A Q&A session with Ken Burns

Burns: We suffer from too much 'pluribus' and not enough 'unum.'

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By James Plath
FIRST ONLINE Nov 23, 2007

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[Bloomington-Normal, Ill.] Riding a crest of popularity following his most recent documentary, "The War," filmmaker Ken Burns came to Bloomington-Normal on November 1 as part of the Adlai E. Stevenson II Lecture Series, co-sponsored by Illinois State University and Illinois Wesleyan University.

He was an appropriate choice. Burns began an afternoon Q&A session at Illinois Wesleyan with a few remarks that showed he had at least one thing in common with Bloomington-Normal's most famous native son. Adlai Stevenson served as Governor of Illinois and later as U.N. Ambassador. But his own home town wouldn't support him in his two unsuccessful runs for the presidency. Burns, meanwhile, told a crowd of some 600 students, faculty, and community members that he also seems to have as many detractors as those who love his work. Before the questions began, Burns told a story about a day when he happily discovered he was the subject of a flattering editorial cartoon. But when he rushed outside to show his daughter, who was just getting off the school bus, she said, "Yeah, I know, look what somebody at school gave me." It was a different cartoon, one which he said showed "a bleary-eyed couple sitting on their couch, the TV set blaring, and the bubble over the TV says, 'Coming soon to PBS, O.J., a 2,750-hour documentary. And there's a bubble over the couple that says, 'Ken Burns must be stopped.'"

That won't come any time soon. Burns, who first found fame with his much-praised PBS documentary on "The Civil War" and was lauded as well for such series as "Jazz" and "Baseball," signed a contract with the public broadcasting station that would make A-Rod jealous. He's going to be producing documentaries for PBS through 2022, including an update on "Baseball" titled "The Tenth Inning."

After introductions from IWU president Dick Wilson and history professor Mike Young, Burns took the podium alone and shared some of his philosophies, including his observation that as a nation divided between red and blue and all kinds of other ways, "We suffer from too much 'pluribus' and not enough 'unum.'" History is the place where we can come together, he said. Then Burns fielded questions for an hour, talking rapidly and passionately about his work and the importance of oral histories and remembering. The questions came from various members of the audience, including former Bloomington mayor Judy Markowitz, and, yes, yours truly.

I'd like to know what kind of research you did to choose the four cities and towns that you chose [Mobile, Ala.; Sacramento, Calif.; Waterbury, Conn.; Luverne, Minn.]. It must have taken a lot of background research to figure out what kind of wonderful people to talk to.

It's actually more the opposite. I wish that I could tell you it was just darts on a map, because that's pretty much what happened. We first thought we could tell the story with one town, because we lived in the Northeast. We wanted to pick a town that not only would our audience, but us filmmakers would have no associations with. There'd be no preconceptions, there'd be no obligations to tell certain stories that everybody knew about--just pick a fresh town, and maybe we could see the whole war through the eyes of this one town, Waterbury, Connecticut. They had a wonderful archives, and an amazing story. But what we very quickly in a few days found out was that there wasn't going to be enough surviving veterans with enough range of combat experience to paint a picture of what it was like to be in that war--a number of pictures. We knew we couldn't tell every story, and we weren't going to be able to cover every episode. So we decided, at that point I decided to do four geographically distributed towns.

We had already read a memoir about a man named Eugene Sledge about his experiences on Peleliu and Okinawa, and we raced to see him down in Alabama and found, to our dismay, that he had just passed away. And his son introduced us to his best friend, and Sid introduced us to his sister Catherine, and we cast our net wider, and accidentally, just by putting our names in the paper and reaching out to veteran's groups as we did in every town, and the historical society, asked not for particular ethnic groups but whoever would come up who would have combat experience.

We then wanted to tell a West Coast story. We knew quite apart from anything else we wanted to tell a story of Japanese-Americans . . . because they had the un-American hypocritical experience of being American citizens and being taken and put into camps and then classified as enemy aliens and then later asked to serve as cannon fodder in segregated regiments. We picked Sacramento, not a well-known western city.

And then we were thrashing about for a small town. We had already met a pilot out of Washington, D.C. and he said he was from Luverne, and we went to Luverne and said, "Yep, this'll do it." But what we wanted to make sure is that we could go with all these towns sort of being a blank slate, in which we wouldn't bring preconceptions and expectations, and neither would you, as an audience. We would just go in, and whatever we discovered would be true, in a sense. We discovered, for example, a great fortuitous gift of discovering, deep in the archives, the bowels of the morgue at the Rock County Star Herald in Luverne, the weekly column of Al McIntosh, the editor who had turned down city jobs to help get his town through the worst of circumstances. And unlike Waterbury and Mobile and Sacramento that were utterly transformed by the war, Luverne wasn't changed psychologically or spiritually, but communally they were utterly changed. Al McIntosh (Tom Hanks in the film) used his column to help us understand what the war was doing to America and Americans.

So everywhere along the way, it wasn't so much doing research and then making the film; it was making the film and never stopping the research, never stopping discovering things.

Anybody with iPhoto knows about the Ken Burns Effect, which is used to describe your innovative way of adding movement to still photographs. I was wondering, though, if you could talk about the Studs Terkel Effect on your work. You know, Terkel as a chronicler of World War II, or even Herman Wouk as a storyteller of World War II, or any type of influences that might have come into play on this project.

Well, thank you. It's so funny in our technological times, the technological tail often wags the dog. I've been, for 35 years, interested in not just holding still photographs at arm's length as if it's a slideshow and you're just waiting until you get footage, but seeing still photographs as a kind of access to the past, the DNA, the building blocks of what we do, and rather energetically explore their landscapes and treat them, each photograph, like the feature filmmaker I used to want to be: as a long shot, a medium shot, a close shot--all the tools of a dramatic filmmaker--and that's what we've done. And 30 years after the fact, Steve Jobs called me up and said, "We've named this thing the 'Ken Burns Effect,' and so now I get introduced as the person who has had an effect named after him. It's a little bit funny that way.

You know, Studs has been a friend for many many years, he's been a first-person voice and an interview subject for my films. I hope he's still talking to be, because I've had to go out and shake and disabuse the country of the notion that this was "The Good War." We know why Studs called this war "The Good War," because our causes, our participation was unambiguous. But no war is good. We open up with Sam Hynes's statement, "There's no such thing as a good war, but only necessary wars." And I think that's the key word for us. In fact, we named, well before the Iraq War and we've been working on this for a long time, we named our first episode "The Necessary War" and I hope it reverberates with that.

But I've always been drawn, in a documentary tradition . . . to the notion that so-called ordinary people hold the key to history. So Studs, is, of course, very much a mentor. Wouk I've read, but less so. The dramatization for me automatically abstracts it to where I can't sort of identify this as a real person. They become agents of character, which is the author himself.

What I love, with film, is to go out and trust that all of us here could tell a much more important story about what this community is like, than a person who is your Congressman, you know?

I have an HD TV and was struck by how many different distinct sounds you can hear in the battle sequences. Could you talk about that?

Could you all hear that? This man has an HD TV and was able to get what we had intended ALL of you to get, which is a complicated sound-effects track. Every bit of footage taken during the Second World War was silent--no sound attached to it. Even when we saw a newsreel of the period, they--the newsreel producers--had added the tinny shots of explosions and the overripe symphonic soundtrack and the narrator. We did the same . . . and we researched painstakingly for years tens of thousands of sounds of war. We know what a German Panzer tank sounds like on snow, on mud, and on pavement. We know what an 80 millimeter gun the Germans had sounds like firing from a mile away, from right next to you as the shell ejects, and that shell hits either metal or pavement or mud. We know what an American plane sounds like as compared to a Japanese Zero, and which planes . . . we just continued to distinguish and distinguish.

At any given moment [in "The War"] we might have 150 different sounds going at any particular moment, so that you look at it and feel as if you were there.

Where did you find these sounds?

As in all things in this complicated and overpopulated world of ours, there are tens of thousands of people who do nothing but collect sound effects, and they are retired military people who have made it their point to meet their counterparts in other armies, and they have recorded sounds of guns at this range and that range. It was a really fascinating entry into a world.

As I grew up, my father was a little bit of an audiophile, and I didn't think any of it had rubbed off, but perhaps it did. I remember sometimes racing downstairs as a little boy because my father had this hi-fidelity stereo system that he had built and he had sound effects records in which a certain train had entered the station and it was all this loud clanging and hissing, and I delighted in that. So maybe all of what I'm doing is just continuing that search for what the actual sound is.

How are you able to access the military films?

The footage is really a remarkable story. In our Civil War series we had to rely on seeing what is an extraordinary number--more than a hundred thousand existing photographs--from the Civil War. In the Second World War we have again tens of thousands of still photographs that we had to cull, but also amazing footage. And this is taken, to some minor extent, by journalists that were embedded, but most of it--99 percent of it--by servicemen from the signal corps in the Army and from combat photographers with the Navy and Marines engaged. Extraordinarily brave people, if you just think for a moment that perhaps the neatest footage of the Second World War is a combat photographer looking backwards taking motion picture film of a soldier dropping at Omaha Beach in the face of that withering fire that morning of June 6, 1944. And if you think about it, you're just overwhelmed by the sacrifice of that moment. Who would get off [the transport] was a farm boy from Illinois. He's not there for money, he's not there for conquest or empire. He's there for an idea of freedom and he's willing to give up his life to do that . . . and there it goes. To me, one of the most amazing things in the footage is then you have to think, Who took that footage? He hasn't got a gun. He's up there farther ahead, who did that? And it's another amazing story.

We had the great good fortune . . . . Most of the documentary films you might see on the history channel have only a few months or even a few weeks to research a project, and so they go to the National Archives (which is the best source there is). We went to hundreds of archives--Moscow, Berlin, Tokyo, and London--but the National Archives was still our best stop. You get presented with a kind of greatest hits, and you normally take all your stuff from there because you don't have time. We spent five years in the bowels of the Archives, and if you get the chance to see Episode Four with the landing at Omaha Beach you will see that shot extended--not from the three-and-a-half seconds that you normally see in other documentaries--but we found after years of searching a beginning and a tail of that which takes it to seven, seven-and-a-quarter, seven-and-a-half seconds in which two other Americans die and exponentially enlarge the sacrifice, the service, the worry that is inherent in that, and you feel so grateful that we as a nation were willing to actually show what happened. That we were willing to record not only the good stuff but even the bad stuff, so that we now know and have a chance to really thank our husbands and our fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers for what they did. And by extension, understand what our young men and women in the service are going through now, and have a profound admiration for them as well, of what they've accomplished on our behalf.

You've already mentioned, in answer to one question, that you research these films in various archives. I think I heard you mention Berlin, perhaps Moscow. Would you Italy to that, or Great Britain? And what was your richest source as far as foreign film records of the war were concerned?

The richest source by far was the Imperial War Museum in London, and subsidiary British archives. There's almost negligible Italian archives of the war. They were Italian. They didn't do a very good job of it. They lost [audience laughter], and a lot of it got messed up. But we were able to find in Berlin and Tokyo repatriated archives that we captured and then returned to them. Ironically, our own United States government charges us nothing for the right to use this footage, and the people who charge us the most for access to the footage are the Germans and the Japanese [more audience laughter]. Can I just share my frustration with you for a few seconds, that when you're trying to honorably produce a film that gives a sense of what went on in the war, you're just very happy to not only have been on the right side, but have a government that's willing to do this? And now regret sharing it back with them, because they charge an arm and a leg for footage which our government just charges us the access to whatever form you needed it and doesn't charge you any rights fees. And I think we wouldn't charge a German or a Japanese either, if they came to the National Archives.

But we found stuff from hundreds of places. Remember, we were trying to merge a vast public archive recorded from around the world, collected haphazardly, particularly among the losers. But also stuff that hasn't seen the light of day. We found footage that had not been seen since it was originally screened, stuff that was originally in color that was made black-and-white to make a newsreel uniform and suddenly there the blood is red and not black, which shows something of the verisimilitude, the horror of that scene. Then we were also trying to merge this vast public archive with the private archive of the individuals we met in these small towns. So we wanted to find the picture of them with their grandma, then in front of the house with their dog. What was the picture that mom kept on the piano or mantelpiece while they were away? What's their Army ID? Their discharge letter? The horrible telegram that announced the death of a loved one? All of these things, so carefully preserved, we also had to figure out a way to take that and use the personal archival material and meld it with the public stuff, which was what our intention was.

Have you had feedback from the people you've made stars of?

It's just so wonderful, you know? After the Civil War series I got a call from Shelby Foote, who almost immediately had marriage proposals [audience laughter]. It was very fun. But he had taken 20 years out of his life (he's a novelist) to write this three-volume non-fiction history of the Civil War. It's the best--3000 pages, 20 years to write, I think it won the Pulitzer Prize, I think it cost you a hundred bucks to buy all three hardback copies or more. I think in 20 years between the time he finished it and the show, he sold about 30,000 sets. And in the few months after the series he sold 90,000 sets. So I got this call from him and he says [voice changing to imitate Foote's drawl], "Ken, you made me a millionaire [audience laughter].

So already women have fallen in love with Sam Hynes. I don't know if he's gotten marriage proposals, but I know people would like to do worse. Captain Singer--we used maiden names throughout, so that the familial connections wouldn't be confusing--I think of her as Captain Singer, but the identification of her is Captain Phillips, sister of Sid. She has just become the darling of Mobile, and they're all very excited. And Quentin Aanenson, our fighter pilot, has really traveled around the country now. People have been asking for him.

I'm very sorry to say, as in all complicated families, we've lost some people. We lost Ray Leopold--the Jew from Waterbury who liberated a concentration camp and spoke as eloquently as anyone in the film--in July. And I broke down and cried. I hadn't realized how much he had meant to me. You know, you see him for a day, but you film him and then he's with you every single day. And we just lost Earl Burke, the ball-turret gunner in the B-17, just last week.

We didn't know the names of . . . . You know the main principle image of the film that we have, of soldiers with sort of hollowed-out eyes? He's one-quarter of a litter bearer at Saipan, one of the graves registration crews. And we spent years trying to track them down, and we found out the guy that we used in the single image, his family doesn't want us to use his name because the war took him. He died of alcoholism way too early because of what he'd seen and had to pick up and take care of, for the rest of us. He was just overcome. But he worked before the war, before he was drafted, in Waterbury, Connecticut. Go figure, out of tens of thousands of images that hand-looked at, trying to figure out what would be the signature image, that we happened to accidentally pick one detail from one photograph, and the guy turns out to be from Waterbury, Connecticut. But another one of those, we were contacted by his family--another one of those four guys--and we were told, that's our dad, that's my husband. I was in Texas the other day and I got a call from the wife who said, "I'm in the hospital, and he's dying, would you talk to him? So she put me on speaker phone and he said "Ken, I'm dying." And I said, Mr. Wickens [sp?], we are so grateful for your service," and I spent 10 minutes talking to him and he just passed away a couple hours later. And so, you know, it's even more than them sort of becoming famous. It's as Sam Hynes said in front of the PBS convention in Dallas, "You know, I'm old, man, I'm not gonna live forever. But now I'm immortal." And I'll tell you what. Everybody who was in that war is immortal, because . . . we couldn't tell everybody's story, but we were suggesting that these four towns could be any four towns. I could've chosen Normal, Illinois or Bloomington, Illinois. Any town. Any four towns.

The English poet William Blake said we should find a world in a grain of sand ["To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour"]. That's what we did.

I haven't read much about how you became inspired to do this, but I imagine you have a story. The second question I have, How did you stay out of the Hollywood production, which always puts a lot of false things into a film?

First of all, I'm a documentary filmmaker, so I'm obligated to at least make a modicum of effort towards telling stuff that actually happened while making it up. I've had several brushes with Hollywood where they've wanted to do versions of films I've made, or parts, and I end up in meetings and have even seen scripts, and everything that's good about the script is already in my film, and everything that's bad is the stuff they make up. And I also notice that being an A-list director--people you'd recognize, Hollywood directors--they complain about "the executive producer hated my guts, they wouldn't let me have this, or he didn't give me this actor, he made me use this one, or I wanted this writer but he made me use her--and I'm just thinking to myself, in public television I haven't had that. Another way of putting it is, if you don't like my films, it's all my fault. You know? And that's the way I want it to be.

I can give you the two-second reason how this came about. Two things: One, a thousand veterans are dying each day. Two, a lot of our kids graduating from high school think that we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the Second World War. That is like a head-on collision. The urgency of not bearing witness to what these people, who have long not spoken about their experiences and are now just beginning, some of them, to talk, to share with us what really happened . . . . After "The Civil War," I wasn't going to do another film about war, but when I heard that, I just had to let go of that one personal feeling and have to do it. It's very important.

How long did it take you to put together, with all the research? And how much help, how many people does it take to do the research so you can start putting out your story?

That's a really great question, and it's very important, particularly the second half of that question, because when you acknowledge a Ken Burns film it represents the work of literally hundreds and hundreds of people. But I'm very happy to say that this was a handmade film, that the real people, the real core of this is just 12 people: myself and my co-director and co-director Lynn Novick, who deserves equal credit for this film, our writer, Jeffrey C. Ward [sp?], producer Sarah Botstein, two co-producers--Peter Miller and David McMahon, my son-in-law (as he puts it, "job security"; as I put it, "security" . . . for my daughter) [audience laughter]--and then we had three editors and their three assistants, and those three assistants are just kids. So those 12 people sort of made this film, and we have worked, six of us, coming up on seven years.

But I was so shocked by the statistic of a thousand a day, so shocked by the statistic of what our kids don't know, who thought we fought against the Russians, that I had to do it. It's been a lot of water under the bridge. It's really, really hard work to make these films. I live in New Hampshire, where we make maple syrup and it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. Right? You know about that process. And that's sort of like a documentary film. We have, in this case, a 100-to-one ratio of footage seen, collected, and catalogued, to footage that was used. So we have to be masters not only of the near-15 hours that you might have seen, but also the 1500 hours that we had to know and master to do it. It's memorizing quotes that people say, it's knowing and recognizing a photograph, and having to figure out its provenance if it's unclear. Was it really at Saipan? Maybe it's at Tinian, and we want to make sure that in none of the footage or the photographs that we report as the Battle of Saipan . . . that we're not mistakenly throwing in a Tinian shot.

You know, other filmmakers get away with that all the time. I guarantee that every other film you've seen about D-Day--even a documentary--has had footage from other parts of that landing at Normandy, and more importantly has had lots of footage of rehearsal footage that the United States government shot in landings in Ireland and England, just to test how people could land at the beach, and what would happen if they threw up smoke. It's very dramatic and wonderful footage, and it's in every documentary you've ever seen--including Oscar-winning ones--and there's not a single bit of footage I know of from that in ours. It's all Omaha Beach. We hope we haven't made any mistakes, but it's a very difficult process. When you see a Ken Burns film, I'm kind of like the conductor of a very talented orchestra. All I'm doing is this [waves his arms].

Could you talk about the Veterans History Project, and what the long-term potential is for that?

I realized very early on that because we were doing this bottom-up, arbitrary, impressionistic view of the Second World War, there were going to be millions of stories we couldn't tell. After "The Civil War," "Baseball," and "Jazz," in a very ad hoc fashion sometimes local PBS stations would produce a film, a half-hour film or an hour film about what we did in the Civil War, or what Triple-A team we had in our town, or what jazz hey-day we had, or where the pubs were. There were about a half dozen such films, and early on I went to the head of PBS and I told her, "We should encourage this, we should mandate this--that everybody should go out using the template of our film and try to do local stories. And by God, there have been all of these great films done at local levels. They have made amazing films and touched incredibly dramatic stories. And they initiated, on the local level, 117 oral history projects. That is to say, You've got a relative with a story to tell, you've got a story to tell. Come visit us, or shoot them and here's the film.

Meanwhile, we had approached, several years ago, the Library of Congress and their Veterans History Project, a Congressionally-mandated program in the Library of Congress which would kind of collect the testimony in whatever shape or form they could of veterans in all of the wars. I said, let's partner together, and they said, terrific. So you can go to their Web site--I think it's loc.gov/veteranshistoryproject--or PBS.org/thewar and you can download from us some simple lighting and shooting instructions, some sample questions, and you can get grandpa, great-grandpa, husband, or wife--get everybody's stories and just send them there. And people are doing this now all across the country. We've engaged schools, and they're working on using these films, and those veterans willing to tell that terrible, terrible news as part of those deep-locked memories, a grateful republic will be able to keep them forever. And we don't need for you to send them in. You can keep them for yourselves, if you want. They're great ways to bind families together. But if you're willing to make a copy, then that way the republic can keep it and cherish it and we'll have that much of a better record for those future historians to understand what actually took place.

My husband was a World War II vet. He died a month ago. He was 81 years old. He was honored because he had been wounded in action when he was 18 in southern France, but he would never, never talk about it. We never watched any war movies. Were you able to free some of these men from the bonds that kept them from discussing this and their experiences? Because there must be a lot of World War II vets who haven't been able to let this out. And I always have felt bad that my husband wasn't able to talk about it.

Your question is at the heart of why we made the film. I'm sorry for your loss, first of all, and grateful for his service. The question that has almost become a joke--which is, "Daddy, what did you do in the war?"--nobody really actually wants to know the answer to that. We were after, and we knew that only a fraction of the people that we spoke to-and we spoke to more than 600 people to get the 40+ that we interviewed for the film-who were actually capable of talk. Some people came back from the war and they talked about it. Most people came back from the war and they never spoke about it. Towards the end of their life, in some cases, with the awareness of their own mortality, as their children or their grandchildren pressured, as friends died off, but let's just remember what actually happens in war.

I've said that we were trying to get at a universal healing experience and it transcended the particulars of the Second World War. And as we begin to seem them, we know that by sharing this film and having forums with Iraqi and Afghanistan vets and Vietnam vets that it's the same. And I'm sure if by some strange magical potion we could import someone from the Peloponnesian Wars, they'd tell you the same thing: I was scared, I was bored, I was hot, I was cold, I saw bad things, I had to do bad things, I lost good friends. Let's just take the last one of those. All the others you understand. But you leave home, you're 18 years old, you've made friends at home and you've got a bond with your family. But in the intensity of basic training and the more intense intensity of combat, you forge relationships with other human beings that will never be replicated in your life . . . ever. And say, you turn this way, and you turn back, and the person is gone. I don't mean just gone "passed away," but killed in a horrible, horrible way. Who do you tell? Can you come back and tell your best friend, or your pop or your mom, what you saw? Or later on, when you marry, your wife? Maybe it is best to just sort of lock it away and move on, and that generation did that admirably. Now we're in a therapeutic generation. We've given it a name--post-traumatic stress--and we know how to talk and treat it, and that's good too. But I've never been upset with a veteran who had to keep it in, because just the small taste of what I've seen in this footage and what I've heard from these veterans is so unspeakably bad and it ought to give every human being pause before entering a war. But you know what? We always forget. We get excited. WE'RE GOIN' TO WAR! They drove out with their carriages, with their picnic baskets before the Civil War to Manassas. They were going to watch the war! And then they went, horror-stricken, back to Washington as they saw their husbands and their sons and their fathers gut-shot on the Virginia countryside.

And so we have an obligation to tell the truth, to remember. For those people we did speak to, it took a long time for them to gain a sense of our trust, that we weren't going to manipulate it. Lynn did many of the interviews, and she, I think, being a woman was actually able to permit some of these men to say stuff that I don't think they would have told me. Now, I got some great stuff out of them, and Paul Fussell broke down constantly and told things he'd never spoken to anybody else before. But we listened, and we heard things that we encouraged. In fact, the single greatest praise as a filmmaker, I heard . . . . We still shoot 16mm film, so every 12 minutes we had to change a roll, and there's sort of awkward silence because we don't want them to keep talking because we're not recording, and we don't want to engage them in what they're going to say next because we want it to be fresh, so we talk about the weather or baseball or something like that. And I remember, after one roll, a middle-aged son was listening on the couch quietly as we were filming and he just turned to his father and he said, "Pop, you never told us that." And he realized that we were there at the birth of expressed memory, and how lucky we are. I don't know if you've seen the series, but you can extrapolate what your husband went through, and in a way that permits him to be present, does it not?

But I think we should always permit someone not to speak at all. They were just kids at the time.

I congratulate you. What you've done is open the eyes of a lot of young people. I had the good fortune of being on a ship named after Effingham County, Illinois, and a young high school student found out that I was on it and called to ask if I'd come down for an interview. He did a great job, because the public television in Charleston used part of that interview on their public television, and what he's gotten people to do with public television, they've got over a hundred and fifty interviews and I guess they're going to put a program together. But getting the high school students to be interested in this, to me that's a big plus.

You know, sir, they're the future of our country. We think of the past as being gone and worry about the relevance of this, but Harry Truman said, "The only thing that's really new is the history you don't know." And it has an incredibly palliative effect for the future, because if you don't know where you've been, you can't possibly know where you are, and you don't know where you're going. Most of us here feel a kind of general malaise about what's happened, and we see lots of different reasons why it is--some are political, some are cultural, some are combinations--and it's difficult to assess exactly what the root cause is and attack it. But anybody who's been a parent knows that you don't always do things directly. . . . I think history's a really good way to have a consensus. We're so divided, as I was saying earlier. History's a place where we share in common, it's a place to come together. We are so divided in so many other ways that I find history is the way we can do that. And what's been great has been response from young folks to this series. We just didn't know. I remember just as we were finishing the film, which is what we do, we had three or four screening where we showed the whole thing over two, three days to lots of people, all different age groups, from teenagers up to veterans. And most of them were not experts on World War II or filmmaking. We just want, as we call them, "warm bodies," people to watch and people to share responses. Sometimes we do it before a film is done, and it helps to watch their reactions. And I remember there was a kid who said, "Sixty million people died? I thought it was just six million."

Just a simple fact like that. Now, when I grew up I wasn't taught about the holocaust. It was a great shame of our schools. It wasn't taught at all. My daddy had to take me and show me the movie "Judgment at Nuremburg," where in the middle of the film, the climax, they turn off the lights and they show the movie within the movie of the bodies. As a kid, I was just shocked at that. That's my introduction to the holocaust and then all the other stuff that came along.

Now, they don't get up to World War II in their survey history courses. Vietnam is ancient history to kids now, and World War II is sort of near the Peloponnesian Wars in that time line. A lot of it's our consumer culture that convinces that if we just buy the right blue jeans and drive the right pick-up truck and smell the right way and have the right handbag, everything will be all right. And of course it's not going to be all right, so we have to figure out the strategies to bind ourselves together. History to me is one way we can do that.

What is your next project?

Well, I'm signed up till 2022, so you don't actually have time enough this afternoon to hear about all the things I'm going to do [audience laughter]. But we are halfway through editing a massive series on a six-part, 12 hours plus history of our National Parks--not travelogue, not pretty pictures of wildlife and nature, though we have that, not the inn that you should stay at, but the history of the individuals and the ideas that made the National Parks possible. We take it for granted, but for the first time in human history--an utterly American idea--we set aside land, not for the privileges of kings and nobleman or rich people, but for everybody and for all time. And the story of how that happened--of the excessive interest in a particular piece of land, of how somebody saved it from extractive interests, and it is now a part of our patrimony . . . . Remember, you and I own some of the best beachfront property on earth. You and I own some of the most spectacular mountain ranges. You and I personally own the grandest canyon on earth. That's a really great story of how that came about, and that's what we're doing next. Please stay tuned!

Just to change the tempo a little for the last question, I loved your thing on baseball. I thought the thing that moved me the most was that you said baseball made a small-time game, most of the different inventions and games in the world came from New York City. I thought that was a great thing. The other thing is, because I'm a fanatic sports fan, there's two other sports I thought that might lend to your thinking. One would be boxing, and the other would be college football. Am I right about that, or wrong?

You're totally right about that. I was giving you a real mean look, but you're absolutely right. And I've done boxing. I made a film on the life of Jack Johnson, the first African-American heavyweight champion, called "Unforgivable Blackness," which I think is a really good film. If you haven't had a chance to see it, I hope you do. I agree with you.

What we're looking for, what I felt, and the reason why I did baseball, I saw baseball, no joke, as the sequel to "The Civil War" series. We too often think that our narrative is merely a political-military narrative, but within baseball, same as the political-military narrative, we could also find issues of immigration and assimilation, we could find the growth and decay and now rebirth of the great cities, we could find the exclusion of women and the nature of popular culture and advertising, labor and management, those who own the ballpark and those whose skills make the game so interesting. And most important to me, the central sub-theme of American life is race. You scratch the surface, the guy who articulated our most important freedoms, who wrote the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence ("We hold these truths that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights")--you know, this is written by a guy who owned more than 200 human beings at the time, never saw the hypocrisy, never saw the contradiction, and most importantly, set in motion an American era of constantly dealing with the issue of rights. And it's at the heart of baseball. The finest moment is when Jackie Robinson comes . . . . So, you know, it's there. Boxing has some of the same material. But I think what we're also looking for is a compassion. Something that accompanies an era, and college football does that in an extremely interesting way. Being a Midwest boy from Ann Arbor, Michigan, college football has, umm, passing interest [audience laughter]. But I'm glad you moved to the more important subject of baseball for the last question. And we are, by the way, to answer the question about what we're doing next, we're also updating our "Baseball" series with a "Tenth Inning," a tenth chapter, a tenth episode that will take us from '94 to the recent good and bad things in the game that still reflects us pretty well.

Thank you so much for your patience!

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