0:02

I'm Alec Baldwin, and you were listening

0:05

to Here's the thing I

0:08

think of a recent documentary you've

0:10

loved. The slow pan over

0:12

still photos, the tight queue

0:15

of period music, the subtle

0:17

shift from a personal story to a historical

0:19

one. These techniques have become

0:22

so associated with Ken Burns

0:24

that the word burns in is found

0:26

everywhere from the New Yorker

0:29

to the Times of Israel. And like

0:31

any great artist, Burns has

0:33

created a whole studio of talent

0:36

to carry out his vision. In nine

0:39

he brought on board the brilliant Lynn Novic,

0:41

with whom he just wrapped up ten years of

0:44

work on PBS's The Vietnam

0:46

War. The series wades

0:49

deep into every possible angle of

0:51

a conflict still seared into

0:53

the American consciousness. I

0:55

invited them on the show to talk about

0:58

Vietnam, their paths to a making,

1:00

and they're ridiculously packed production

1:03

schedule. We are planned out

1:05

to and we can waste most of your time

1:08

telling you even the thumbnail descriptions

1:10

of all the things we're doing on the American Revolution and

1:12

Ernest Hemingway and Muhammad Ali in the History

1:14

of Reconstruction lb J

1:17

and civil rights, the possibilities

1:19

must be infinite. Is

1:21

budget a factor? No, who's the decider?

1:24

No, I'm at work, I'm the decider. So

1:26

far, how do you settle on? Hemingway is supposed

1:28

to fit general. So here's what it

1:30

is. It's sort of like friends and love and

1:32

intimacy. We have lots of ideas, as

1:34

you're saying, the cauldrons are all boiling

1:36

over with potential projects, and we think about

1:38

them. We're making lists all the time, but their ideas,

1:40

they're the pink bong balls of the lottery. But

1:43

every once in a while, something goes down in here. So

1:45

for example, Jeff Ward our principal writer,

1:47

and Lynn and I've been talking about Hemingway. Jeff

1:50

and I have been talking since the eighties. Hemingway has been

1:52

on shortlist of things. And then finally

1:54

it's just the gut feeling it comes

1:56

down and say yes, it's time to do Hemmingway.

2:00

Um, now, Lynn, I want to ask you, tell

2:02

me what film and you

2:04

studied American studies at Yale. Yeah.

2:07

Were your parents and the biz at all? No,

2:09

not at all. They're both sort of more in science

2:11

and math. My father's a biologist, my mother's

2:13

a neuropsychologist, so I'm kind of the outlier in the

2:15

family. It was a neuropsychologist who does

2:18

evaluations of kids with learning issues and tries

2:20

to figure out what's going on in their brains and then helps

2:22

figure out how to fix it. And you went to Yale

2:24

four. I thought I was going to be

2:26

premat actually, and that lasted about six

2:28

weeks and I sort of checking it

2:30

down. Yes, exactly. And

2:33

when I sort of evolved into realizing

2:35

I wanted to work in documentary film, they kept saying,

2:37

Okay, but how's that going to work? Where

2:39

are you? Where are you going to actually work? Are you ever going

2:42

to have a job? What are you going to do with yourself?

2:44

Are you gonna move out? Yeah? Exactly. There

2:46

was some of that too. So where did it begin for you in

2:48

terms of when you shouted American studies

2:50

at Yale? Did you go to graduate school? I

2:52

didn't. I thought about going to film school, but at

2:54

the time that I graduated, most film schools really

2:56

focused on narrative scripted. Um

2:59

you know drogs they are now, No, they

3:01

weren't there. You couldn't really study it in film school.

3:03

I don't think we talk about that, but when you

3:05

get out of Yale. So what's the path too? It

3:07

was a very non linear path. Um.

3:10

I worked for a while as a research assistant at the Smithsonian

3:13

Museum of American History, and then I realized

3:15

I didn't want to be a historian and work in a

3:17

museum, and I wanted to work on historical

3:19

documentaries. And I eventually got

3:21

an internship at w n E T here and

3:23

got some some production experience. I've

3:25

freelanced. I worked for Bill Moyers for several years.

3:28

That was wonderful. It was I was going

3:30

to graduate school basically in how

3:32

to do this, And then, luckily for me, I

3:34

figured out that ken Burns was working on a film on the

3:36

Civil War, and I just waited until

3:39

I've heard that he might have an opening, and then I

3:41

applied. And that was what do you think

3:43

he hired you? Four? What do you think ken burn saw

3:45

in you? That's a very good question. I

3:48

guess maybe. Um, I was passionate

3:51

and interested and I wanted to learn, I will

3:53

say those things. And I think having

3:55

worked with film Moyer's helped a little bit. So

4:00

So, first of all, where I

4:02

went to Hampshire College and study

4:04

film and photography every single semester,

4:07

every single semester, every single semester, and

4:09

started we did organize a little film company

4:11

in the college to do uh completely

4:14

at cost films for nonprofits

4:16

in western Massachusetts. And so following

4:19

that model, I started a company called Florentine

4:21

Films after I graduated, and the first one

4:23

was one on the Brooklyn Bridge. I moved out in Manhattan

4:26

up to up to the wilds of New Hampshire

4:28

then, but we were finishing the Civil War. It

4:31

was done or a month or two from

4:33

locking, and I had lost an

4:35

associate producer who just sort

4:37

of very unceremoniously left,

4:39

and friends suggested that I

4:41

talked to Lynn, and she said, you know, I'd

4:43

love this job. You know, all of her credentials

4:46

seemed perfect and and but she

4:48

was going to get married and go on her honeymoon. She wouldn't

4:50

be able to start until mid July. Said that's fine,

4:52

that's fine, that's fine. We take the long view this

4:54

this project had taken five and a half years, and

4:57

uh, she was gonna attend to some rights

4:59

issues for the photographs and other things. And

5:02

the previous person told me they thought it would be

5:04

done the following February.

5:06

By August fifteen, she had it done and

5:08

we've been working together ever since, like

5:11

a month. So so

5:13

Moyers was more shall we say, agit prop

5:15

than a lot of other people. He was a very political

5:18

guy, was the projects I worked

5:20

with him on. Joseph Campbell's series was not really

5:22

political, sort of existential and really

5:24

deep way about philosophical Yeah,

5:27

and that was surprising to me that I when I was

5:29

working on it, I thought, she, I don't know if American people

5:31

are gonna want to watch six or eight

5:33

hours of talking about philosophy and the

5:35

meaning of life, and turned out to be a huge

5:37

hit because there's such a hunger for that kind of conversation.

5:40

Um. Just watching Bill work and seeing how he related

5:43

to the people that he spoke to and the kind of quality

5:45

that he expected of all the producers that worked there was

5:47

a great education for

5:49

you. Ken, I'll go with you first, and then Lynn,

5:52

what did Vietnam mean to you personally?

5:55

At the advent of the project. So I

5:57

always picked things I don't know about and want

5:59

to know about. Rather telling you what I know, I'd

6:01

rather share with you our process of discovery.

6:04

So two films Baseball, which Lenn and I

6:06

produced together uh In

6:08

in the nineties. I thought I knew something because

6:10

I've been a wild about baseball from the moment

6:12

I could remember anything, and I

6:15

instantly found out how little I knew. I

6:17

grew up in Antarbora, Michigan. I was

6:19

present for the first teaching against

6:21

the war and demonstrations, and I

6:23

had a high draft number. But it was very politically

6:26

active campus, very politically active campus,

6:28

and a politically active father, and you

6:30

know, I was just thought, well, I know everything

6:32

about it. And basically

6:34

for ten and a half years, it was daily humiliation

6:36

of what we didn't know. And what's so great is

6:38

that to basically lose your baggage

6:41

early on, lose that conventional wisdom

6:43

that actually is wrong, and then

6:45

be able to avail ourselves in a very clean

6:48

way of more than forty years

6:50

of new scholarship in every single

6:52

department, so that we got excited because

6:54

we dissembled all these scholars there, and as

6:57

we're working first with proposals, then with

6:59

early scripts, then with advanced scripts, then

7:01

with assemblies and rough cuts and fine cuts,

7:03

they're all blown away, not by

7:05

what they've contributed, which is significant

7:08

but what their colleagues have contributed because they

7:10

don't know that stuff. And then all the other colleagues

7:12

are saying the same thing about their stuff, and

7:14

you begin to realize, Wow, we are aggregating

7:16

in here the latest stuff. You know, the centrality

7:19

of Ho Chi Minh to the leadership of the Vietnam

7:22

we assume, you know, we so

7:24

we we we have in episode one. It turns

7:26

out it's another guy who's really in charge,

7:29

and he'll be a character in old ten episodes.

7:32

But everybody presumed Ho Ho

7:34

Ho Chi Minh and LF is gonna win, and

7:37

nobody asked another question about that. I know Lynn

7:39

will agree with me. When Americans talk

7:41

about Vietnam, we just talk about

7:43

ourselves, and that what what we needed to do

7:46

was to triangulate with all the other

7:48

perspectives, not just the enemy. This

7:50

isn't just Clint eas We're doing postcards

7:53

and all of that sort of stuff. It's finding

7:55

out what the civilians felt, the enemy felt,

7:57

the viet Cong felt, But then our our our

7:59

all the South Vietnamese who get

8:01

treated like you know what all the time,

8:04

and their civilians and their protesters,

8:06

as well as all the servicemen

8:08

that we did in the air or marines

8:11

or army guys and everybody all the

8:13

way out to deserters and draft dodgers

8:15

across the American spectrum. And if you

8:17

then do that, then the kind

8:20

of political dialectic loses

8:22

its its force because you realize

8:24

that more than one truth could obtain at

8:27

any given moment. From my money,

8:29

what I walked away with that project was that ho Chiman

8:31

was a man who understood his people and what

8:33

they wanted and what he needed more than

8:36

his American counterparts. From the moment Kennedy

8:38

is assassinated to the moment that Nixon resigns.

8:40

Yes, you go, there's a line from

8:43

sixty three all the way down to seventy

8:45

three. There's ten years there was out

8:47

of power when he died in sixty nine, and by

8:49

sixty four he had essentially neutralized

8:52

himself on the Polite

8:54

Bureau. From there on end he had opposed the tet

8:56

offensive vehemently, and his secretary

8:58

was throughout

9:00

the fifties and then on in the early sixties. And you

9:02

get to some point in this project and go, my

9:05

god, I'm just no, My my next project

9:07

is going to be about the boy Scouts. No, Because

9:09

Lynn came in and we looked at each other and realized we

9:12

had to do Vietnam, inviting exactly

9:14

what you just talked about. The Second

9:16

World War. Our first episode is called a necessary

9:19

war. But what would happen if you took a war

9:21

in which there's not a positive

9:24

that. You know, we didn't unite the Union and free

9:26

slaves, we didn't end the world of militarism

9:29

and fascism. And Americans particularly

9:32

are susceptible to the disease of argument

9:34

that their Second World War they call it the good War.

9:36

It's obviously not the good war. Sixty million people

9:38

died, that's not a good war. You know, you can't

9:41

do that. History is not a parlor game. When they're

9:43

more PTSD candidates from World War Two

9:45

than there are in Vietnam. We just didn't have a name

9:47

and a convenient level. You're saying in the sense that Vietnam

9:49

was no worse than the other war, that's hugely important. It

9:51

was divisive. I think, um,

9:54

it is different than the other wars before

9:56

then that we paid attention to and

9:58

that we didn't win. And it was so divisive

10:00

while it was going on, and we never could talk

10:03

about like Kinna saying, so I

10:05

always think a bit sort of like this childhood

10:07

trauma, say that we never talked about and just never

10:09

dealt with, and it just keeps cooking away underneath

10:12

the surface. And so that's why the

10:14

film was the most challenging thing we've ever done.

10:16

And like Kenna's saying, just this chance to bring people

10:18

together to kind of start over. Okay,

10:21

something terrible happened. We've never really figured it out.

10:23

We don't know what it was, We don't know what was

10:25

going on in Vietnam. Maybe if we would

10:27

just let people tell us their story and

10:29

put it together, we could find out some

10:31

sort of deeper truths that we've never really acknowledged.

10:33

Obviously, the Vietnam War has been covered in you

10:36

know, to a fairy Well and film,

10:38

in books, in Broadway musicals.

10:41

Do you start by immersing yourself and what other people

10:43

have done or you just tune that out completely.

10:45

It's a really tough one because you don't want

10:48

to imitate when anybody else has done. And

10:50

we've certainly carry around in all of our heads the Hollywood

10:52

versions of the Vietnam War, so we didn't have to immerse

10:55

ourselves. They're just they're present health poclets

10:57

now put you in the deer Hunter. We're very familiar

10:59

with those. But for documentaries that

11:01

have been done, and there have been some great ones, and there have been some

11:03

very sort of dated things that were great at

11:05

their time, we sort of check them at the door.

11:08

Our colleagues have to look at all that for for footage

11:10

and stills, so for research perverses,

11:12

we have to go through everything and see what's out there.

11:14

I go to a monastery and take a vale of silence.

11:17

I will not look at anything anywhere,

11:19

nothing, and just try to make sure complete.

11:23

Even though I've seen this, has lind said that, even though I've seen

11:25

this stuff, I need to be free of I'm always in President

11:27

Lincoln. It's difficult. I read

11:29

a lot too. I mean, I think a lot of you know, we we do

11:31

have a big team of people helping us. So I've been in an

11:33

interview you did with somebody where you mentioned a

11:36

board of advisors that you can so describe

11:38

the board of advisors and what their role is. Yeah,

11:40

so we we put together the foremost

11:42

experts on the subject whatever film we're working

11:45

on. So in this particular case, you have an ad hoc consultants

11:48

like that people some some We have a couple

11:50

of people who come on more than one project because they just understand

11:52

American history and pretty much can talk about

11:54

and understand. And every Bill Luchenburg is

11:56

in nineties something year old, yeah year

11:59

old historians, Dean of American Historians. He's

12:01

we don't leave home without him. He was with my Hue Long

12:04

film back in the early eighties and I think he's

12:06

just done the majority of the film since. But

12:08

for this case, we also wanted um veterans,

12:11

we wanted Vietnamese historians, we wanted military

12:13

storms, you wanted social historians, pop culture,

12:16

Hispanic American, African American

12:18

presidential audio. Right, So it's it's

12:20

a wide range. Actually, probably twenty people

12:22

by the time we collect all these different experts.

12:25

Some of them read scripts and then don't come to screenings,

12:27

some kind of screenings and haven't read a script. Some are

12:30

there every step of the way, and their

12:32

roles kind of evolve over time as the film evolved.

12:34

You you remember in another interview

12:37

you will also reference how you

12:39

had the Vietnamese producer Ho

12:43

Ho dang Wa, and you mentioned said

12:45

in another project you did where you were interviewing

12:47

the famous Japanese baseball player, and you couldn't keep

12:50

up with him, and you couldn't that you're a follower, so

12:52

you decided you wanted to approach things differently. But

12:54

but you also mentioned that you were talking to some of these

12:56

men in the Vietnamese counterparts,

12:58

and you were kind of taking with how gracious they

13:00

were talking about people you knew they hated in a despise

13:03

and had fought in war. Very different

13:05

from the American point of because when Americans

13:07

talk about these things it's often very heated.

13:09

We had both, you know, we had people on

13:11

both sides that talked about their hatred

13:14

for the enemy. But it's interesting now that they're

13:16

at the age that they're at and

13:18

many of them are grandfathers and have survived,

13:21

they're most curious. Like we we were

13:23

able before the film came out to share with Center

13:26

McCain, who we did not interview, and consciously

13:28

told him early on in the project we weren't

13:30

going to interview him, or carry or Kissinger

13:32

or heroes. That

13:35

wasn't been a big because no, no, no, because they're

13:37

still polishing their apple in the public sphere,

13:39

and we didn't want any of that. We want people

13:41

that you didn't know, and then they

13:44

would be characters carry and and McCain

13:46

and Kissinger and and but

13:48

they couldn't try to put their thumb on the

13:51

scale in anyway. He got it immediately. But when it

13:53

was done done, he invited us

13:55

in for what was just going to be a few minutes. All he

13:57

wanted to watch, and he kept extending

13:59

it in the aids said no, you've got to go. Was

14:02

he wanted to watch them the other side.

14:04

And what you begin to realize is

14:06

that at that point of combat, which is

14:09

where human beings are at their very worst,

14:11

they're really good at killing the other people and avoiding

14:13

being killed or all this stuff happens. But

14:16

it's hell, and we couldn't even possibly

14:18

imagine what it's like. And we've tried so hard in so

14:20

many films, from Civil War through World War

14:22

Two into this. But they recognize

14:25

each other, and they that recognition has

14:27

transcendent, and so he wants to see

14:29

what they're saying, and what they're saying sounds

14:31

so exactly like our marines and our

14:33

army guys. And so you have a marine,

14:35

for example, Karmar Lantis who says you

14:38

know, we're not the dominant

14:40

species on the planet because we're nice,

14:42

right, And people complained that, oh, the military

14:45

turns young men into killing machines. I'd suggest

14:47

it's only finishing school. On the other side, we

14:49

have an n V a young soldier now kind of beloved,

14:52

David McCullough, Yoda uh

14:54

figure in in in their culture, and

14:57

he says, um, humans are

14:59

the only animal the kill when they're not

15:01

hungry. I've been in the jungle. I spend time in

15:03

the jungle. Even the tiger does not kill

15:05

when it's not hungry. And so what

15:07

you find on the front line is

15:10

a kind of similarity. And so for the North

15:12

Vietnamese, nobody had asked them these questions before,

15:14

because I remember, this is the singular victory

15:17

of the people capital p So they've

15:19

never heard about losses. They've never seen

15:21

their dead bodies scooped up with uh

15:24

you know, you know, bulldozers and things like

15:26

that, and no one said, what did you feel,

15:28

who did you lose? What did your mother worry about? Which

15:31

is the questions we in a kind of egocentric,

15:33

narcissistic Western society kind

15:35

of promote. And so when you

15:38

hear them they break down and cry just

15:40

like our guys do, and they get outraged

15:42

just like our guys doing. It's a pretty

15:45

it's a wonderful affirmation of what

15:47

we sort of loosely talk about

15:49

and don't really believe is a common humanity.

15:52

I think, as this is evolved in my life,

15:55

I'm somebody that as a boy on

15:57

Long Island, they named an award

16:00

my high school, uh for the most

16:02

improved athlete that was called the Roland

16:04

Floria Award, who died

16:07

two weeks before he was meant to come home. He was all

16:09

ready to get discharged. And he was

16:11

the brother of a family that lived down the block

16:13

from us, and the and the sisters in the family were

16:15

our babysitters. And as

16:17

this is evolved in my life watching films

16:20

which Full Metal Jacket is my favorite because you distill

16:22

it down to the the indefective ability

16:24

of the of the enemy. It's a girl

16:26

with a gun in a building and just she's gonna

16:29

take it all the way down the line and kills many of her

16:31

enemy as she can infend. And you met

16:33

her in real life in the Ted Offensive

16:35

a couple of times, right, I mean, you met

16:38

that counterpart from full matile jacket, but it

16:40

really a real person. But for me, what we would

16:42

I arrived at the point I arrived at is not

16:44

just Ellsberg, Pentagon

16:47

papers McNamara. We knew

16:49

was wrong at the time, not in hindsight. We knew

16:51

it was wrong. They knew it

16:54

was a mistake in

16:56

the middle of it. When it also takes me

16:58

to us is the evolution of the MA are in

17:00

military. People are embedded. It's

17:02

a limited transparency, there's no draft,

17:04

it's a professional military. The ten part

17:06

documentary I'd like to see Lennovik and ken Burns

17:09

do is the history of the U. S Military

17:11

and how we've arrived where we are now. We're on

17:13

one hand, you believe even

17:15

though a hornet's nest has been kicked,

17:18

maybe we kicked it, Maybe we should

17:20

have, maybe we shouldn't in the Middle East, But the point of

17:22

the fact matter is we've kicked its kicked

17:24

and if we walk away, we can't walk away.

17:27

We have to engage somewhere, some where

17:29

we engage and how is always the question. But

17:31

the idea that we can just hold the bartend to come home is ridiculous.

17:34

But but but I want to ask you both back

17:37

to one thing that I just in this question of

17:39

heroes, because it's come up a few times about what's

17:41

the hero, and this film taught us that there's lots of different

17:43

ways to be a hero in a situation like this.

17:46

And they're certainly incredibly heroic soldiers

17:48

on both sides, and you know, sacrifice

17:50

for other people and are brave and do incredible

17:52

things and sometimes suffer terribly

17:55

for it. But they're also the heroes

17:57

who went to Canada and the heroes who protested

17:59

the war, and the heroes who revealed

18:01

what was wrong about the war, you know, and the reporters

18:03

who tried to cover it, and the Vietnamese

18:06

who didn't believe that what their government was doing was right.

18:08

So it's just it's sort of up ended our no conventional

18:10

wisdom of what's the hero, which may deal

18:12

with this really horrendous tragedy over

18:15

ten years inspiring for us. Actually,

18:17

I was overcome by a Rory Kennedy's

18:19

movie Last Days of Vietnam, which he talks

18:22

about that guy that was the guy that got everybody out of thereon

18:25

Yeah, he's tortured, Stewart Harrington

18:28

by the people they left behind. To this day, you

18:30

know and and like he personally feels

18:32

he's carrying the weight of the decisions

18:34

made by people in Washington. My

18:37

next question for you is, um,

18:39

are you a filmmaker or a journalist? And

18:43

an easy one, I think yeah. I think we definitely

18:45

in ourselves filmmakers and not journalists. But

18:47

have you picked up some kind of you Obviously you've acquired

18:49

some journalistic education along the world, trying to be

18:51

really scrupulous about what we think is

18:54

true and what the facts are the way of journalist

18:56

would, but we really want distance to

18:58

be able to evaluate which facts are important.

19:00

So Philip Graham, who owned the Washington Post,

19:03

um said that journalism

19:05

is the first rough draft of history. It's a great

19:07

thing. But what history is able to do is come back

19:09

and triangulate, take advantage of

19:11

the perspective. The passage of time has permitted

19:14

us to get uh clearer sources.

19:16

So we do participate in certain

19:19

journalistic ethics, but we're filmmakers. We

19:21

are interested in telling a story. Have you

19:23

ever had a situation where you're doing a project

19:25

and you have someone who is significant

19:28

to the project, even integral, and then

19:30

you find out that they weren't necessarily on the up and up with

19:32

you and what do you do in war?

19:34

You have to be particularly careful because

19:37

the fish gets bigger the farther away

19:39

from the lake you get. And there are people who

19:41

feel a certain amount of survivor's guilt who

19:43

then have to expand their story. And because

19:45

war is tenent combat

19:48

and the rest is support, people who were in

19:50

support often guildlily a little

19:52

bit. So we always make sure that we

19:54

can at least place them at

19:56

the place where they are based on their military

19:58

record at that day. Then we have to

20:01

look him in the eye and say, is this story

20:03

believable? And that's why one of the things

20:05

the veterans do, the advisors do is

20:07

they go, oh, that's bs that that that

20:09

debt didn't happen, And we do it. And sometimes

20:12

we've found people that were, as you say,

20:14

central parts of our narrative that we just

20:16

felt that we felt more comfortable if

20:19

we could pare them back a little bit. Well, people

20:21

who come right out and say John carry

20:23

lied, he didn't do any of the things he did that one in the Purple

20:25

Heart. Some people argue it cost him the presidency,

20:28

that he didn't respond adequately to that nothing

20:30

happened. Well, this is what happens when we politicize.

20:33

We permit that relatively superficial

20:35

but so intoxicating and so seductive

20:38

world of the buying area of the yes and no. And

20:40

so you can't do that with Vietnam. You can't

20:42

do that intel an accurate story because it just

20:45

sort of sets itself against itself,

20:48

you know. So it's we That's why we

20:50

took ourselves out of that contemporary debate

20:52

about say carry it's interesting to hear

20:54

you talk now about you know what the political DNA

20:57

is or isn't in some of these projects, and you privately

20:59

have been somewhat politically. You've given money

21:01

to the Democratic Party. UM. In

21:04

mid June of I

21:06

came out warning people about

21:09

what I felt were the supreme existential

21:12

dangers of the then presumed

21:14

Republican nominee. And that was the first time

21:16

I've ever done it that kind of went viral. Did the video

21:18

for Teddy Kennedy's memorial correct, Yeah, but completely

21:21

anonymously and didn't charge a

21:23

cent and didn't want to be involved in anything other than

21:25

somebody that I had known and respected. I

21:27

don't list that film on my resume. I just

21:30

it was something that I'm say, you have a democratic

21:32

political DNA, but what I would

21:35

think it's masterful. This may be one of the greatest

21:37

things about ken Burns is filmmaking, because you've kept

21:39

the politics out of it. I think the

21:41

integrity of the films is inseparable

21:43

from our collectively, not

21:45

just Lynn, but the films I do with other producers.

21:48

Um, we've we've made that

21:50

decision to leave it out of it

21:53

because it is so binary, it is so

21:55

superficial, it is so easy to just

21:58

it's it's it's in the end

22:00

it is. I mean, there's a place for political

22:02

films, and that's an important part

22:05

of the tradition of documentary films that we have

22:07

advocacy. We still have a First Amendment. People

22:09

can say, I believe it's this way

22:12

I'm trying. There's too much pluribus, Arthur

22:14

Sassenger Jr. Said, and not enough unhum.

22:17

So we actually just started a website called Unum,

22:19

which is trying to curate and take the scenes from

22:21

all these films to say, look, we have shared

22:24

stories. We're not trying to exclude

22:26

anybody. When you add an African dimension

22:28

to a civil war story, you're not excluding other

22:30

people. Well, I mean, this can't

22:32

be helped your ken burn, so you must walk around old day

22:35

people going excuse me, could you do a

22:37

story on the history of pizza.

22:40

I think that people don't understand

22:42

how important pizza is. But

22:45

you know, getting to this idea of

22:47

your own personal ethic, did

22:50

you have to do some kind of political lobotomizing

22:52

in order to do the work you do? Affective? What

22:54

happened for you when you're a politize? You know, I

22:56

feel very grateful that my parents gave me a great education.

22:59

Being credit and thinking about what happened and being

23:01

honest are important, and that's been

23:03

a huge sort of existential challenge to sit

23:05

down people. You do it all the time. A

23:07

lot of people don't do it. Talk to someone

23:10

that you don't necessarily agree with, and here where they're

23:12

coming from, think about why, think about

23:14

who they are. Understand the documentary character.

23:16

Look, you want a narrative character. The minute

23:18

you look at that character in in in literature,

23:21

whether it's Williams or Faulkner or Shakespeare,

23:23

and you look at them and you study and they go, wow, that's interesting.

23:25

You meet the person in real life, feel like, get away from me. You

23:28

mentioned round the Board of Education.

23:31

I can't help but suggest that would be a really great topic

23:33

of the Supreme Court. The Court. So

23:36

sometimes these uh formulations

23:38

get a little bit expository into dactic.

23:41

So what I often say is that

23:43

a lot of times our films will cover

23:45

this, like we've got obviously the Dreads got Decision

23:48

in this film, We've got plus the versus Ferguson

23:50

in five films, We've got you known.

23:54

So what happens is instead of just segregating

23:56

it into Philadelphia with the

23:59

with the wigs and the green felt tables

24:01

with the white quill pens,

24:03

exactly what you you have

24:05

the Constitution operating in

24:07

all of the stories that we're telling, whether it's Jackie

24:10

Jackie Robinson, our film on Jackie Robinson that

24:12

I made with my daughter Sarah Burns and her husband,

24:14

the filmmaker David McMahon a few years

24:16

ago, that is as much the

24:19

story of Jackie Robinson taking away some

24:21

of the myths that everybody has promoted. Even so,

24:24

he was an amazing Lincoln was Lincoln

24:27

during the Civil War and in the Civil Rights movement. You said

24:29

Jackie Robinson was the Lincoln. He's a Republican

24:31

who can't stand Jack Kennedy, won't look him

24:33

in the eye. Kennedy says, well, you know, we

24:36

don't know too many negroes, and he goes, you're

24:38

gonna have to know negroes, and then Kennedy

24:40

has his come to Jesus. By the time of the Civil Rights

24:42

Act, Jackie's with Rockefeller are still a Republican,

24:45

but watches the Goldwater Tide votes

24:47

for Johnson. And you can see

24:49

in the arc of part two of Jackie Robinson

24:52

the whole history of modern political

24:55

America, which is the switch of the

24:57

Republican Party founded in eighteen

24:59

fifty four and rip on Wisconsin with one thing

25:01

in mind, the emancipation of the slave

25:03

hypocrisy that cannot exist any longer

25:06

in this Republic. And now they

25:08

become the harbor, the safe

25:10

haven for white supremacists

25:13

and racists. And and it is

25:15

just it's a stunning flip.

25:18

And the Dixiecrats, who the

25:20

Northern Democrats look the other way and counted

25:23

on their votes and to carry us ali itself

25:25

went the other way. But the Democratic Party

25:27

has been liberated from the tyranny

25:30

of those people. Does he call

25:32

you up at three o'clock in the morning and do this. I

25:35

got this idea and it's like a twenty minute,

25:37

one breath monologue. We're try not to

25:39

send text before six am.

25:43

At the core of Burns and Novic's

25:45

documentaries is a belief in listening

25:47

deeply and understanding all sides.

25:51

But, as Burns said, activist filmmaking

25:53

has its place too. One of the

25:55

best examples, to my mind is Josh

25:58

Fox's gas Land, about fracking

26:00

for natural gas in Pennsylvania. I

26:03

spoke to Josh after the release of

26:05

the film. Their priorities are

26:07

not about protecting groundwater or

26:09

keeping this situation non toxic. That couldn't

26:11

be further from their priorities. Their priorities

26:14

to get the gas out of the ground and make their money.

26:17

Here the rest of my interview with Josh

26:19

Fox at Here's the Thing dot

26:21

org. When we come back, Ken

26:23

Burns and Lynn Novik on Vietnam,

26:26

Trump and why he'd never leave

26:28

PBS for Netflix. I'm

26:41

Alec Baldwin and you're listening to

26:43

Here's the Thing. One

26:46

of Ken burns few overt

26:48

activism projects was lobbying

26:51

presidents to pardon the Great boxer

26:53

Jack Johnson. Burns thinks

26:55

the conviction was driven by racism,

26:58

but after over ten years he much

27:00

gave up. Then, advised

27:02

by Sylvester Stallone, Donald

27:04

Trump made it happen. In May two

27:07

eighteen. You mentioned Jack Johnson, and I'm

27:09

going to think you must be a huge Trump then, Now,

27:12

didn't you lead a movement. I've been working with

27:15

Sander McCain since two thousand and six

27:17

and we couldn't get w to move And for very obvious

27:19

Truss, we tried really

27:21

hard. And and then for Obama,

27:24

you know, I put I lifted up on the accelerated

27:26

because I knew it was a no win situation for

27:28

him. What this black president

27:31

is going to pardon an African American

27:33

who married white women and beat them? Explained

27:35

that people, what what what Johnson's would

27:37

need to be pardoned? Four yea. So Johnson is the

27:39

first African American heavyweight champion, which

27:41

was kind of He won on a mistake.

27:44

Nobody had intended to ever allow a black

27:46

man into the ring to possibly show. In

27:48

those days, the superiority of the races

27:51

was determined in some ways by who was the most

27:53

powerful. So this is a real, just mono

27:55

amount of thing, and he won great hope, and

27:57

then they sent a series of white hopes

27:59

up against him. And then on July four they

28:02

sent up Jim Jefferies, the greatest of all white

28:04

hope, and John Just Johnson

28:06

demolished him, and there were white on black um

28:09

riots all across the United States. So then there

28:12

are a few more fights, but basically everybody

28:14

said, how do we stop this guy. This is a decade

28:17

nineteen o five nineteen fifteen when war African

28:19

Americans were lynched that in any other time,

28:21

and yet he's living exactly the way he wants

28:23

to, dating women and multiple women

28:26

and marrying white women. And so they hooked.

28:28

They got him expost facto, meaning

28:30

they apply to law that had passed after

28:32

he'd done this thing, which is illegal, constitutional

28:34

on on the Man Act and basically for

28:37

crossing state lines with a moral purposes.

28:39

So she wasn't underage, she wasn't under age.

28:41

She was a prostitute. Of course. For people who are

28:44

not familiar with the Mayor film called Unforgivable

28:46

Blackness, The Rise and Fall of Jack Lola Johnson,

28:48

which is from a quote by W. B. Two Boys, a

28:51

great black scholar, who said, look, you know boxing

28:53

is in disfavor, and Johnson hasn't done anything

28:55

that other ball players and sportsmen, meeting

28:57

boxers and even senators haven't

29:00

on it all comes down then to his unforgivable

29:02

black So in this is so at least in the context

29:05

of the single issue thing with Jack Johnson, Trump,

29:07

as far as you're concerned, is the greatest president

29:09

of the modern century. So let me put this very

29:11

delicacy. We support the

29:13

pardon, but let's understand that the underlying issues

29:16

about Jack Johnson are about race, and we're

29:18

dealing with the human being who has a dismal

29:21

record on race. We actually made a film on

29:23

the Central Park five in which these

29:25

are five innocent children, children,

29:27

right, that did not commit the Central Park

29:29

jogger. Right. We know that they've been exonerated,

29:32

but they went to jail, and he took out

29:34

full page ads saying bring back the death penalty

29:37

and double down on it the day of the Access

29:39

Hollywood tape. So this is, you

29:41

know, a tweet from he has a conversation

29:44

with Sylvester Stallone. If

29:46

he does it, that's great. You want

29:48

justice to prevail, to

29:50

get behind the Central Park five. Yes, and then

29:53

he could call Trump. We'll be done. Now

29:55

here's my big gooey deep fried

29:57

smother than cheese. Larry King question,

30:00

what's a Ken Burns movie? Because I

30:02

have Michael want to give him my answer. Yes, Sir Burns,

30:04

his films are He's like Spielberg. You're

30:06

the Spielberg of documentary film, big canvases,

30:09

big themes, big budgets.

30:11

Comparatively speaking, you think about Spielberg,

30:13

you think God doesn't even want to do a movie for like two

30:15

million bucks, and it's Edward Norton

30:18

and Refines trapped in an elevator.

30:20

It's like one set great dialogue. Which

30:22

one do you want to make that you can't? You're

30:25

right, we do bite off. And I have had many

30:28

opportunities to talk to Steven Spielberg about

30:30

this, and we look at each other and we go we

30:32

do the same things. You can make stuff

30:34

up. I can't. What's a VIC movie? I

30:37

think we're plowing in the same field. It's

30:39

too we could pick something very small, but it

30:42

ends up that these projects take a long time, enormous

30:45

amount of effort and sort of psychic energy,

30:47

and so you want to pick something that you're going to really care about

30:49

spending time on. So it's

30:51

American history for sure, but it's also these

30:53

sort of deep questions about the human condition. That sounds

30:55

very pretentious to say that, but when you're looking at

30:58

individual artists like Time Away our Frank

31:00

woid right, it's how do people create and live

31:02

and get their work done. I think what we're

31:05

really interested in ultimately is

31:08

our country stands for something really

31:10

profound and inspiring and beautiful, which is that

31:12

we're all equal and we have this capacity

31:15

to be great, and yet from the day

31:17

we were founded, from before that we are so far

31:19

away from that thing. And in that

31:21

space is where we want to hang

31:23

out and explore, and it's very painful

31:26

and it's also really inspiring. I would just suggest

31:28

too that these big themes, these big

31:30

stories, the constituent building blocks,

31:33

are these intimate, bottom

31:35

up stories, more often than not, of people

31:38

that you don't know. And so like William

31:40

Blake, we're finding the world in a grain of sand,

31:42

and that changes, particularizes,

31:45

literally atomizes the

31:47

way you tell these stories. So it isn't just

31:50

the thirty thousand feet Great Man

31:52

history of the presidency in generals

31:54

and wars. It's something that is bottom

31:56

up and you and you touch on the African American

31:59

experience, which is in almost every film we've

32:01

made, and the failure, as Lena is talking about,

32:03

to live up to our creed. And when

32:05

you learn from so called ordinary people,

32:08

then it sort of mitigates the tension of the

32:10

big idea, right and somewhere

32:12

and there you can begin to negotiate

32:14

some of these bigger questions about who

32:16

we are, where we fail our promise,

32:19

where that exceptionalism is. So it's possible

32:21

in Vietnam, which is a horrible failure

32:23

to find unbelievable pockets

32:26

of love and beauty and redemption. And how

32:28

the political climate in this country now

32:30

make you feel about that. I think we're right

32:32

now in the greatest existential threats, certainly

32:34

since World War Two and the Depression. I

32:37

would just find that an assault on institutions

32:40

and values. And because of the way media is

32:42

and the Internet, which we thought of our

32:45

as our friend, now we don't know what's true, and

32:47

the ability to manipulate images and voices

32:50

now and video give us the

32:52

possibility for a kind of say whatever you

32:54

want to disseminate into. And we've

32:56

stayed in public broadcasting consciously a kind

32:58

of Some people would suggest some creaky old

33:01

form, but in fact is extraordinarily

33:03

was changed during the ark of your career. Not

33:05

much we what I happened to know what I mean,

33:07

everybody knows who studied this, that Reagan

33:09

stacked the CPP with more conservative

33:11

people. Do they wanted doing? They had

33:14

documentaries about the oil

33:16

business. Yeah, but one of his appointees is

33:18

the long time ahead of it now and she's been one

33:20

of our greatest supporters. And the last thing they want to

33:22

do is cross over any kind of line,

33:24

which is why I've stayed there. The unstated

33:26

agreement is you don't make me look bad, I won't make

33:28

you look bad. I wouldn't even say that. I mean, I came out

33:30

with a film called called Unforgivable

33:32

Blackness, and they swallowed hard. They wanted

33:34

to be called Jack Johnson, The Rise and Fall

33:37

of an American, you know, like that. But but

33:39

but but so I feel sort of fortunate.

33:41

I think we all feel very very grateful

33:43

for it. But we're able to make the

33:45

films that we do. And look what happened

33:47

with Vietnam. We accumulated,

33:50

just in the fall its first sets

33:52

of showings, thirty nine million people,

33:54

and then they had thirteen million streams,

33:57

which means this makes it one of the biggest

33:59

things to pass sue the PBS system.

34:01

Ever, this is a truth of people

34:03

don't understand. After the big

34:05

three networks plus Fox, the

34:08

next highest network trading

34:11

with Fox News PBS,

34:13

which means we're already able

34:15

to activate a huge segment

34:18

of the American population, which means old

34:20

media is not so dead. We're actually

34:23

able to approximate the unum

34:25

that we all just talk about in Wanna and

34:28

Wanna, you know, not our head to it. Actually

34:31

we can in a documentary film like this,

34:33

you can have people have a conversation that

34:35

you can't really put in a room together. You couldn't,

34:37

you know, that they would argue, so they'd start yelling at

34:39

each other. And in a documentary,

34:41

we can interview you, and we can interview you, and then we can

34:43

put you together and you can have a civilized

34:45

conversation. And we're kind of modeling a kind of civil

34:48

dialogue or discourse that our country

34:50

really lacks. It's not Jerry Springer. It's not Jerry

34:52

Springer. And PBS is where

34:54

people kind of come. They're expecting that people

34:58

and I'm assuming there must have been many, many

35:00

times that the Netflixes of

35:02

the world and these other independence have said, you come

35:04

with us, come work with us, you leave

35:07

pps that's your childhood. Well

35:09

it's been throughout networks, studios

35:12

more a lot of money in your face. Yeah,

35:15

but you know what it is is that I moved

35:17

out of New York in seventy nine, the summer seventy

35:19

nine, because I had finished most

35:21

of the shooting on my first film. Brooklyn Bridge had

35:24

no idea how he's going to make it into a film. But

35:26

I realized I needed to get a job to survive

35:28

in New York, like a real job, and that if

35:30

I put that film away, I'd still be

35:32

in New York. And you know, like the ad guy who

35:34

woke up and didn't write the novel that he always wanted.

35:36

So I moved to this tiny, little world town where I could

35:39

live for nothing. And that model has

35:41

informed the spirit at least, if not

35:43

precisely the letter, of what we've

35:45

done ever since that we've had a kind of independence,

35:48

we've stayed there. Yes, that

35:50

all that is attractive, but it comes

35:52

with certain things. Suits can come in

35:54

and say longer, shorter,

35:57

more sexy, less sexy, more

35:59

violent, and it's just do

36:02

not want to ever say,

36:05

even when somebody even has

36:07

the whiff of wouldn't it be better if you didn't

36:09

do it? This no focus because and you know what, I'm

36:11

not good at us because I also get in a separate

36:13

way like people I really admire,

36:16

like Errol Morris and Spike Lee who do commercials

36:18

like I would shrivel up to nothing

36:20

if someone said we want you to do like a commercial

36:23

for X y Z and the ken Burn style and

36:25

we're gonna pay you this. You don't do this, Fort

36:28

Knox, I cannot problem. I

36:30

cannot. I've got four kids. I'm hosting

36:32

a game show Friday. Yeah,

36:36

I admire you for that ability to do

36:38

that. I can't do that. But I live in New Hampshire

36:40

and we're fine. Ten and a half

36:42

years somebody was sitting with Richard Plepler and me

36:45

and saying he's the head of HBO. He

36:47

said, well, why don't you fun Ken And

36:49

he stops and I said, because Richard wouldn't

36:51

give us thirty million dollars and ten

36:53

and a half years to do this. The model they're

36:56

as generous and elastic as it is

36:58

at HBO doesn't permit even though the

37:00

PBS brand is

37:02

no less quality wise, it's just a little more obscured

37:04

because of the marketplace is so diverse now and so

37:07

fractured. Just as our

37:09

Civil War came out in nineteen ninety

37:11

when there were maybe twenty other stations,

37:14

right, and then we've gone through all

37:16

of this cable revolution and then the

37:18

Internet revolution. So we've got fifteen

37:21

hundred cable channels and millions

37:23

and millions of Internet possibilities at anything

37:25

in a moment. And what is that that bit

37:27

of audience marching through from thirty

37:30

nine million people for civil wars? But what

37:32

did we get in in the aggregated

37:34

of a few different showings in the fall of Vietnam

37:37

thirty nine million is Florentine headquartered

37:40

up in New Hampshire. That is that where the I L

37:42

M is. Does all the stuff flow through there?

37:44

That's where you cut you do You have

37:46

some superspace station set up there where

37:48

you cut everything and do it. We have a little house

37:51

off the town green that we got in, but

37:53

there's at us. It's the

37:58

former knitting mill that you as a doctor's

38:00

house. You're

38:02

you're contemplating or you're gonna do ali

38:05

What do you think you're going to bring to I

38:07

mean all, he's like the Beatles, He's been covered from every

38:09

angle. What are you gonna do? We're gonna bring a lie, right,

38:12

because here's I made a film on Huey Long in the mid

38:14

eighties, right, And part of my proposal was, we're

38:16

going to intercut pieces of Roderick

38:18

Crawford's performance in the Academy Award winning

38:20

motion picture All the King's Men. We

38:23

put him next to the real speeches of Huey Long.

38:25

It just diminished. Now, I thought, Will Smith, that was a

38:27

you know, that was not a perfect film. The first twenty five

38:29

minutes is one of the greatest openings

38:31

of a modern American movie that Michael Mann

38:33

did. It's just it's but

38:36

here's what happens in all the Ali stuff,

38:38

and there's lots of Ali stuff. It's basically

38:40

this fight or it's that fight. But we want

38:42

to start, as we do with

38:44

the French coming in eighteen fifty

38:46

eight to Danang, Let's tell the whole story.

38:49

So we want to start in Louisville and

38:51

and and tell the whole story up to the end.

38:53

That's what my podcast is about, Origins, is

38:55

you have to do this and what happens is we

38:57

are now, you know, biting

38:59

off smaller and smaller chunks and

39:01

sometimes doing extraordinary

39:03

things with it. I'm not proscribing

39:06

any other way of doing it. We just think

39:08

that there is room for us to learn

39:10

a lot more about, as you say, a person

39:13

who would be impossible to duplicate, So

39:15

why try to duplicate him. Let's just go to the archives

39:17

here and spar with Cosell see the fightstial,

39:20

you know, and people at the end who were there when

39:23

you know most of us were not. You

39:25

know, we understood the power of that

39:27

shaky lighting of the torch

39:29

in Atlanta, But but who was there

39:31

who went back to the hotel room with him

39:33

that night? You know? Um, I

39:36

have for Lynn? How does the me too movement

39:38

play out for you? I mean, I don't mean to be so

39:40

topical, but are you any thoughts about that

39:42

in terms of making a film? Well, I mean,

39:44

it's been really overwhelming

39:47

to see what's happened in our world in the last

39:49

year and a half and how much the stories we've been

39:51

hearing resonate for everyone. I know,

39:54

just the wide range being interrupted,

39:56

just not being taken seriously, having people

39:58

comment on how you look. We've had

40:01

I've had all kinds of inappropriate comments

40:03

in my time, and I've never talked about it. Sure,

40:05

even in public television, even in public

40:07

television, perfectly, the men in public television

40:10

are like the men everywhere else. It's shocking to

40:12

say, but yes, I think it's part

40:14

of human relations and how we've all been. I

40:16

think conditions should just ignore that and just keep going.

40:19

And I frankly would take offense at

40:21

someone saying, oh, you know, what does it

40:23

feel like to be a woman filmmaker. I want to be taken

40:25

seriously as a filmmaker. Was it hard for you to be as a woman

40:27

filmaker in the beginning, No, it really wasn't.

40:30

No, I don't think so. In the documentary world, even

40:32

before landed in Florentine, What was it like

40:34

in the early days. Yeah, I don't I really don't

40:36

have any mess came on this show and she

40:38

was, I don't want to say, in the extreme

40:41

on Mike in the show, she was very

40:43

forthcoming. She said, the guy put his hand

40:45

in the sixties or whatever, the late sing she goes, the guy

40:47

put his hand on my on my leg right, So

40:49

I mean their generation. I think really paid their dues.

40:52

To be honest, She's quite a bit older than me, and I think

40:54

in that time there were very few women in the world

40:56

of news and journalism. And right,

40:58

so Dickerson Right's

41:02

mom exactly, um, and

41:05

what's her name? Povitch Shirley Povid should be interviewed

41:07

for Baseball film. His daughter Lynn Povish

41:09

was a pioneering reporter in news Day Newsweek,

41:12

who sued. I mean, I've heard these these pioneering

41:14

women, and even the women ten years older than me working at

41:16

CBS sixteen minutes. I've heard incredible stories.

41:19

I really have not experienced anything criminal

41:21

or regious or anything I would call harassment, but

41:23

I've certainly been objectivided. I think every

41:25

woman who walks the earth has been. And

41:28

the way I was brought up and the way I just sort of functioned

41:30

was Okay, I'm gonna do my job and

41:33

I have I mean, you know, and I think

41:35

for women coming after me, though, and I have a daughter who's

41:37

twenty five, almost twenty six, I

41:39

don't want that to be her world. In the best

41:41

no, she wants She's getting out of lost medical

41:46

school. Major

41:49

parents happy for healthy granddaughter. Well

41:52

but anyway, you know, I just I

41:54

think it's an exciting time actually that some

41:56

of this kind of conversation is happening. I think that's

41:58

healthy. I think it has gone way too

42:00

far in some ways of convicting

42:02

people without any kind of do process,

42:05

And I think that's the problem. Did you want

42:07

to say something, Well, I have four daughters, so

42:09

you know, we're working with one of Lynn's

42:12

counterparts, another producing partner, Dayton Duncan,

42:14

and I've been working for many years on a film about

42:16

country music. And what's so interesting is that

42:18

women from the very very beginning to take

42:20

a central role in this story, well

42:22

before Rock and roll was dealing with

42:25

some issues about sort of

42:27

spousal abuse and marital rape

42:29

and divorce and taking

42:31

the pill. Loretta Lynn is in the mid

42:33

sixties. This is stuff that Grace Slick is not doing

42:36

or Joni Mitchell is not going to do for another decade.

42:38

But there she is, and you've got Passy Klin

42:40

before her, and all of these stories are

42:42

there in American history. It's what

42:44

we choose to show, and that the ability

42:47

for the patriarchy to limit and narrow

42:49

the story, We've just widened the story and nothing's

42:52

diminished. He gets more dimensional. And the

42:54

same with race, the same with labor, the

42:56

same with you know, complications.

42:58

There's undertow and my real brother

43:01

from another mother. When Marsalis

43:03

said in our Jazz film said that sometimes

43:06

a thing and the opposite of a thing are

43:08

true at the same time, and we have been,

43:11

we've been, we have been working

43:13

on trying to honor that in all

43:15

the situations since he said that in the mid nineties.

43:18

Cust Now are you ken Burns? Are you a collector?

43:20

Privately? What does ken Burns collect? Quilts?

43:23

American quilts by women who

43:26

tell the story I think of

43:28

in an elemental way who we are, the warp

43:30

and the wolf, and in that these are sometimes

43:33

anonymous or collective efforts.

43:35

An Amish piece from the eighteen thirties. A

43:38

hundred years later, piet Mondrian is

43:40

doing these geometrical, loud,

43:42

geometrical, bright colors, which is the epitome

43:45

of modernism. And I go, excuse

43:47

me, I've got a shaker quilt from a hundred

43:49

years before that can sit next to any Piet

43:52

Mondrea painting. And let me show

43:54

this to you. It's like on fire. And

43:56

then it just the lies the kinds of

43:59

borders that we ach, they don't exist for the artists,

44:01

and the borders we make between people based

44:03

on color of the skin or regions, or

44:05

whether they're blue voting or red voting,

44:07

or whether they're gay or they're straight. All

44:09

of these superimposed distinctions

44:12

don't actually exist, and it is possible

44:14

to embrace a complex narrative.

44:17

I have been immersed in

44:20

the world of documentary film for the past almost

44:22

decade because David Nugent, the artistic director

44:24

of the Hampton's Film Festival, and I are partners. But

44:27

docs have become so ubiquitous

44:29

now and so it desired, you know, it's

44:31

thrilling. I remember an

44:33

article that Vincent can Be wrote

44:35

in five about

44:39

the releases of documentary that year.

44:41

The Way I had a film out on Huey Long

44:43

Uh. Fred Wiseman had a cinema very

44:45

Tay. There was a thing called street Wise

44:48

which was really flirting with a dramatic

44:50

films uh and using real

44:53

people. And Ross mckaway did Sherman's

44:55

March, self referential film.

44:58

He said the documentary was too arrow

45:00

word and I think why we're drawn to it today is

45:02

that we have all these outlets that need to

45:04

fill stuff out. But more importantly,

45:07

our plots are not tired

45:09

anymore. Right, Steven's gonna invest

45:12

everything with the meaning. But these plots

45:14

we know what. You know what it's like to go into a movie and go,

45:16

she's dead. She's not gonna survive this film

45:19

and and documentaries, even when you

45:21

know it's gonna turn out the way you know it

45:24

did. You don't think it's gonna happen. Right, you go

45:26

to Ford see or anything. Maybe this time the gun's gonna

45:28

jam. Have you ever put yourself in anything? Done?

45:30

In one film? In baseball, I was interviewing

45:33

Billy the Spaceman,

45:35

the Boston Red Sox pitcher who know

45:37

people when he was traded to Canadian

45:40

team, he would find, uh, you know

45:42

tin foil? I said, why are people throwing tinfoil

45:44

at me? And it was hash

45:47

But anyway, I said, what's your best pitch? And you needed

45:49

it to set up his onlie. You

45:52

put yourself Yeah, and you felt

45:54

you had to do it. Yeah, it was just really necessary.

45:56

We debated about it though. We had a big, huge conversation.

45:59

Do you have one? Well, I have one. It's a World

46:01

War two veteran said Phillips, and I was asking

46:03

him, um, you know, did you have

46:06

a hard time kind of keeping your language clean

46:08

when you came home, because you know how Marines

46:10

talk. And here was this very courtly,

46:12

southern gentleman and he said, you know,

46:14

in the Marines, we only use but one adjective,

46:18

and when I came home, it was really really hard to

46:20

not use that adjective at the dinner table.

46:22

And so you hear me say what was it? And

46:25

he says, I can't tell you. My wife will come down and Heaven

46:27

and hit me on the head. But it's kind of a conceit

46:29

if you think about it. I mean, we were

46:31

doing an event the other day and someone said, was it intentional

46:34

when you cut to this picture? After

46:36

that person said something and as if it was some

46:38

kind of accident that these things happened. I mean,

46:40

every single thing in the film is intentional.

46:43

Right, So we don't put ourselves

46:45

in but we're in every frame. Filmmakers

46:54

Lynnovic and Ken Burns. Their

46:56

latest documentary is The Vietnam

46:59

War. I'm Alec

47:01

Baldwin and you're listening to here's

47:03

the thing