FIRSTS Conversation with a First of His Kind Documentarian

JR: Welcome to First Conversations, the podcast slash speaker series that puts a spotlight on the barrier breakers, glass ceiling smashers, and innovators who have helped shape modern life. Each of our guests is a trailblazer who cleared a path for others, and you'll get to hear more about what it took to get there.

I'm Jessica Rosenworcel, the Chairwoman of the Federal Communications Commission, and my guest today really needs no introduction, but I'll do a short one anyways. Ken Burns is a renowned American documentarian known for his signature style of storytelling with archival footage, interviews, and narration. He has produced and directed so many award-winning documentaries, including The Civil War, Baseball, and The Vietnam War. And he has been honored for his first-of-their-kind documentaries with multiple Emmys and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

But how famous is he? Well, the film editing software on my phone has something called the Ken Burns effect, and he has been portrayed on The Simpsons multiple times. So we have high culture, low culture, and our shared history here. We have it all. What a treat.

So thank you, Ken, for joining me today. It's great to have you.

KB: It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

JR: Let's get to it. I'm going to start by trying to put this discussion in context. At the Federal Communications Commission, we were the first agency to license the airwaves for the public good, and it's a responsibility we take seriously. We have congressional guidelines that help us make those determinations. And as part of that effort, we make those airwaves available to radio and television stations for entertainment, for news, really to tell stories about our culture, about our communities, and our country. And that makes me think a good place to start is to ask you how you decide what stories to tell.

KB: It’s interesting. The sort of the glib response would be to say that they choose me. I feel like I'm American Samoa or Guam. I'm an American possession. And I feel so privileged to be a citizen of this country and to try to understand the stories. If I were given a thousand years to live, I wouldn't run out of stories in American history. And like you, I feel attracted to that public service. I've spent my entire professional life making films that are broadcast on PBS, and those initials are important. They stand for the Public Broadcasting Service. It isn't a system. It's a service. I'm very much wedded to that. I'm interested in complicated, interesting stories in American history and covering as much as I can. There's no game plan. There's no marketing that goes on. PBS has one foot tentatively in the marketplace and the other proudly out of it. And I like the fact that we're quite often the only place in public media that has a long-term commitment to the complicated stories of us. I've been making films for almost 50 years about the U.S. But I've also been making films about us, that is to say, that two-letter, lowercase, plural pronoun, all the intimacy of that, plus we and our, and all of the majesty, the complexity, the contradiction, even the controversy of the U.S. And that has been my beat. I'm so grateful to say that I have been able to spend nearly half a century working in that space between the us, singular, and the us, plural, and the capitalized U.S. and then the lowercase us.

JR: So, let's build on that for a second, because so many of your documentaries have been made possible with support from the National Endowment for the Arts. And of course, they've been broadcast on public television, like you said. And these institutions have been really important. They help support the arts. They've really helped democratize learning. I think they're really important for the United States. Now, at the same time, the ways we watch and the systems that support watching, both technically and financially, they're changing. We see that very clearly here at the Federal Communications Commission. So, I'm wondering, how has the rise of streaming platforms, everything from the PBS app and its ilk, to YouTube clips, changed documentaries, filmmaking, and even our attention spans?

KB: Yeah, that's a big one.

JR:I threw that last one in. I admit it.

KB: That's a big one. For me, I feel privileged working with PBS, and all of the films that I've done have been on PBS. And we've enjoyed the support of mostly the National Endowment for the Humanities, to a lesser extent, the National Endowment for the Arts, but also the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is a huge contributor. I'm aware of all of that. I'm talking to you from a little village in New Hampshire, where I moved to 44 years ago because I realized that becoming a a documentary filmmaker focusing on American history on PBS, was taking a vow of anonymity and poverty. And while I'm very happy that neither of those things actually took place, I didn't leave here. And I've been able to cultivate something that's going on that's kept me a little bit outside of some of these pressures and exigencies of a larger marketplace that do, I think, influence, to an extreme degree, how people communicate. We've tried to keep our process the same. We didn't want the technological tail to wag the dog. We wanted to master the technologies first. So, I was 10 years late among my colleagues at adopting computer editing. I was 10 years after that, before I stopped shooting in film, which I would still prefer to do. And what I wanted to make sure is that many of the bells and whistles, and some of the places and opportunities, that you're talking about, the various platforms that accompany these new systems, didn't govern the ultimate task of storytelling. The printing press comes in and that's the end of something else or the telegraph or the telephone or this or that, television and all of that. There's always been technological changes. And I think at the end of the day, the thing that has been consistent has been those using whatever technologies there might be who know how to tell a good story. In the end, that's it. The novelist Richard Powers said, ‘The best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story.’ And so we make our films not with some idea of advocating some particular political or other platform, but with the idea of communicating a very complex story about who we are.

That maybe changes you, maybe doesn't, maybe works at the edges. Maybe is fundamental. But once the film is done, we want it given over to you. And more than that, we want to have it seen by as many people as possible. So, as these opportunities present themselves, it is important to take advantage of them. At the same time, you still want the story to be everything. And that's why I've permitted PBS to broadcast my stuff and to stream it. Because it offers, at least right now, the best opportunity to reach a lot of people without compromising anything about our process or anything about the quality of the work that we've been able to do over the nearly 50 years I've been doing it.

JR: I love that you centered everything on a good story. But I also have to acknowledge what I said at the start. You've been credited for popularizing the rostrum effect, which has been described as giving life to still photographs by slowly zooming out subjects of interest and panning from one subject to the other or of course as most of know it as the Ken Burns Effect. So, you talk all about a good story. I'm just wondering, did you ever imagine as a young filmmaker that that kind of technical practice might be seen as part of your legacy?

KB: Well, Madam Chairwoman, I must commend you on the use of the Rostrum Effect. This is a British terminology that's used that means that you put still images on a board, on a platform, and it's filmed for animation purposes, to zoom or whatever. It's very rarely used in the United States. What I wanted when I first wanted to be a filmmaker as a kid was to be a Hollywood filmmaker. And when I changed over to documentary and I realized that the DNA of what I did was the still photograph, I said, we're still both storytellers. I can't make stuff up as a fiction person can, as Hollywood can, but I can still tell stories. And the laws of storytelling that Aristotle laid out millennia ago still apply. And so I had no reason to assume that I couldn't use the same techniques that a feature filmmaker would present with a master scene. I treated a photograph like it had a master shot. Like it had a wide shot, a medium shot, a close shot, a tilt, a pan, a reveal, zoom in or out of detail that you'd isolate. And so that, along with complex use of sound effects and first person and third person voices and contemporary music and on-camera, not just still photographs of paintings and graphics and maps and footage and live cinematography and talking heads. All of those things were sort of what I was doing to will the story alive, to will that photograph alive. And many years ago, Steve Jobs at Apple decided to figure out how regular folks who were uploading, downloading photographs could turn them into little presentations: my vacation, my birthday, this bar mitzvah, this wedding, this whatever it was.

JR: I know, I know, I've used it.

KB: But he brought me in; we became friends as a result of this. And he wanted to call it the Ken Burns effect. And I told him I didn't do commercial endorsements. And we figured out a thing where I was able to give a lot of hardware and software to some nonprofits. And we started a friendship, I think, in large measure, because he couldn't believe someone wouldn't have jumped at the chance and just said, 'Of course, yes, use it.' But it's still up there. It's still a free thing. And on all Mac computers and phones and things like that, as part of iMovie and iPhoto. It's sort of funny, in this case, it's, it's a superficial tail wag; technological tail wagging the dog, but it has such a broad, popular thing. I rarely meet anyone who use Apple products who don't use this effect to help tell the stories of their vacations or their birthdays or whatever it might be.

JR: Well, that's incredible to know the background of it, but also to understand that the technology helps tell the story. And that's really the power of it. I know that here at the agency, we're often focused on thinking about technology and what it means for the future. But one of the things that I try to do a lot of is try to examine what's worked before in the past, what hasn't worked in the past, and look for historians who can tell us about what technology meant at different times. So, I'm wondering, who is your favorite historian or writer, someone who explains the past in a way that's novel, or just feels different?

KB: Oh, my goodness, there's so many, you know, in each project that we engage, in large measure, because of the requirements of the National Endowment for the Humanities, we bring on scholars, I probably wouldn't have done that if I'd gone in a different way and got funding from different places. When I don't have the support of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or NEH, we still do that now. And we find it incredible. So, on Vietnam, we had 23 experts, each one of them pushing the envelope in their little area, and you began to realize, the way they reacted to their colleagues' new information, that our film would be an incredible place where we could aggregate the highest level of scholarship of that. And so it really depends on what project we're working on. And I've used historians of all stripes, from all different emphases. And now, as we've expanded out with our first non-American topic on Leonardo da Vinci, on international scholars. We've brought in several at different junctures that had to do, say, for our Vietnam film, we went to Vietnam and spoke to writers and scholars there. It's hugely important. It's hard to say there's just one person. I've been a fortunate individual in that I've had lots and lots of mentors. And each project seems to bring a new one to me. So I would just, you know, I love Doris Kearns Goodwin. I love John Meacham. I love Shelby Foote and how he wrote about it in a kind of epic, almost like Gibbon and Macaulay. These are the great British historians. So many different people have influenced me.

JR: So what do you look for in a historian you might feature in your documentaries? There's certain qualities?

KB: The Academy has at various times been under the thrall of various, I don't want to say it pejoratively, but fashions of historiography. Old narrative, traditional narrative is bankrupt. And the Second World War and the dropping of the atomic bomb prove that. But then the Academy would often move to different things, like it would move to a Freudian interpretation or a Marxist economic determinist one, to semiotics, to deconstruction, to whatever it might be. And what I found is that good old-fashioned narrative that is interested in seeing things from a multiplicity of perspectives is the best way to do it, to tell a good story. And so I'm interested in those historians who remember that the word history is mostly made up of the word story plus Hi, which is a good way to begin a conversation, and that are rooted in story, which means that we are bound to the complexity of human nature. We lament, in a media culture, that we have no heroes. It's ridiculous. The Greeks who invented at least the modern concept of heroism that we've adopted were interested in presenting these gods as sort of big versions of human beings. And they were all deeply flawed as well as deeply talented.  So, the most obvious one is Achilles had his hubris and his heel to go along with his great strength. But this notion that heroism is somehow perfection is not it. And so we're very much interested in the undertow and complexity. In fact, in my editing room, I have a small, discreet, but neon sign that says ‘it's complicated.’ There's not a filmmaker in the world,   if the scene's working, they don't want to touch it. And what we do is we've trained ourselves over many, many decades to touch it, to open it up, to maybe make it less, work less well, but to serve the complexity of the story. And I love those historians who aren't out to grind a particular axe or who aren't looking to sort of swing the pendulum in the other direction and either in a revisionist fashion, trash somebody or resurrect somebody without understanding that everybody comes with two sides of the coin. Human beings naturally gravitate to that, which is complicated.

JR: Yeah, it's complicated and neon. I think we're all going to remember that. I know that historian David McCullough has really been important to your work. And I also know that he passed away last year. So can you tell us a little bit about him, your relationship, and what it meant to your work?

KB: Well, we can talk about mentors. He's central to it. I remember a friend of mine who was a book salesman threw down his book, The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge in paperback, which was his second book. And I devoured it. And I told my friends, we're going to make a film on the story of the building of the bridge and also its life as a symbol. And they looked at me like I was crazy, as did the next several hundred people who turned me down for funding.

JR: Several hundred? This was your first, right? This was your first?

KB: For PBS. And I'd made a few films before that, but nothing like this. And they're looking at this kid and saying, this child is trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge. No. And slam the door. And I used to keep two, three ring binders with several hundred in each rejections that I had received in the course of trying to do that. But I reached out to David McCullough, and he agreed to not only sit for an interview, but then later on agreed to be the narrator, gave me and my writer, Amy Steckler, just unbelievable lessons in writing as we were working on it. And then went on to narrate several more of the films culminating in 1990, The Civil War. I think he'd done six out of the first seven films, that narrated them. And also, served in the Congress film and the Statue of Liberty film, in addition to Brooklyn Bridge, as someone who would apprear on camera. And then he really wanted to go in other directions. So we stayed in touch and I devoured his books like millios of others citizens. And then in the teens, he sat for an interview for our Roosvelts because one of his great books is Mornings on Horseback about the young Theoador Roosevelt, this really wonderful piece of biography. So, we stayed close and, of course, devastated by the news that not only did he pass away, but just a month or so before his wife, his beloved, I think high school sweetheart, Rosalie passed away too. It feels like for so many of us, there's a big gulf missing, a big chunk of our lives and important influence. And so I really want to honor David McCullough and his contribution, not just to American arts and letters, but to my own development as a filmmaker and a writer and I think a person.

JR: A real icon in American history. Now, I am one of those people who always keeps a queue of what I'm going to be watching next. And in my queue is your new documentary you released last year on Benjamin Franklin. I'm going to get to it. But I wanted to ask you specifically about it because he is someone who has not only shaped American history, he's an incredible innovator. He's known for what he's produced, from bifocals to new kinds of stoves. And so I'm wondering if you could tell us a bit about how he shaped American ingenuity and even our national identity.

KB: In so many ways, the problem is he's on the hundred dollar bill and everybody's into collecting as many Benjamins as possible. And he'd be horrified by that. It's the largest bill in general circulation that Americans handle. And yet he was a self-made man. He was a printer. He was a publisher. He was a great, great, great writer. And he then retired in his 40s to turn to scientific inventions and, you know, improved a German immigrant stove, invented the lightning rod, which transformed science. He was the most famous American on Earth. People who could not tell you to save their lives where Philadelphia was knew who Benjamin Franklin was all over Europe and around the world. And it made him; I think we forget it, this restless, expanding man. He was also interested in doing things for the common good. He starts a library, a fire company, police force. He looks for civic improvements. All his inventions he held without patent, which goes against the American sort of idea of get rich and pull as much wealth out of the system. He was all for turning back. He felt he'd had enough and also began to turn to politics at the same.He's older than everybody else. His son is older than Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, you name it. He's the old man. And he is dispatched to France. We now think of George Washington as having coalesced our country as leading the Continental Army. There is no way he wins at Yorktown without having 6,000 French soldiers. Thank you very much, Dr. Franklin, along with about an army of the same size of his own and clothed by French material. Thank you very much, doctor. And more importantly, blocking Cornwallis' escape from Yorktown is the French fleet. Thank you very, very much, Mr. Franklin, who's been negotiating with the French all along. And then he negotiates the Treaty of Paris, which will give us the United States. It's the most lopsided treaty in history. It's got some victims and he's then forging a lot of the compromises, some of them tragic. We can't underestimate him. In fact, because he wasn't president and because he yielded to Washington, we forget that those two were co-equal responsible for the creation of the United States of America. And it was his restless, invented, curious, technologically far ahead mind that really made him who he was and distinguished him above every other American on Earth or ever. And he is the model of raising yourself up by the bootstats. But he would want you to remember that it's always about paying back.

There are 46 states and there are four commonwealths, and one of them is Pennsylvania and Philadelphia is in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. And though that terminology is interesting, I also will add that he watched the native peoples in the East, what people sometimes refer to as the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, which they called the Haudenosaunee. And they essentially invented democracy, that is to say, United States of different tribes. And he went, wow, we should do that. Even drew up a cartoon under the slogan 'Join or Die' of a segmented snake, meaning if we don't get together, we'll die. And he proposes it 20 years before the revolution. Everybody says, no, no, no . Takes away our ability to control our own states in England. England just freaked out. But it became a slogan of the American Revolution. So he's the father of so much of who we are, the restlessness, the inventiveness, the entrepreneurial spirit, the pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, but also paying back to your community. I cannot say enough, and I hope you enjoy the film that we did last year.

JR: You've got me excited by the volume of what he represents. Here's a simpler question: I always wonder when there's someone like you who's amassing all this information, how do you edit? How do you decide what content doesn't make it into your final films?

KB: So you're talking to me. I'm in rural New Hampshire. I've lived here for 44 years. We make maple syrup in my town, and it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. And that's a perfect analogy for what we do. We have to collect 40 times the amount of stuff. Every time you see a talking head in our film, we've got 40 times more commentary by that person. Every time you see an image, there are probably 40 other images that we might draw on, live maps, graphics, photographs, footage. So, it's an incredible thing. And you know what? It's just what we do. We edit human spirit. Somebody says to you, 'Honey, how was your day?' It doesn't begin. I back slowly down the driveway, avoiding the garbage can at the curb, unless somebody T-bones you, in which case that's exactly the way you describe it. But, we edit human experience. And that's what we have to do in our storytelling. That's what a story is. ‘Honey, how was your day?’

JR: And the ratio 40 to one, that's extraordinary.

KB: At least. And sometimes it's much, much more. I'm working on a history of the American Revolution right now, among several other projects. And I think our live cinematography, because there are no photographs, because there is no footage, the live cinematography of the now quiet locations, if they still exist where the revolution took place and just atmospherics around this gorgeous Eastern, you know, seaboard where the 13 colonies were, is going to be probably 100 to 1.

JR: Alright. You're making anyone who participates in the creative process feel better with those ratios. So, this podcast is called First Conversations. So I'm going to ask when you first got started, who were the most important mentors, the people who really influenced you? I know you mentioned David McCullough before; is there anyone else?

KB: Most definitely my father, who was a cultural anthropologist but a very serious amateur still photographer who built a dark room in our basement, and I, as a two-year-old kid, I remember being held in his arms, looking at the strange alchemy. I went to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1971 its second year of existence then, an experimental college still as fiercely and ferociously experimental now, and I ran into a social documentary still photographer named Jerome Liebling, who more than anyone else influenced who I would become and what kind of not just artist, and filmmaker, but what kind of human being that I would come, and then all the other people that have been involved in the films from Lewis Mumford to Shaker Eldresses to Robert Penn Warren to Shelby Foote to too many people, the Doris Croon's good when some of the historians I've mentioned most you know obviously David McCullough but many I've been so fortunate to, as we all do stand on the the shoulders of giants.

JR: Have you always loved history?

KB: You know in a completely untrained and untutored, as the last course I took was in college in Russian History. The last time before that is, when they make you take American history in 11th grade, but I'd always been a person who read about it was interested. And so I was a very lucky person; I knew at 12, I wanted to be a filmmaker; knew at 18, I wanted to be documentary films; and I knew by 22 that I wanted to be in American history, and I've been able to do that now for decades and decades and decades. And I feel like I've got the best job in the country. It educates all of my parts, the people I work with; it's very small, very hands-on, very kind of handmade, and more of a family dynamic than it is a corporate one, and that means everything to me.

JR: What role do documentaries have in helping frame our national identity, especially now?

KB: It's huge. We're in a place where our technologies are challenging. The FCC used to require the equal comment from the other person, which was abandoned in 1987. And a lot of the problems we're in is a lie can get started and go around the world for a long long time before the truth can get started because have somebody saying well actually the opposite and I've got to give that equal time, as it was called at the time. And what we've had is a proliferation of people gradually dissipating to their own self-serving places, their own echo chambers, their own silos, and I think a big broad mandated place like PBS, which is for everybody, doesn't say red state, doesn't say blue state, doesn't say young, doesn't say old; it says everybody. Public broadcasting has got certain requirements and pressures on it to tell something. So, I'm thrilled by the fact that honorably made documentaries are sometimes the front line of re-engaging people with not just the glories of our past and the complications of our past but also the facts of our past because facts do matter, and there are some who can convince themselves these days that facts don't matter and to make them up and to and do it out of whole cloth, but I can't operate that way. PBS doesn't operate that way, and just like the governor on your engine, the Congress of the United States they won't let us operate that way because they control the purse strings of the corporation for public broadcasting which is as I said earlier a significant source of funding for the various projects that we do.

JR: Well, said okay, so now we're going to move from the lofty to the much more mundane because in this First Conversation series we close by asking some quick questions. So what's the first thing you do in the morning?

KB: The first thing I do is I read a quote from Tolstoy's Calendar of Wisdom along with about 250 other people. The man who started it with me and his then ill son, who's passed away, photos shot with his camera and send to me each each day's thing because I travel around a lot and couldn't carry a big book. Then I respond, and then he responds, and now many, many people respond to it. It's just this intimate kind of almost like morning prayer if you will. That's the first thing I do every morning before I get out of bed. I still call it the Tolstoy Trio, and there’re 250 but it's my friend and his late son and and me and now lots of other people and it's not about any of us it's about the ideas, the powerful ideas spiritual mostly ideas about how one improves oneself so it does feel like morning prayers in a way to begin the day.

JR: That's incredible! Alright, again mundane but fun, what was your first concert? It can be the school concert or something you did when you were a teenager.

KB: In the first grade I was the lead flower in the Waltz of the Flowers in Tchaikovsky's you know Nutcracker Suite, but I don't think you mean that. My parents took me in ann arbor michigan to Hill Auditorium which is the biggest auditorium there at the University of Michigan and we saw the Danish-American comedian, pianist, and conductor Victor Borge who is hilarious. This was in the early 60s; my mom passed away in 65, so I knew it had to be before that. I can remember some of the humor went over my head but I loved how much they loved it, and there was music involved and the audience was. I can still remember the sensations I felt as a 10-year old 11-year old kid watching this concert

JR: What a sweet memory. Okay, what's the bit of advice you'd give to someone who's just starting the first day of their first job?

KB: They sound like platitudes now but I always say when people ask me about filmmaking, I always say, you got to know who you are. Filmmaking looks, at a distance very glamorous, there's a lot of hard work, particularly in documentary. Thousands and thousands of men and women hours go into making these films and it's really hard so you have to know who you are. It's almost socratic, its no shame in saying, you know what, I'd rather tend a garden. I'd rather raise a child. I'd rather write a symphony. You need to be able to have the courage to change a little bit. And then I think the biggest thing is perseverance. Nothing is handed to us. And I know that there's lots of other people much more talented than me, but I've been dogging about it. Remember, I took those hundreds and hundreds of rejections and just kept going and this before there was self-correcting typewriters, let alone computers that I would just keep writing these letters, hundreds, thousands out to people getting 500 here or a thousand there. And finally being able to make my first film on the Brooklyn Bridge, defying the objections of people who thought I was selling them the Brooklyn Bridge.

JR: I love the persistence and tenacity. So, before we go, where can folks follow you to keep up to date with what you're doing?

KB: Oh God, I don't know. I'm the world's biggest Luddite. I think I do have a friend who sort of runs a Twitter thing. The best thing to do is to look at the films. That's what I spend my life doing. I do a lot of public speaking around the country. G o to pbs.org and look at the catalog of stuff and being able, as you're doing, to put in your queue on Passport, which is their streaming service. Some of the stuff we've done after Ben Franklin, we did a film called The U.S. and the Holocaust. This year, we just finished a film called The American Buffalo. Next year, Leonardo da Vinci. The year after that, The American Revolution. The year after that, a film we're working on called Emancipation to Exodus about post-Civil War life for African Americans. A year after that, on LBJ and the Great Society. And there are 40 films in the rearview mirror you can catch up on. Some of them are an hour long or half an hour long, and some of them are 20 hours long. So, there's a lot of stuff there within PBS Learning Media. All of our stuff has stuff for teachers and for students and for families. We also have a new thing that the philanthropist David Rubenstein underwrote Unum, U-N-U-M, which is from the Latin motto of the United States, “e pluribus unum,” out of many, one. I'm interested in that one, that us. And so what we've done is curated the evergreen themes of our films, of leadership of politics, of war, of innovation, of entrepreneurship, whatever it might be, and responded to current events with things and mixtapes, if you will, from our films that gather together a lot of the threads. And so if you go to KenBurnsUnum.com, you can find some stuff. And that's much better than hearing what I think about this, that, or the other thing. I don't actually have time for social media because if you think about it, you ever been in a room of teenagers?
I've got four daughters. Social media, it's not social. If everybody's looking at their thing and not at each other, that's not social. So I prefer looking at other people.

JR: Fantastic. Look forward to watching Ben Franklin and a whole bunch more of your work going forward. Thank you for what you do to tell our national story, our shared story. It's so important. So, this wraps up this edition of First Conversations. Thank you for being here, Ken. Thank you for the work you do. And thanks to everyone for listening. Take care.