The Statesman Interview: Ken Burns
Acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns has placed his fingerprints on multiple aspects of American society, with a storytelling style that has earned him countless awards and critical acclaim, particularly in the area of documentaries.
While his 1990 miniseries, “The Civil War,” drew 40 million viewers on its first night, he’s best known in sports circles for “Baseball,” a nine-part documentary in 1994.
His latest documentary — the two-part, four-hour “Jackie Robinson,” which he co-directed with his daughter Sarah Burns and her husband, David McMahon — will debut Monday and Tuesday night on PBS (8 p.m., with a replay at 10 p.m. each night).
Burns, who was in Austin recently for the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, spoke with the American-Statesman on a wide range of subjects, from baseball to slavery:
When you found out you were the descendant of a slave owner, did that change your perspective when it came to race relations in our country and how you view them?
Not at all. In fact, I was expecting to find that out, just given who my people were and what part of the country they came from. That didn’t bother me. I’m mean, I’m ashamed of that, but it didn’t bother me. One of the reasons is that I spent almost all of my entire professional life dealing with race and speaking to issues of equality.
What bothered me more was finding out that I had a distant (relative) many generations before who fought for the British in the American Revolution. That bothered me much more, to know I had a Tory in my family. America is a very complicated place. I have 1 percent of Saharan African blood, which means I have that one drop of Negro blood in me today. I wear it like a badge.
The Civil War documentary — what was the inspiration to do that one?
It was like my sixth or seventh film, though each of the subjects of those films were very different — the Brooklyn Bridge, the Shakers, Huey Long, the Statue of Liberty, the painter Thomas Hart Benton. Though they were completely diverse topics, all had, as a kind of a central feature, the Civil War. One began to understand that just as (people) might say that it was the most important event, I was feeling without a doubt that it was the most important event in American history, so it deserved to be treated seriously. Everything that came before it led up to it, and everything that came after it, whether we’re aware of it or not, is a product of it. Even today.
All you have to think about is the campaign of Donald Trump and the kind of dog-whistle signs that he’s making. When you have to wait a day to not be sure for a day that you can’t denounce a white supremacist, David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan … that’s just a wink-wink at all the people who are — how should we put it — “unreconstructed” among us.
What put it in your heart to produce that “Baseball” series?
In many ways, I realize that it wasn’t the first actual progress or the first significant progress in civil rights, but the first symbolically important progress in civil rights after the Civil War was Jackie Robinson’s arrival (in major league baseball), I’m sorry to say, which made the baseball series in a way a sequel to the Civil War series. Too often we think of history as just the sequence of presidential administrations punctuated by wars, and it could be a lot more. Baseball teaches you about those presidents, about those wars, but also teaches about immigration and assimilation, about race, about the exclusion of women, about popular culture in advertising. So it was a way to do American history that went way beyond the box score, that is to say, who won and who lost.
I’m really looking forward to the Jackie Robinson documentary. Was he one of your heroes?
Oh, my God, of course. My goodness, yes. And what’s happened is his story has been so encrusted in mythology that it’s hard to get to the real man. We live in a superficial media culture, and all people want to talk about is the simple, familiar, conventional wisdom about Jackie. What we try to do is pull away and try to get at some of those stories that aren’t true, and that the true stories are a lot more interesting than the false ones. That’s a good thing to tell. We’re very excited about that, the idea that we can share with people a much more complicated, a much more dimensional person, but a person that will feel real to them.
We’ve been aided in our film by having interviews with his widow, Rachel, who is 93, who can tell us the intimate details about both the positive and tragic about his life.We’ve interviewed the president and first lady. We were able to interview great teammates of his, like Don Newcombe, Carl Erskine and Ralph Branca. We’ve interviewed broadcasters, like Vin Scully and a lot of (others), like Howard Bryant, Gerald Early and Yohuru Williams, and Harry Belafonte, who understood Jackie’s centrality to all of this.
What are the false stories that are out there about Jackie?
That Pee Wee Reese threw his arm around him in that first year at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. There’s a statue outside the Great American Ballpark, and it just didn’t happen. Jackie was playing first (base), and Pee Wee was playing (shortstop). He wouldn’t have come over and done that. There’s no mention of it in Jackie’s autobiography. There’s no mention of it in the white press. There’s no mention of it in the black press. If it had happened, they would have done 10 or 15 different related stories about what a great gesture it was.
It’s no pun intended, but it’s just white people wanting to have some skin in the game and feeling like they had participated. It was probably years after that, when Jackie had moved to second base and they had been old teammates for a while, they might have put their arms around each other, and then the story migrated back in time. It’s really important to double check. … I think it came from Red Barber and probably Roger Kahn, who wrote “The Boys of Summer” — and it just isn’t true. We wish it was true, but it didn’t happen.
In fact, Pee Wee said he had never shaken the hand of a black person in his life before he met Jackie. That tells you a little bit about how complicated it was. The film has many rich stories that helped make it. It wasn’t just Branch Rickey’s conscience alone that did it. but there were many other forces — the black press; the leftist press; Fiorello La Guardia, the left-leaning Republican mayor of New York City; and other pressure groups that were trying to get baseball to integrate. We sort of simplify it and just say it was Branch Rickey and his conscience. It’s a good story, but we want to get the right story, don’t we?
I watched the movie “42.” A lot of what you just said is glamorized in the film.
“42” is not a bad film, but it just focuses on that year he came up, and it helps to perpetuate the idea of the centrality of Branch Rickey. Now, don’t get me wrong; Branch Rickey is a great man, and he was pioneer. He was the lone owner who was for integration. Fifteen of the 16 major league baseball teams had voted not to integrate, and he did it anyway. He was the lone vote for it. So I don’t want to take anything away (from Rickey), but there are other forces, and our film tells that story.
Are you a sports fan in general?
I love all other sports, but baseball is by far the best. It’s the only sport with no clock. It’s the only sport where the defense has the ball, and it’s the only sport where the person scores and not the puck or the ball. It’s a great sport and also the oldest.
Who are your favorite athletes?
I’ve lived in New England since 1971, so I’m a Red Sox fan and had the pleasure of watching three world championships over the last decade. That’s been great. I like lots of today’s players. I think Bryce Harper may be the best. Mike Trout is a great player.
Who is your favorite Sox player of all time? Is it Yaz?
Oh, no. The most important Red Sox of all time — excluding Ted Williams, Babe Ruth and Carl Yastrzemski — is David Ortiz, “Big Papi,” by far. I wouldn’t pick a fight in a bar, but I firmly believe he’s the best clutch hitter I’ve ever seen. He helped them win three world championships and was the MVP in the last one. Babe Ruth helped them win three championships as a pitcher, but this is something that both Ted Williams and Yaz, as great as they are — in particular Ted — (didn’t do). You have to like Big Papi as the guy who made it happen. And he is Boston. When he got up and said … ‘This is our (bleeping) city,’ after the Boston Marathon bombings, there wasn’t a dry eye in the country. So powerful.
You divided “Baseball” into nine parts, or innings if you will. Some may not know that you produced a “Tenth Inning” addition in 2010 that included the Steroid Era. What’s your opinion of guys like Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Mark McGwire? Are they Hall of Famers in your book?
I think that Bonds and Clemens might eventually get in, but (Sammy) Sosa and McGwire should never get in. The reason I say that is because from having researched it extensively, both Bonds and Clemens were Hall of Fame material the day before they started taking steroids. They will be punished by the writers for a while, then I think they will be added in by the veterans committee.
Are you still planning an “Eleventh Inning” to “Baseball” — and if so, when can we expect it?
I think if the Cubs wins the World Series, you can count on it.
Is that where your money is going? I’m picking them, too.
I would never put my money on the Cubs.
Acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns has placed his fingerprints on multiple aspects of American society, with a storytelling style that has earned him countless awards and critical acclaim, particularly in the area of documentaries.
While his 1990 miniseries, “The Civil War,” drew 40 million viewers on its first night, he’s best known in sports circles for “Baseball,” a nine-part documentary in 1994.
His latest documentary — the two-part, four-hour “Jackie Robinson,” which he co-directed with his daughter Sarah Burns and her husband, David McMahon — will debut Monday and Tuesday night on PBS (8 p.m., with a replay at 10 p.m. each night).
Burns, who was in Austin recently for the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, spoke with the American-Statesman on a wide range of subjects, from baseball to slavery:
When you found out you were the descendant of a slave owner, did that change your perspective when it came to race relations in our country and how you view them?
Not at all. In fact, I was expecting to find that out, just given who my people were and what part of the country they came from. That didn’t bother me. I’m mean, I’m ashamed of that, but it didn’t bother me. One of the reasons is that I spent almost all of my entire professional life dealing with race and speaking to issues of equality.
What bothered me more was finding out that I had a distant (relative) many generations before who fought for the British in the American Revolution. That bothered me much more, to know I had a Tory in my family. America is a very complicated place. I have 1 percent of Saharan African blood, which means I have that one drop of Negro blood in me today. I wear it like a badge.
The Civil War documentary — what was the inspiration to do that one?
It was like my sixth or seventh film, though each of the subjects of those films were very different — the Brooklyn Bridge, the Shakers, Huey Long, the Statue of Liberty, the painter Thomas Hart Benton. Though they were completely diverse topics, all had, as a kind of a central feature, the Civil War. One began to understand that just as (people) might say that it was the most important event, I was feeling without a doubt that it was the most important event in American history, so it deserved to be treated seriously. Everything that came before it led up to it, and everything that came after it, whether we’re aware of it or not, is a product of it. Even today.
All you have to think about is the campaign of Donald Trump and the kind of dog-whistle signs that he’s making. When you have to wait a day to not be sure for a day that you can’t denounce a white supremacist, David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan … that’s just a wink-wink at all the people who are — how should we put it — “unreconstructed” among us.
What put it in your heart to produce that “Baseball” series?
In many ways, I realize that it wasn’t the first actual progress or the first significant progress in civil rights, but the first symbolically important progress in civil rights after the Civil War was Jackie Robinson’s arrival (in major league baseball), I’m sorry to say, which made the baseball series in a way a sequel to the Civil War series. Too often we think of history as just the sequence of presidential administrations punctuated by wars, and it could be a lot more. Baseball teaches you about those presidents, about those wars, but also teaches about immigration and assimilation, about race, about the exclusion of women, about popular culture in advertising. So it was a way to do American history that went way beyond the box score, that is to say, who won and who lost.
I’m really looking forward to the Jackie Robinson documentary. Was he one of your heroes?
Oh, my God, of course. My goodness, yes. And what’s happened is his story has been so encrusted in mythology that it’s hard to get to the real man. We live in a superficial media culture, and all people want to talk about is the simple, familiar, conventional wisdom about Jackie. What we try to do is pull away and try to get at some of those stories that aren’t true, and that the true stories are a lot more interesting than the false ones. That’s a good thing to tell. We’re very excited about that, the idea that we can share with people a much more complicated, a much more dimensional person, but a person that will feel real to them.
We’ve been aided in our film by having interviews with his widow, Rachel, who is 93, who can tell us the intimate details about both the positive and tragic about his life.We’ve interviewed the president and first lady. We were able to interview great teammates of his, like Don Newcombe, Carl Erskine and Ralph Branca. We’ve interviewed broadcasters, like Vin Scully and a lot of (others), like Howard Bryant, Gerald Early and Yohuru Williams, and Harry Belafonte, who understood Jackie’s centrality to all of this.
What are the false stories that are out there about Jackie?
That Pee Wee Reese threw his arm around him in that first year at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. There’s a statue outside the Great American Ballpark, and it just didn’t happen. Jackie was playing first (base), and Pee Wee was playing (shortstop). He wouldn’t have come over and done that. There’s no mention of it in Jackie’s autobiography. There’s no mention of it in the white press. There’s no mention of it in the black press. If it had happened, they would have done 10 or 15 different related stories about what a great gesture it was.
It’s no pun intended, but it’s just white people wanting to have some skin in the game and feeling like they had participated. It was probably years after that, when Jackie had moved to second base and they had been old teammates for a while, they might have put their arms around each other, and then the story migrated back in time. It’s really important to double check. … I think it came from Red Barber and probably Roger Kahn, who wrote “The Boys of Summer” — and it just isn’t true. We wish it was true, but it didn’t happen.
In fact, Pee Wee said he had never shaken the hand of a black person in his life before he met Jackie. That tells you a little bit about how complicated it was. The film has many rich stories that helped make it. It wasn’t just Branch Rickey’s conscience alone that did it. but there were many other forces — the black press; the leftist press; Fiorello La Guardia, the left-leaning Republican mayor of New York City; and other pressure groups that were trying to get baseball to integrate. We sort of simplify it and just say it was Branch Rickey and his conscience. It’s a good story, but we want to get the right story, don’t we?
I watched the movie “42.” A lot of what you just said is glamorized in the film.
“42” is not a bad film, but it just focuses on that year he came up, and it helps to perpetuate the idea of the centrality of Branch Rickey. Now, don’t get me wrong; Branch Rickey is a great man, and he was pioneer. He was the lone owner who was for integration. Fifteen of the 16 major league baseball teams had voted not to integrate, and he did it anyway. He was the lone vote for it. So I don’t want to take anything away (from Rickey), but there are other forces, and our film tells that story.
Are you a sports fan in general?
I love all other sports, but baseball is by far the best. It’s the only sport with no clock. It’s the only sport where the defense has the ball, and it’s the only sport where the person scores and not the puck or the ball. It’s a great sport and also the oldest.
Who are your favorite athletes?
I’ve lived in New England since 1971, so I’m a Red Sox fan and had the pleasure of watching three world championships over the last decade. That’s been great. I like lots of today’s players. I think Bryce Harper may be the best. Mike Trout is a great player.
Who is your favorite Sox player of all time? Is it Yaz?
Oh, no. The most important Red Sox of all time — excluding Ted Williams, Babe Ruth and Carl Yastrzemski — is David Ortiz, “Big Papi,” by far. I wouldn’t pick a fight in a bar, but I firmly believe he’s the best clutch hitter I’ve ever seen. He helped them win three world championships and was the MVP in the last one. Babe Ruth helped them win three championships as a pitcher, but this is something that both Ted Williams and Yaz, as great as they are — in particular Ted — (didn’t do). You have to like Big Papi as the guy who made it happen. And he is Boston. When he got up and said … ‘This is our (bleeping) city,’ after the Boston Marathon bombings, there wasn’t a dry eye in the country. So powerful.
You divided “Baseball” into nine parts, or innings if you will. Some may not know that you produced a “Tenth Inning” addition in 2010 that included the Steroid Era. What’s your opinion of guys like Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Mark McGwire? Are they Hall of Famers in your book?
I think that Bonds and Clemens might eventually get in, but (Sammy) Sosa and McGwire should never get in. The reason I say that is because from having researched it extensively, both Bonds and Clemens were Hall of Fame material the day before they started taking steroids. They will be punished by the writers for a while, then I think they will be added in by the veterans committee.
Are you still planning an “Eleventh Inning” to “Baseball” — and if so, when can we expect it?
I think if the Cubs wins the World Series, you can count on it.
Is that where your money is going? I’m picking them, too.
I would never put my money on the Cubs.
