the
Speaker 1: disease of argument that their Second World War they call
Speaker 1: it the good War. It's obviously not the good war.
Speaker 1: Sixty million people died, that's not a good war. You know,
Speaker 1: you can't do that. History is not a parlor game.
Speaker 1: When they're more PTSD candidates from World War Two than
Speaker 1: there are in Vietnam. We just didn't have a name
Speaker 1: and a convenient level. You're saying in the sense that
Speaker 1: Vietnam was no worse than the other war, that's hugely important.
Speaker 1: It was divisive. I think, um, it is different than
Speaker 1: the other wars before then that we paid attention to
Speaker 1: and that we didn't win. And it was so divisive
Speaker 1: while it was going on, and we never could talk
Speaker 1: about like Kinna saying, so I always think a bit
Speaker 1: sort of like this childhood trauma, say that we never
Speaker 1: talked about and just never dealt with, and it just
Speaker 1: keeps cooking away underneath the surface. And so that's why
Speaker 1: the film was the most challenging thing we've ever done.
Speaker 1: And like Kenna's saying, just this chance to bring people
Speaker 1: together to kind of start over. Okay, something terrible happened.
Speaker 1: We've never really figured it out. We don't know what
Speaker 1: it was, We don't know what was going on in Vietnam.
Speaker 1: Maybe if we would just let people tell us their
Speaker 1: story and put it together, we could find out some
Speaker 1: sort of deeper truths that we've never really acknowledged. Obviously,
Speaker 1: the Vietnam War has been covered in you know, to
Speaker 1: a fairy Well and film, in books, in Broadway musicals.
Speaker 1: Do you start by immersing yourself and what other people
Speaker 1: have done or you just tune that out completely. It's
Speaker 1: a really tough one because you don't want to imitate
Speaker 1: when anybody else has done. And we've certainly carry around
Speaker 1: in all of our heads the Hollywood versions of the
Speaker 1: Vietnam War, so we didn't have to immerse ourselves. They're
Speaker 1: just they're present health poclets now put you in the
Speaker 1: deer Hunter. We're very familiar with those. But for documentaries
Speaker 1: that have been done, and there have been some great ones,
Speaker 1: and there have been some very sort of dated things
Speaker 1: that were great at their time, we sort of check
Speaker 1: them at the door. Our colleagues have to look at
Speaker 1: all that for for footage and stills, so for research perverses,
Speaker 1: we have to go through everything and see what's out there.
Speaker 1: I go to a monastery and take a vale of silence.
Speaker 1: I will not look at anything anywhere, nothing, and just
Speaker 1: try to make sure complete. Even though I've seen this,
Speaker 1: has lind said that, even though I've seen this stuff,
Speaker 1: I need to be free of I'm always in President Lincoln.
Speaker 1: It's difficult. I read a lot too. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think a lot of you know, we we do have
Speaker 1: a big team of people helping us. So I've been
Speaker 1: in an interview you did with somebody where you mentioned
Speaker 1: a board of advisors that you can so describe the
Speaker 1: board of advisors and what their role is. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: we we put together the foremost experts on the subject
Speaker 1: whatever film we're working on. So in this particular case,
Speaker 1: you have an ad hoc consultants like that people some
Speaker 1: some We have a couple of people who come on
Speaker 1: more than one project because they just understand American history
Speaker 1: and pretty much can talk about and understand. And every
Speaker 1: Bill Luchenburg is in nineties something year old, yeah year
Speaker 1: old historians, Dean of American Historians. He's we don't leave
Speaker 1: home without him. He was with my Hue Long film
Speaker 1: back in the early eighties and I think he's just
Speaker 1: done the majority of the film since. But for this case,
Speaker 1: we also wanted um veterans, we wanted Vietnamese historians, we
Speaker 1: wanted military storms, you wanted social historians, pop culture, Hispanic American,
Speaker 1: African American presidential audio. Right, So it's it's a wide range. Actually,
Speaker 1: probably twenty people by the time we collect all these
Speaker 1: different experts. Some of them read scripts and then don't
Speaker 1: come to screenings, some kind of screenings and haven't read
Speaker 1: a script. Some are there every step of the way,
Speaker 1: and their roles kind of evolve over time as the
Speaker 1: film evolved. You you remember in another interview you will
Speaker 1: also reference how you had the Vietnamese producer Ho Ho
Speaker 1: dang Wa, and you mentioned said in another project you
Speaker 1: did where you were interviewing the famous Japanese baseball player,
Speaker 1: and you couldn't keep up with him, and you couldn't
Speaker 1: that you're a follower, so you decided you wanted to
Speaker 1: approach things differently. But but you also mentioned that you
Speaker 1: were talking to some of these men in the Vietnamese counterparts,
Speaker 1: and you were kind of taking with how gracious they
Speaker 1: were talking about people you knew they hated in a
Speaker 1: despise and had fought in war. Very different from the
Speaker 1: American point of because when Americans talk about these things
Speaker 1: it's often very heated. We had both, you know, we
Speaker 1: had people on both sides that talked about their hatred
Speaker 1: for the enemy. But it's interesting now that they're at
Speaker 1: the age that they're at and many of them are
Speaker 1: grandfathers and have survived, they're most curious. Like we we
Speaker 1: were able before the film came out to share with
Speaker 1: Center McCain, who we did not interview, and consciously told
Speaker 1: him early on in the project we weren't going to
Speaker 1: interview him, or carry or Kissinger or heroes. That wasn't
Speaker 1: been a big because no, no, no, because they're still
Speaker 1: polishing their apple in the public sphere, and we didn't
Speaker 1: want any of that. We want people that you didn't know,
Speaker 1: and then they would be characters carry and and McCain
Speaker 1: and Kissinger and and but they couldn't try to put
Speaker 1: their thumb on the scale in anyway. He got it immediately.
Speaker 1: But when it was done done, he invited us in
Speaker 1: for what was just going to be a few minutes.
Speaker 1: All he wanted to watch, and he kept extending it
Speaker 1: in the aids said no, you've got to go. Was
Speaker 1: he wanted to watch them the other side. And what
Speaker 1: you begin to realize is that at that point of combat,
Speaker 1: which is where human beings are at their very worst,
Speaker 1: they're really good at killing the other people and avoiding
Speaker 1: being killed or all this stuff happens. But it's hell,
Speaker 1: and we couldn't even possibly imagine what it's like. And
Speaker 1: we've tried so hard in so many films, from Civil
Speaker 1: War through World War Two into this. But they recognize
Speaker 1: each other, and they that recognition has transcendent, and so
Speaker 1: he wants to see what they're saying, and what they're
Speaker 1: saying sounds so exactly like our marines and our army guys.
Speaker 1: And so you have a marine, for example, Karmar Lantis
Speaker 1: who says you know, we're not the dominant species on
Speaker 1: the planet because we're nice, right, And people complained that, oh,
Speaker 1: the military turns young men into killing machines. I'd suggest
Speaker 1: it's only finishing school. On the other side, we have
Speaker 1: an n V a young soldier now kind of beloved,
Speaker 1: David McCullough, Yoda uh figure in in in their culture,
Speaker 1: and he says, um, humans are the only animal the
Speaker 1: kill when they're not hungry. I've been in the jungle.
Speaker 1: I spend time in the jungle. Even the tiger does
Speaker 1: not kill when it's not hungry. And so what you
Speaker 1: find on the front line is a kind of similarity.
Speaker 1: And so for the North Vietnamese, nobody had asked them
Speaker 1: these questions before, because I remember, this is the singular
Speaker 1: victory of the people capital p So they've never heard
Speaker 1: about losses. They've never seen their dead bodies scooped up
Speaker 1: with uh you know, you know, bulldozers and things like that,
Speaker 1: and no one said, what did you feel, who did
Speaker 1: you lose? What did your mother worry about? Which is
Speaker 1: the questions we in a kind of egocentric, narcissistic Western
Speaker 1: society kind of promote. And so when you hear them
Speaker 1: they break down and cry just like our guys do,
Speaker 1: and they get outraged just like our guys doing. It's
Speaker 1: a pretty it's a wonderful affirmation of what we sort
Speaker 1: of loosely talk about and don't really believe is a
Speaker 1: common humanity. I think, as this is evolved in my life,
Speaker 1: I'm somebody that as a boy on Long Island, they
Speaker 1: named an award my high school, uh for the most
Speaker 1: improved athlete that was called the Roland Floria Award, who
Speaker 1: died two weeks before he was meant to come home.
Speaker 1: He was all ready to get discharged. And he was
Speaker 1: the brother of a family that lived down the block
Speaker 1: from us, and the and the sisters in the family
Speaker 1: were our babysitters. And as this is evolved in my
Speaker 1: life watching films which Full Metal Jacket is my favorite
Speaker 1: because you distill it down to the the indefective ability
Speaker 1: of the of the enemy. It's a girl with a
Speaker 1: gun in a building and just she's gonna take it
Speaker 1: all the way down the line and kills many of
Speaker 1: her enemy as she can infend. And you met her
Speaker 1: in real life in the Ted Offensive a couple of times, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, you met that counterpart from full matile jacket,
Speaker 1: but it really a real person. But for me, what
Speaker 1: we would I arrived at the point I arrived at
Speaker 1: is not just Ellsberg, Pentagon papers McNamara. We knew was
Speaker 1: wrong at the time, not in hindsight. We knew it
Speaker 1: was wrong. They knew it was a mistake in the
Speaker 1: middle of it. When it also takes me to us
Speaker 1: is the evolution of the MA are in military. People
Speaker 1: are embedded. It's a limited transparency, there's no draft, it's
Speaker 1: a professional military. The ten part documentary I'd like to
Speaker 1: see Lennovik and ken Burns do is the history of
Speaker 1: the U. S Military and how we've arrived where we
Speaker 1: are now. We're on one hand, you believe even though
Speaker 1: a hornet's nest has been kicked, maybe we kicked it,
Speaker 1: Maybe we should have, maybe we shouldn't in the Middle East,
Speaker 1: But the point of the fact matter is we've kicked
Speaker 1: its kicked and if we walk away, we can't walk away.
Speaker 1: We have to engage somewhere, some where we engage and
Speaker 1: how is always the question. But the idea that we
Speaker 1: can just hold the bartend to come home is ridiculous.
Speaker 1: But but but I want to ask you both back to
Speaker 1: one thing that I just in this question of heroes,
Speaker 1: because it's come up a few times about what's the hero,
Speaker 1: and this film taught us that there's lots of different
Speaker 1: ways to be a hero in a situation like this.
Speaker 1: And they're certainly incredibly heroic soldiers on both sides, and
Speaker 1: you know, sacrifice for other people and are brave and
Speaker 1: do incredible things and sometimes suffer terribly for it. But
Speaker 1: they're also the heroes who went to Canada and the
Speaker 1: heroes who protested the war, and the heroes who revealed
Speaker 1: what was wrong about the war, you know, and the
Speaker 1: reporters who tried to cover it, and the Vietnamese who
Speaker 1: didn't believe that what their government was doing was right.
Speaker 1: So it's just it's sort of up ended our no
Speaker 1: conventional wisdom of what's the hero, which may deal with
Speaker 1: this really horrendous tragedy over ten years inspiring for us. Actually,
Speaker 1: I was overcome by a Rory Kennedy's movie Last Days
Speaker 1: of Vietnam, which he talks about that guy that was
Speaker 1: the guy that got everybody out of thereon Yeah, he's tortured,
Speaker 1: Stewart Harrington by the people they left behind. To this day,
Speaker 1: you know and and like he personally feels he's carrying
Speaker 1: the weight of the decisions made by people in Washington.
Speaker 1: My next question for you is, um, are you a
Speaker 1: filmmaker or a journalist? And an easy one, I think yeah.
Speaker 1: I think we definitely in ourselves filmmakers and not journalists.
Speaker 1: But have you picked up some kind of you Obviously
Speaker 1: you've acquired some journalistic education along the world, trying to
Speaker 1: be really scrupulous about what we think is true and
Speaker 1: what the facts are the way of journalist would, but
Speaker 1: we really want distance to be able to evaluate which
Speaker 1: facts are important. So Philip Graham, who owned the Washington Post,
Speaker 1: um said that journalism is the first rough draft of history.
Speaker 1: It's a great thing. But what history is able to
Speaker 1: do is come back and triangulate, take advantage of the perspective.
Speaker 1: The passage of time has permitted us to get uh
Speaker 1: clearer sources. So we do participate in certain journalistic ethics,
Speaker 1: but we're filmmakers. We are interested in telling a story.
Speaker 1: Have you ever had a situation where you're doing a
Speaker 1: project and you have someone who is significant to the project,
Speaker 1: even integral, and then you find out that they weren't
Speaker 1: necessarily on the up and up with you and what
Speaker 1: do you do in war? You have to be particularly
Speaker 1: careful because the fish gets bigger the farther away from
Speaker 1: the lake you get. And there are people who feel
Speaker 1: a certain amount of survivor's guilt who then have to
Speaker 1: expand their story. And because war is tenent combat and
Speaker 1: the rest is support, people who were in support often
Speaker 1: guildlily a little bit. So we always make sure that
Speaker 1: we can at least place them at the place where
Speaker 1: they are based on their military record at that day.
Speaker 1: Then we have to look him in the eye and say,
Speaker 1: is this story believable? And that's why one of the
Speaker 1: things the veterans do, the advisors do is they go, oh,
Speaker 1: that's bs that that that debt didn't happen, And we
Speaker 1: do it. And sometimes we've found people that were, as
Speaker 1: you say, central parts of our narrative that we just
Speaker 1: felt that we felt more comfortable if we could pare
Speaker 1: them back a little bit. Well, people who come right
Speaker 1: out and say John carry lied, he didn't do any
Speaker 1: of the things he did that one in the Purple Heart.
Speaker 1: Some people argue it cost him the presidency, that he
Speaker 1: didn't respond adequately to that nothing happened. Well, this is
Speaker 1: what happens when we politicize. We permit that relatively superficial
Speaker 1: but so intoxicating and so seductive world of the buying
Speaker 1: area of the yes and no. And so you can't
Speaker 1: do that with Vietnam. You can't do that intel an
Speaker 1: accurate story because it just sort of sets itself against itself,
Speaker 1: you know. So it's we That's why we took ourselves
Speaker 1: out of that contemporary debate about say carry it's interesting
Speaker 1: to hear you talk now about you know what the
Speaker 1: political DNA is or isn't in some of these projects,
Speaker 1: and you privately have been somewhat politically. You've given money
Speaker 1: to the Democratic Party. UM. In mid June of I
Speaker 1: came out warning people about what I felt were the
Speaker 1: supreme existential dangers of the then presumed Republican nominee. And
Speaker 1: that was the first time I've ever done it that
Speaker 1: kind of went viral. Did the video for Teddy Kennedy's
Speaker 1: memorial correct, Yeah, but completely anonymously and didn't charge a
Speaker 1: cent and didn't want to be involved in anything other
Speaker 1: than somebody that I had known and respected. I don't
Speaker 1: list that film on my resume. I just it was
Speaker 1: something that I'm say, you have a democratic political DNA,
Speaker 1: but what I would think it's masterful. This may be
Speaker 1: one of the greatest things about ken Burns is filmmaking,
Speaker 1: because you've kept the politics out of it. I think
Speaker 1: the integrity of the films is inseparable from our collectively,
Speaker 1: not just Lynn, but the films I do with other producers. Um,
Speaker 1: we've we've made that decision to leave it out of
Speaker 1: it because it is so binary, it is so superficial,
Speaker 1: it is so easy to just it's it's it's in
Speaker 1: the end it is. I mean, there's a place for
Speaker 1: political films, and that's an important part of the tradition
Speaker 1: of documentary films that we have advocacy. We still have
Speaker 1: a First Amendment. People can say, I believe it's this
Speaker 1: way I'm trying. There's too much pluribus, Arthur Sassenger Jr. Said,
Speaker 1: and not enough unhum. So we actually just started a
Speaker 1: website called Unum, which is trying to curate and take
Speaker 1: the scenes from all these films to say, look, we
Speaker 1: have shared stories. We're not trying to exclude anybody. When
Speaker 1: you add an African dimension to a civil war story,
Speaker 1: you're not excluding other people. Well, I mean, this can't
Speaker 1: be helped your ken burn, so you must walk around
Speaker 1: old day people going excuse me, could you do a
Speaker 1: story on the history of pizza. I think that people
Speaker 1: don't understand how important pizza is. But you know, getting
Speaker 1: to this idea of your own personal ethic, did you
Speaker 1: have to do some kind of political lobotomizing in order
Speaker 1: to do the work you do? Affective? What happened for
Speaker 1: you when you're a politize? You know, I feel very
Speaker 1: grateful that my parents gave me a great education. Being
Speaker 1: credit and thinking about what happened and being honest are important,
Speaker 1: and that's been a huge sort of existential challenge to
Speaker 1: sit down people. You do it all the time. A
Speaker 1: lot of people don't do it. Talk to someone that
Speaker 1: you don't necessarily agree with, and here where they're coming from,
Speaker 1: think about why, think about who they are. Understand the
Speaker 1: documentary character. Look, you want a narrative character. The minute
Speaker 1: you look at that character in in in literature, whether
Speaker 1: it's Williams or Faulkner or Shakespeare, and you look at
Speaker 1: them and you study and they go, wow, that's interesting.
Speaker 1: You meet the person in real life, feel like, get
Speaker 1: away from me. You mentioned round the Board of Education.
Speaker 1: I can't help but suggest that would be a really
Speaker 1: great topic of the Supreme Court. The Court. So sometimes
Speaker 1: these uh formulations get a little bit expository into dactic.
Speaker 1: So what I often say is that a lot of
Speaker 1: times our films will cover this, like we've got obviously
Speaker 1: the Dreads got Decision in this film, We've got plus
Speaker 1: the versus Ferguson in five films, We've got you known.
Speaker 1: So what happens is instead of just segregating it into
Speaker 1: Philadelphia with the with the wigs and the green felt
Speaker 1: tables with the white quill pens, exactly what you you
Speaker 1: have the Constitution operating in all of the stories that
Speaker 1: we're telling, whether it's Jackie Jackie Robinson, our film on
Speaker 1: Jackie Robinson that I made with my daughter Sarah Burns
Speaker 1: and her husband, the filmmaker David McMahon a few years ago,
Speaker 1: that is as much the story of Jackie Robinson taking
Speaker 1: away some of the myths that everybody has promoted. Even so,
Speaker 1: he was an amazing Lincoln was Lincoln during the Civil
Speaker 1: War and in the Civil Rights movement. You said Jackie
Speaker 1: Robinson was the Lincoln. He's a Republican who can't stand
Speaker 1: Jack Kennedy, won't look him in the eye. Kennedy says, well,
Speaker 1: you know, we don't know too many negroes, and he goes,
Speaker 1: you're gonna have to know negroes, and then Kennedy has
Speaker 1: his come to Jesus. By the time of the Civil
Speaker 1: Rights Act, Jackie's with Rockefeller are still a Republican, but
Speaker 1: watches the Goldwater Tide votes for Johnson. And you can
Speaker 1: see in the arc of part two of Jackie Robinson
Speaker 1: the whole history of modern political America, which is the
Speaker 1: switch of the Republican Party founded in eighteen fifty four
Speaker 1: and rip on Wisconsin with one thing in mind, the
Speaker 1: emancipation of the slave hypocrisy that cannot exist any longer
Speaker 1: in this Republic. And now they become the harbor, the
Speaker 1: safe haven for white supremacists and racists. And and it
Speaker 1: is just it's a stunning flip. And the Dixiecrats, who
Speaker 1: the Northern Democrats look the other way and counted on
Speaker 1: their votes and to carry us ali itself went the
Speaker 1: other way. But the Democratic Party has been liberated from
Speaker 1: the tyranny of those people. Does he call you up
Speaker 1: at three o'clock in the morning and do this. I
Speaker 1: got this idea and it's like a twenty minute, one
Speaker 1: breath monologue. We're try not to send text before six am.
Speaker 1: At the core of Burns and Novic's documentaries is a
Speaker 1: belief in listening deeply and understanding all sides. But, as
Speaker 1: Burns said, activist filmmaking has its place too. One of
Speaker 1: the best examples, to my mind is Josh Fox's gas Land,
Speaker 1: about fracking for natural gas in Pennsylvania. I spoke to
Speaker 1: Josh after the release of the film. Their priorities are
Speaker 1: not about protecting groundwater or keeping this situation non toxic.
Speaker 1: That couldn't be further from their priorities. Their priorities to
Speaker 1: get the gas out of the ground and make their money.
Speaker 1: Here the rest of my interview with Josh Fox at
Speaker 1: Here's the Thing dot org. When we come back, Ken
Speaker 1: Burns and Lynn Novik on Vietnam, Trump and why he'd
Speaker 1: never leave PBS for Netflix. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're
Speaker 1: listening to Here's the Thing. One of Ken burns few
Speaker 1: overt activism projects was lobbying presidents to pardon the Great
Speaker 1: boxer Jack Johnson. Burns thinks the conviction was driven by racism,
Speaker 1: but after over ten years he much gave up. Then,
Speaker 1: advised by Sylvester Stallone, Donald Trump made it happen. In
Speaker 1: May two eighteen. You mentioned Jack Johnson, and I'm going
Speaker 1: to think you must be a huge Trump then, Now,
Speaker 1: didn't you lead a movement. I've been working with Sander
Speaker 1: McCain since two thousand and six and we couldn't get
Speaker 1: w to move And for very obvious Truss, we tried
Speaker 1: really hard. And and then for Obama, you know, I
Speaker 1: put I lifted up on the accelerated because I knew
Speaker 1: it was a no win situation for him. What this
Speaker 1: black president is going to pardon an African American who
Speaker 1: married white women and beat them? Explained that people, what
Speaker 1: what what Johnson's would need to be pardoned? Four yea.
Speaker 1: So Johnson is the first African American heavyweight champion, which
Speaker 1: was kind of He won on a mistake. Nobody had
Speaker 1: intended to ever allow a black man into the ring
Speaker 1: to possibly show. In those days, the superiority of the
Speaker 1: races was determined in some ways by who was the
Speaker 1: most powerful. So this is a real, just mono amount
Speaker 1: of thing, and he won great hope, and then they
Speaker 1: sent a series of white hopes up against him. And
Speaker 1: then on July four they sent up Jim Jefferies, the
Speaker 1: greatest of all white hope, and John Just Johnson demolished him,
Speaker 1: and there were white on black um riots all across
Speaker 1: the United States. So then there are a few more fights,
Speaker 1: but basically everybody said, how do we stop this guy.
Speaker 1: This is a decade nineteen o five nineteen fifteen when
Speaker 1: war African Americans were lynched that in any other time,
Speaker 1: and yet he's living exactly the way he wants to,
Speaker 1: dating women and multiple women and marrying white women. And
Speaker 1: so they hooked. They got him expost facto, meaning they
Speaker 1: apply to law that had passed after he'd done this thing,
Speaker 1: which is illegal, constitutional on on the Man Act and
Speaker 1: basically for crossing state lines with a moral purposes. So
Speaker 1: she wasn't underage, she wasn't under age. She was a prostitute.
Speaker 1: Of course. For people who are not familiar with the
Speaker 1: Mayor film called Unforgivable Blackness, The Rise and Fall of
Speaker 1: Jack Lola Johnson, which is from a quote by W. B.
Speaker 1: Two Boys, a great black scholar, who said, look, you
Speaker 1: know boxing is in disfavor, and Johnson hasn't done anything
Speaker 1: that other ball players and sportsmen, meeting boxers and even
Speaker 1: senators haven't on it all comes down then to his
Speaker 1: unforgivable black So in this is so at least in
Speaker 1: the context of the single issue thing with Jack Johnson, Trump,
Speaker 1: as far as you're concerned, is the greatest president of
Speaker 1: the modern century. So let me put this very delicacy.
Speaker 1: We support the pardon, but let's understand that the underlying
Speaker 1: issues about Jack Johnson are about race, and we're dealing
Speaker 1: with the human being who has a dismal record on race.
Speaker 1: We actually made a film on the Central Park five
Speaker 1: in which these are five innocent children, children, right, that
Speaker 1: did not commit the Central Park jogger. Right. We know
Speaker 1: that they've been exonerated, but they went to jail, and
Speaker 1: he took out full page ads saying bring back the
Speaker 1: death penalty and double down on it the day of
Speaker 1: the Access Hollywood tape. So this is, you know, a
Speaker 1: tweet from he has a conversation with Sylvester Stallone. If
Speaker 1: he does it, that's great. You want justice to prevail,
Speaker 1: to get behind the Central Park five. Yes, and then
Speaker 1: he could call Trump. We'll be done. Now here's my
Speaker 1: big gooey deep fried smother than cheese. Larry King question,
Speaker 1: what's a Ken Burns movie? Because I have Michael want
Speaker 1: to give him my answer. Yes, Sir Burns, his films
Speaker 1: are He's like Spielberg. You're the Spielberg of documentary film,
Speaker 1: big canvases, big themes, big budgets. Comparatively speaking, you think
Speaker 1: about Spielberg, you think God doesn't even want to do
Speaker 1: a movie for like two million bucks, and it's Edward
Speaker 1: Norton and Refines trapped in an elevator. It's like one
Speaker 1: set great dialogue. Which one do you want to make
Speaker 1: that you can't? You're right, we do bite off. And
Speaker 1: I have had many opportunities to talk to Steven Spielberg
Speaker 1: about this, and we look at each other and we
Speaker 1: go we do the same things. You can make stuff up.
Speaker 1: I can't. What's a VIC movie? I think we're plowing
Speaker 1: in the same field. It's too we could pick something
Speaker 1: very small, but it ends up that these projects take
Speaker 1: a long time, enormous amount of effort and sort of
Speaker 1: psychic energy, and so you want to pick something that
Speaker 1: you're going to really care about spending time on. So
Speaker 1: it's American history for sure, but it's also these sort
Speaker 1: of deep questions about the human condition. That sounds very
Speaker 1: pretentious to say that, but when you're looking at individual
Speaker 1: artists like Time Away our Frank woid right, it's how
Speaker 1: do people create and live and get their work done.
Speaker 1: I think what we're really interested in ultimately is our
Speaker 1: country stands for something really profound and inspiring and beautiful,
Speaker 1: which is that we're all equal and we have this
Speaker 1: capacity to be great, and yet from the day we
Speaker 1: were founded, from before that we are so far away
Speaker 1: from that thing. And in that space is where we
Speaker 1: want to hang out and explore, and it's very painful
Speaker 1: and it's also really inspiring. I would just suggest too
Speaker 1: that these big themes, these big stories, the constituent building blocks,
Speaker 1: are these intimate, bottom up stories, more often than not,
Speaker 1: of people that you don't know. And so like William Blake,
Speaker 1: we're finding the world in a grain of sand, and
Speaker 1: that changes, particularizes, literally atomizes the way you tell these stories.
Speaker 1: So it isn't just the thirty thousand feet Great Man
Speaker 1: history of the presidency in generals and wars. It's something
Speaker 1: that is bottom up and you and you touch on
Speaker 1: the African American experience, which is in almost every film
Speaker 1: we've made, and the failure, as Lena is talking about,
Speaker 1: to live up to our creed. And when you learn
Speaker 1: from so called ordinary people, then it sort of mitigates
Speaker 1: the tension of the big idea, right and somewhere and
Speaker 1: there you can begin to negotiate some of these bigger
Speaker 1: questions about who we are, where we fail our promise,
Speaker 1: where that exceptionalism is. So it's possible in Vietnam, which
Speaker 1: is a horrible failure to find unbelievable pockets of love
Speaker 1: and beauty and redemption. And how the political climate in
Speaker 1: this country now make you feel about that. I think
Speaker 1: we're right now in the greatest existential threats, certainly since
Speaker 1: World War Two and the Depression. I would just find
Speaker 1: that an assault on institutions and values. And because of
Speaker 1: the way media is and the Internet, which we thought
Speaker 1: of our as our friend, now we don't know what's true,
Speaker 1: and the ability to manipulate images and voices now and
Speaker 1: video give us the possibility for a kind of say
Speaker 1: whatever you want to disseminate into. And we've stayed in
Speaker 1: public broadcasting consciously a kind of Some people would suggest
Speaker 1: some creaky old form, but in fact is extraordinarily was
Speaker 1: changed during the ark of your career. Not much we
Speaker 1: what I happened to know what I mean, everybody knows
Speaker 1: who studied this, that Reagan stacked the CPP with more
Speaker 1: conservative people. Do they wanted doing? They had documentaries about
Speaker 1: the oil business. Yeah, but one of his appointees is
Speaker 1: the long time ahead of it now and she's been
Speaker 1: one of our greatest supporters. And the last thing they
Speaker 1: want to do is cross over any kind of line,
Speaker 1: which is why I've stayed there. The unstated agreement is
Speaker 1: you don't make me look bad, I won't make you
Speaker 1: look bad. I wouldn't even say that. I mean, I
Speaker 1: came out with a film called called Unforgivable Blackness, and
Speaker 1: they swallowed hard. They wanted to be called Jack Johnson,
Speaker 1: The Rise and Fall of an American, you know, like that.
Speaker 1: But but but but so I feel sort of fortunate.
Speaker 1: I think we all feel very very grateful for it.
Speaker 1: But we're able to make the films that we do.
Speaker 1: And look what happened with Vietnam. We accumulated, just in
Speaker 1: the fall its first sets of showings, thirty nine million people,
Speaker 1: and then they had thirteen million streams, which means this
Speaker 1: makes it one of the biggest things to pass sue
Speaker 1: the PBS system. Ever, this is a truth of people
Speaker 1: don't understand. After the big three networks plus Fox, the
Speaker 1: next highest network trading with Fox News PBS, which means
Speaker 1: we're already able to activate a huge segment of the
Speaker 1: American population, which means old media is not so dead.
Speaker 1: We're actually able to approximate the unum that we all
Speaker 1: just talk about in Wanna and Wanna, you know, not
Speaker 1: our head to it. Actually we can in a documentary
Speaker 1: film like this, you can have people have a conversation
Speaker 1: that you can't really put in a room together. You couldn't,
Speaker 1: you know, that they would argue, so they'd start yelling
Speaker 1: at each other. And in a documentary, we can interview you,
Speaker 1: and we can interview you, and then we can put
Speaker 1: you together and you can have a civilized conversation. And
Speaker 1: we're kind of modeling a kind of civil dialogue or
Speaker 1: discourse that our country really lacks. It's not Jerry Springer.
Speaker 1: It's not Jerry Springer. And PBS is where people kind
Speaker 1: of come. They're expecting that people and I'm assuming there
Speaker 1: must have been many, many times that the Netflixes of
Speaker 1: the world and these other independence have said, you come
Speaker 1: with us, come work with us, you leave pps that's
Speaker 1: your childhood. Well it's been throughout networks, studios more a
Speaker 1: lot of money in your face. Yeah, but you know
Speaker 1: what it is is that I moved out of New
Speaker 1: York in seventy nine, the summer seventy nine, because I
Speaker 1: had finished most of the shooting on my first film.
Speaker 1: Brooklyn Bridge had no idea how he's going to make
Speaker 1: it into a film. But I realized I needed to
Speaker 1: get a job to survive in New York, like a
Speaker 1: real job, and that if I put that film away,
Speaker 1: I'd still be in New York. And you know, like
Speaker 1: the ad guy who woke up and didn't write the
Speaker 1: novel that he always wanted. So I moved to this tiny,
Speaker 1: little world town where I could live for nothing. And
Speaker 1: that model has informed the spirit at least, if not
Speaker 1: precisely the letter, of what we've done ever since that
Speaker 1: we've had a kind of independence, we've stayed there. Yes,
Speaker 1: that all that is attractive, but it comes with certain things.
Speaker 1: Suits can come in and say longer, shorter, more sexy,
Speaker 1: less sexy, more violent, and it's just do not want
Speaker 1: to ever say, even when somebody even has the whiff
Speaker 1: of wouldn't it be better if you didn't do it?
Speaker 1: This no focus because and you know what, I'm not
Speaker 1: good at us because I also get in a separate
Speaker 1: way like people I really admire, like Errol Morris and
Speaker 1: Spike Lee who do commercials like I would shrivel up
Speaker 1: to nothing if someone said we want you to do
Speaker 1: like a commercial for X y Z and the ken
Speaker 1: Burn style and we're gonna pay you this. You don't
Speaker 1: do this, Fort Knox, I cannot problem. I cannot. I've
Speaker 1: got four kids. I'm hosting a game show Friday. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I admire you for that ability to do that. I
Speaker 1: can't do that. But I live in New Hampshire and
Speaker 1: we're fine. Ten and a half years somebody was sitting
Speaker 1: with Richard Plepler and me and saying he's the head
Speaker 1: of HBO. He said, well, why don't you fun Ken
Speaker 1: And he stops and I said, because Richard wouldn't give
Speaker 1: us thirty million dollars and ten and a half years
Speaker 1: to do this. The model they're as generous and elastic
Speaker 1: as it is at HBO doesn't permit even though the
Speaker 1: PBS brand is no less quality wise, it's just a
Speaker 1: little more obscured because of the marketplace is so diverse
Speaker 1: now and so fractured. Just as our Civil War came
Speaker 1: out in nineteen ninety when there were maybe twenty other stations, right,
Speaker 1: and then we've gone through all of this cable revolution
Speaker 1: and then the Internet revolution. So we've got fifteen hundred
Speaker 1: cable channels and millions and millions of Internet possibilities at
Speaker 1: anything in a moment. And what is that that bit
Speaker 1: of audience marching through from thirty nine million people for
Speaker 1: civil wars? But what did we get in in the
Speaker 1: aggregated of a few different showings in the fall of
Speaker 1: Vietnam thirty nine million is Florentine headquartered up in New Hampshire.
Speaker 1: That is that where the I L M is. Does
Speaker 1: all the stuff flow through there? That's where you cut
Speaker 1: you do You have some superspace station set up there
Speaker 1: where you cut everything and do it. We have a
Speaker 1: little house off the town green that we got in,
Speaker 1: but there's at us. It's the former knitting mill that
Speaker 1: you as a doctor's house. You're you're contemplating or you're
Speaker 1: gonna do ali What do you think you're going to
Speaker 1: bring to I mean all, he's like the Beatles, He's
Speaker 1: been covered from every angle. What are you gonna do?
Speaker 1: We're gonna bring a lie, right, because here's I made
Speaker 1: a film on Huey Long in the mid eighties, right,
Speaker 1: And part of my proposal was, we're going to intercut
Speaker 1: pieces of Roderick Crawford's performance in the Academy Award winning
Speaker 1: motion picture All the King's Men. We put him next
Speaker 1: to the real speeches of Huey Long. It just diminished. Now,
Speaker 1: I thought, Will Smith, that was a you know, that
Speaker 1: was not a perfect film. The first twenty five minutes
Speaker 1: is one of the greatest openings of a modern American
Speaker 1: movie that Michael Mann did. It's just it's but here's
Speaker 1: what happens in all the Ali stuff, and there's lots
Speaker 1: of Ali stuff. It's basically this fight or it's that fight.
Speaker 1: But we want to start, as we do with the
Speaker 1: French coming in eighteen fifty eight to Danang, Let's tell
Speaker 1: the whole story. So we want to start in Louisville
Speaker 1: and and and tell the whole story up to the end.
Speaker 1: That's what my podcast is about, Origins, is you have
Speaker 1: to do this and what happens is we are now,
Speaker 1: you know, biting off smaller and smaller chunks and sometimes
Speaker 1: doing extraordinary things with it. I'm not proscribing any other
Speaker 1: way of doing it. We just think that there is
Speaker 1: room for us to learn a lot more about, as
Speaker 1: you say, a person who would be impossible to duplicate,
Speaker 1: So why try to duplicate him. Let's just go to
Speaker 1: the archives here and spar with Cosell see the fightstial,
Speaker 1: you know, and people at the end who were there
Speaker 1: when you know most of us were not. You know,
Speaker 1: we understood the power of that shaky lighting of the
Speaker 1: torch in Atlanta, But but who was there who went
Speaker 1: back to the hotel room with him that night? You know? Um,
Speaker 1: I have for Lynn? How does the me too movement
Speaker 1: play out for you? I mean, I don't mean to
Speaker 1: be so topical, but are you any thoughts about that
Speaker 1: in terms of making a film? Well, I mean, it's
Speaker 1: been really overwhelming to see what's happened in our world
Speaker 1: in the last year and a half and how much
Speaker 1: the stories we've been hearing resonate for everyone. I know,
Speaker 1: just the wide range being interrupted, just not being taken seriously,
Speaker 1: having people comment on how you look. We've had I've
Speaker 1: had all kinds of inappropriate comments in my time, and
Speaker 1: I've never talked about it. Sure, even in public television,
Speaker 1: even in public television, perfectly, the men in public television
Speaker 1: are like the men everywhere else. It's shocking to say,
Speaker 1: but yes, I think it's part of human relations and
Speaker 1: how we've all been. I think conditions should just ignore
Speaker 1: that and just keep going. And I frankly would take
Speaker 1: offense at someone saying, oh, you know, what does it
Speaker 1: feel like to be a woman filmmaker. I want to
Speaker 1: be taken seriously as a filmmaker. Was it hard for
Speaker 1: you to be as a woman filmaker in the beginning, No,
Speaker 1: it really wasn't. No, I don't think so. In the
Speaker 1: documentary world, even before landed in Florentine, What was it
Speaker 1: like in the early days. Yeah, I don't I really
Speaker 1: don't have any mess came on this show and she was,
Speaker 1: I don't want to say, in the extreme on Mike
Speaker 1: in the show, she was very forthcoming. She said, the
Speaker 1: guy put his hand in the sixties or whatever, the
Speaker 1: late sing she goes, the guy put his hand on
Speaker 1: my on my leg right, So I mean their generation.
Speaker 1: I think really paid their dues. To be honest, She's
Speaker 1: quite a bit older than me, and I think in
Speaker 1: that time there were very few women in the world
Speaker 1: of news and journalism. And right, so Dickerson Right's mom exactly, um,
Speaker 1: and what's her name? Povitch Shirley Povid should be interviewed
Speaker 1: for Baseball film. His daughter Lynn Povish was a pioneering
Speaker 1: reporter in news Day Newsweek, who sued. I mean, I've
Speaker 1: heard these these pioneering women, and even the women ten
Speaker 1: years older than me working at CBS sixteen minutes. I've
Speaker 1: heard incredible stories. I really have not experienced anything criminal
Speaker 1: or regious or anything I would call harassment, but I've
Speaker 1: certainly been objectivided. I think every woman who walks the
Speaker 1: earth has been. And the way I was brought up
Speaker 1: and the way I just sort of functioned was Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do my job and I have I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, and I think for women coming after me, though,
Speaker 1: and I have a daughter who's twenty five, almost twenty six,
Speaker 1: I don't want that to be her world. In the
Speaker 1: best no, she wants She's getting out of lost medical school.
Speaker 1: Major parents happy for healthy granddaughter. Well but anyway, you know,
Speaker 1: I just I think it's an exciting time actually that
Speaker 1: some of this kind of conversation is happening. I think
Speaker 1: that's healthy. I think it has gone way too far
Speaker 1: in some ways of convicting people without any kind of
Speaker 1: do process, And I think that's the problem. Did you
Speaker 1: want to say something, Well, I have four daughters, so
Speaker 1: you know, we're working with one of Lynn's counterparts, another
Speaker 1: producing partner, Dayton Duncan, and I've been working for many
Speaker 1: years on a film about country music. And what's so
Speaker 1: interesting is that women from the very very beginning to
Speaker 1: take a central role in this story, well before Rock
Speaker 1: and roll was dealing with some issues about sort of
Speaker 1: spousal abuse and marital rape and divorce and taking the pill.
Speaker 1: Loretta Lynn is in the mid sixties. This is stuff
Speaker 1: that Grace Slick is not doing or Joni Mitchell is
Speaker 1: not going to do for another decade. But there she is,
Speaker 1: and you've got Passy Klin before her, and all of
Speaker 1: these stories are there in American history. It's what we
Speaker 1: choose to show, and that the ability for the patriarchy
Speaker 1: to limit and narrow the story, We've just widened the
Speaker 1: story and nothing's diminished. He gets more dimensional. And the
Speaker 1: same with race, the same with labor, the same with
Speaker 1: you know, complications. There's undertow and my real brother from
Speaker 1: another mother. When Marsalis said in our Jazz film said
Speaker 1: that sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing
Speaker 1: are true at the same time, and we have been,
Speaker 1: we've been, we have been working on trying to honor
Speaker 1: that in all the situations since he said that in
Speaker 1: the mid nineties. Cust Now are you ken Burns? Are
Speaker 1: you a collector? Privately? What does ken Burns collect? Quilts?
Speaker 1: American quilts by women who tell the story I think
Speaker 1: of in an elemental way who we are, the warp
Speaker 1: and the wolf, and in that these are sometimes anonymous
Speaker 1: or collective efforts. An Amish piece from the eighteen thirties.
Speaker 1: A hundred years later, piet Mondrian is doing these geometrical, loud, geometrical,
Speaker 1: bright colors, which is the epitome of modernism. And I go,
Speaker 1: excuse me, I've got a shaker quilt from a hundred
Speaker 1: years before that can sit next to any Piet Mondrea painting.
Speaker 1: And let me show this to you. It's like on fire.
Speaker 1: And then it just the lies the kinds of borders
Speaker 1: that we ach, they don't exist for the artists, and
Speaker 1: the borders we make between people based on color of
Speaker 1: the skin or regions, or whether they're blue voting or
Speaker 1: red voting, or whether they're gay or they're straight. All
Speaker 1: of these superimposed distinctions don't actually exist, and it is
Speaker 1: possible to embrace a complex narrative. I have been immersed
Speaker 1: in the world of documentary film for the past almost
Speaker 1: decade because David Nugent, the artistic director of the Hampton's
Speaker 1: Film Festival, and I are partners. But docs have become
Speaker 1: so ubiquitous now and so it desired, you know, it's thrilling.
Speaker 1: I remember an article that Vincent can Be wrote in
Speaker 1: five about the releases of documentary that year. The Way
Speaker 1: I had a film out on Huey Long Uh. Fred
Speaker 1: Wiseman had a cinema very Tay. There was a thing
Speaker 1: called street Wise which was really flirting with a dramatic
Speaker 1: films uh and using real people. And Ross mckaway did
Speaker 1: Sherman's March, self referential film. He said the documentary was
Speaker 1: too arrow word and I think why we're drawn to
Speaker 1: it today is that we have all these outlets that
Speaker 1: need to fill stuff out. But more importantly, our plots
Speaker 1: are not tired anymore. Right, Steven's gonna invest everything with
Speaker 1: the meaning. But these plots we know what. You know
Speaker 1: what it's like to go into a movie and go,
Speaker 1: she's dead. She's not gonna survive this film and and documentaries,
Speaker 1: even when you know it's gonna turn out the way
Speaker 1: you know it did. You don't think it's gonna happen. Right,
Speaker 1: you go to Ford see or anything. Maybe this time
Speaker 1: the gun's gonna jam. Have you ever put yourself in anything? Done?
Speaker 1: In one film? In baseball, I was interviewing Billy the Spaceman,
Speaker 1: the Boston Red Sox pitcher who know people when he
Speaker 1: was traded to Canadian team, he would find, uh, you
Speaker 1: know tin foil? I said, why are people throwing tinfoil
Speaker 1: at me? And it was hash But anyway, I said,
Speaker 1: what's your best pitch? And you needed it to set
Speaker 1: up his onlie. You put yourself Yeah, and you felt
Speaker 1: you had to do it. Yeah, it was just really necessary.
Speaker 1: We debated about it though. We had a big, huge conversation.
Speaker 1: Do you have one? Well, I have one. It's a
Speaker 1: World War two veteran said Phillips, and I was asking him, um,
Speaker 1: you know, did you have a hard time kind of
Speaker 1: keeping your language clean when you came home, because you
Speaker 1: know how Marines talk. And here was this very courtly,
Speaker 1: southern gentleman and he said, you know, in the Marines,
Speaker 1: we only use but one adjective, and when I came home,
Speaker 1: it was really really hard to not use that adjective
Speaker 1: at the dinner table. And so you hear me say
Speaker 1: what was it? And he says, I can't tell you.
Speaker 1: My wife will come down and Heaven and hit me
Speaker 1: on the head. But it's kind of a conceit if
Speaker 1: you think about it. I mean, we were doing an
Speaker 1: event the other day and someone said, was it intentional
Speaker 1: when you cut to this picture? After that person said
Speaker 1: something and as if it was some kind of accident
Speaker 1: that these things happened. I mean, every single thing in
Speaker 1: the film is intentional. Right, So we don't put ourselves
Speaker 1: in but we're in every frame. Filmmakers Lynnovic and Ken Burns.
Speaker 1: Their latest documentary is The Vietnam War. I'm Alec Baldwin
Speaker 1: and you're listening to here's the thing