History in the Making

Kirk Baird

Saturday, April 2, 2005 | 9:16 a.m.

WEEKEND EDITION

April 2 - 3, 2005

Who: Ken Burns.

When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday.

Where: Artemus Ham Hall at UNLV.

Admission: Free; tickets are required and limited to two per person. Tickets are available only at the Performing Arts Center Box Office on the UNLV campus.

Information: 895-2787.

When Ken Burns first decided to become a historical documentarian, while living in New York City, he thought he had "taken a vow of anonymity and poverty."

More than 30 years later the 51-year-old filmmaker has emerged as one of the most recognizable and successful documentarians today, with such acclaimed works as "The Civil War," "Baseball," "Jazz," "Thomas Jefferson" and his most recent film, "Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson," the story of the first black heavyweight boxing champion.

Burns speaks at UNLV's Ham Hall on Thursday as part of the Barrick Lecture Series.

During a recent phone interview with Burns from his home in New York, the Las Vegas Sun chatted with the filmmaker about his documentaries, the state of public television and Michael Moore.

Las Vegas Sun: Typically your documentaries focus on historical events, people or places. Would you ever consider making a documentary on a modern-day subject, say 9/11?

Ken Burns: Well, I'd want to get several years between us and that event. I think a great deal of wisdom comes from the passage of time. There's a kind of historical triangulation that can take place that will permit us to see things.

If I'd decided to make a film 10 years after the fall of Saigon, in 1985 when Japan was ascendent, when the United States was in a recession, when it looked like the balance of power in the world had shifted to the other side of the Pacific, Vietnam would have seemed like this ball-and-chain that we would drag around perpetually in American history, the symbol of our decline.

If I'd waited another 10 years to 1995 after we fought the Gulf War with a broad international coalition, Japan was stagnant and had been and would be for many years, the United States was in the beginning of the largest economic peacetime expansion in its history, we were the sole superpower and Vietnam would have its importance, but it wouldn't be this dark cloud hanging over things.

If we waited yet another 10 years to this year and, God forbid, there was another or two more 9/11-type events, Vietnam would suddenly take on yet another color, a different sort of hue. So I always like to get at least 20-25 years out from an event before I really start trying to make some historical judgments about it. But even then I have recognized how malleable history was and how valuable history is.

Sun: How do you come up with your ideas for documentaries?

KB: I'm interested in a good story. Either those stories find me or I find them. And that's what I get drawn to. And, for however many years it takes, I'm passionately engaged in trying to tell that story. As I go along, I learn. And as I go along, I try to share what I've learned, openly and generously with, I think, an intelligent audience. And that's why I think the films have been so hugely successful, beyond the expectations of what documentaries are supposed to do.

Sun: Do you typically have more than one project going on?

KB: Yeah, I've got a kind of freelancer's pathology. While I'm finishing and promoting and broadcasting the "Jack Johnson" film, I'm shooting and beginning to edit this massive series on the second World War, and I'm shooting and writing a big series on the national parks. Even now that "Jack Johnson's" gone I'm turning my attention to a project we have in development on Prohibition.

But I tell you, if I were given a thousand years to live, I'd never run out of topics in American history. It's just a race of time. It really is.

Sun: Your films, which air on PBS, have been hugely successful for the network. How important has public television been to you?

KB: It's central. If there was no public television, you would have never heard of me and this conversation would not be taking place.

Only public television, without commercial interruption, permitted me to sort of discover who I was, and in the course of five or six films before "The Civil War" and then most notably in "The Civil War" and since, permitted me to experiment and grow and, I hope, to get better as a filmmaker.

Public television, underfunded, with one foot in the marketplace and with the other very proudly out of it, is able to produce ... the best children's, the best science, the best nature, the best public affairs and, I'm told, the best history programs on television. That's a wonderful, wonderful legacy. And it doesn't cost very much money for the American people to support public television.

Sun: Do you feel that public television is in jeopardy?

KB: It's always in jeopardy. Every year or every half-year somebody decides they don't like the political cut of one program and decide they're going to do away with the whole thing. My God, we now have a media, which is essentially a conservative media, still screaming about how liberal it is.

There's one lone, absolutely defiantly liberal voice out there, that was Bill Moyers, whose show is now done. And boy, you'd have thought this guy was screaming "Fire!" in a crowded theater and this is some communist we had to restrain and because of this we have to get rid of (public television) ... forgetting to look at the public television landscape, which has been peppered with dozens of conservative shows and has been a home base for conservative shows forever. William F. Buckley's "Firing Line" was one of the oldest programs on television. It's just ridiculous.

Sun: Documentaries have become more prevalent and popular in recent years, and you were one of the first to usher in this new wave of documentary filmmakers.

KB: It's been so heartening and they've come in every different shape and form, which is always really good. The word "documentary" was already like a sweater that the dryer had shrunk, an uncomfortably tight definition for stuff that ranged from Errol Morris' superb stylized work to the cinema verite of Frederick Wiseman, who's been out there for 40 years doing it, to the most recent cinema verite things that were so successful like "Spellbound."

And then you've got these physical filmmakers, such as (Morgan Spurlock of) "Super Size Me" and Michael Moore, and you've got this incredible interest in documentaries and we begin to realize that God is the greatest dramatist.

The best stories don't have to be made up. We tell stories that are fact-driven, Hollywood tells stories that are fiction-driven. What makes a good or a bad film, documentary or feature film, has to do with how well the story is told.

Sun: Is Michael Moore a legitimate documentarian?

KB: Absolutely. And I think what he's done, just by raising the visibility of the documentary, (is) a terrific service.

Sun: Still, many critics contend that Michael Moore played fast and loose with the facts in his critique of the Bush administration and the Iraq War in "Fahrenheit 9/11."

KB: That's an interesting thing. Last time I read the Constitution, and I actually read it and I carry around a copy of it in my pocket and I refer to it, we have in the Bill of Rights this freedom of speech. I'm not scared of ideas -- new ideas, radical ideas, different ideas -- and it's always the first thing that you fall back on when somebody is making a point that they're playing fast and loose with the facts.

Well, the point is, everybody plays fast and loose with facts. They all organize facts the way they want. George Will, Rush Limbaugh organize the facts the way they want. Michael Moore organizes the facts the way he wants and people who disagree with him go cuckoo. People who agree with him think he walks on water.

So the point of view is, a healthy country is one with lots of voices, all talented, all speaking different truths, all arguing different points of view. And those of us who are threatened and want to curtail (them) really haven't read our Constitution recently.

I don't know what to say to somebody who's afraid of an idea that's different than theirs. I'm not threatened by Bill O'Reilly. He doesn't make my world uncomfortable because I don't share his politics. Nor am I threatened by Michael Moore and I don't share his politics, either. I'm just happy to be in a world in which these two screaming men exist.

Sun: Being a baseball historian, what are your thoughts on the growing steroid scandal in that sport?

KB: It's just so sickening. I'm so disturbed by it and so unhappy and so anxious for that "Star Spangled Banner" to be played and the final words, which are not "... home of the brave" but "play ball!" to be yelled so we can go back to focusing on what is still glorious.

We have to remember the steroids stuff is ridiculous and horrible and a taint on all the people, but steroids don't make you hit the ball better. You still have to see the ball and you still have to find it. I'm not trying to excuse it. I find the behavior inexcusable; I find the lying ... even more inexcusable. But I just think that this is the greatest game that's ever been invented and it's always much more interesting to me when the game is on, than when we're worrying about Babe Ruth's off-the-field antics, or alcohol consumption or number of hot dogs he ate.

And the most significant thing about steroids has actually nothing to do with these grown men, who've clearly violated the sprit, if not the law, of the game they play, it's the example that they help to perpetuate for kids, who then themselves become victims of the pernicious effects and side effects of steroids.

If we can root that out, then we'll have done a good thing in all of us. But let's get back to the game.

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