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Summer Press Tour Notes
Ken Burns versus the critics
(well, "versus" might be a stretch, as might "critics")
By Aaron Barnhart Kansas City Star in his blog TV Barn July 12, 2007
Perhaps it was his default personality: friendly, gracious, slightly meek, the kind that reminds you Ken Burns chose a career that was part filmmaker, part fundraiser. Or perhaps it was being in a room packed with TV critics who had strewn his path with rose petals of praise these past 17 years, since his documentary "The Civil War" debuted on PBS.
Or maybe it was the fact that almost none of us in the room was Latino.
Whatever the reason, Burns succeeded in deflecting criticism of his upcoming opus, "The War," where in the original cut sent to critics, at least he had managed to produce 14 hours of film about the men who fought World War II for the United States without including a single significant voice of Hispanic origin.
The oversight had exploded in the press last year, led by a University of Texas professor, Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, who leads an oral history project to record the memories of Hispanic women and men who took part in the war. Burns at first stiffened, saying the film was done and ripping it up would make it hard to finish by its scheduled airdate this fall. HACR, an umbrella group of 14 Latino organizations, vowed to boycott Anheuser-Busch and Burns' other corporate underwriters, and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus voted to back HACR.
Burns finally relented. And yesterday, doing that thing he does so well spin stories that sound so wonderfully heartfelt, they must be true the slightly built baseball and crosswords fan made it sound like there was no controversy at all, that he was on the side of La Raza all along.
"There's been a kind of a hot political battle," Burns said when the question came up. "We listened. We heard that. We produced some new material and included it at the end of three of the episodes." There will be seven total, airing over two weeks starting Sept. 23.
"These are stories that are as powerful as anything in the film and as good as anything we produced in the film. So, no, we feel it was our obligation to listen and to hear. I've been in the business, as you know, of telling stories that haven't been told in American history for the last 30 years and have tried to do that.
"It was, of course, painful to us, on one level, that people would misinterpret what the film was about, but we didn't have the luxury of abstracting this. These people" Burns meant World War II veterans are dying; 1,500 a day is now the statistic. It was important in a network and for filmmakers who wish to be inclusive, to have heard this.
"I think we've found the right balance, had the right compromise, that permitted us not to alter our original vision and version of the film and at the same time honor what was legitimate about the concerns of a group of people who, for 500 years, have had their story untold in American history."
It was such an earnest and generous response, it almost made you forget that when Burns made his baseball documentary 13 years ago, he had a Latino problem, too.
Earlier in the day, PBS president Paula Kerger took more heat from critics over the handling of the situation, but she too escaped without serious, ah, burns. Kerger said "The War" will now be longer because no material will be cut to make way for the new stories about Latino vets. The film, she said, "should be as long as it needs to be to tell the story he needs to tell, and that's why he's in public broadcasting."
Kerger also said PBS had commissioned other films to buttress Burns' film, "including another documentary that talks specifically about the Latino experience during the war."
Meanwhile, another program that promises to make the fall interesting for PBS got its first preview. "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial," an episode of "Nova" scheduled to air Nov. 13, will recreate the widely covered 2004 trial over a school-board policy in Dover, Pa., that would have required science teachers to give evolution and God-made-this theories equal time.
Since cameras weren't allowed in the courtroom, "Nova" hired actors to re-enact portions of the transcript. First the O.J. civil trial, then Michael Jackson, now public television.
Unlike Ken Burns, who waited for trouble to come his way, Paula Apsell, the executive producer of "Nova," and the makers of "Judgment Day" seem to have sensed from the get-go they would take a lot of abuse from the intelligent design proponents. And so, to keep it from spilling over into the mainstream press, the producers said they went to great pains representing the anti-evolution point of view, even as the Seattle organization that leads those efforts stonewalled "Nova's" requests for interviews.
"If you believe that intelligent design got a fair shake in the trial, then you'll certainly believe that it gets a fair shake in this program because this is a program about the trial," said Apsell.
Judge John E. Jones III, who was appointed by President Bush, ruled for the teachers who refused to teach intelligent design, and the voters turned out the anti-evolutionists in the next school board election.
Jones, appearing in L.A. to help promote the two-hour program, said he didn't cut people off at the trial, and let everyone have their say. Jones quoted the journalist Margaret Talbot, who wrote after the trial in the New Yorker, "It was a science class that everybody wished they'd been able to take when they were in school."
http://blogs.kansascity.com/tvbarn/2...ersu.html#more
Ken Burns versus the critics
(well, "versus" might be a stretch, as might "critics")
By Aaron Barnhart Kansas City Star in his blog TV Barn July 12, 2007
Perhaps it was his default personality: friendly, gracious, slightly meek, the kind that reminds you Ken Burns chose a career that was part filmmaker, part fundraiser. Or perhaps it was being in a room packed with TV critics who had strewn his path with rose petals of praise these past 17 years, since his documentary "The Civil War" debuted on PBS.
Or maybe it was the fact that almost none of us in the room was Latino.
Whatever the reason, Burns succeeded in deflecting criticism of his upcoming opus, "The War," where in the original cut sent to critics, at least he had managed to produce 14 hours of film about the men who fought World War II for the United States without including a single significant voice of Hispanic origin.
The oversight had exploded in the press last year, led by a University of Texas professor, Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, who leads an oral history project to record the memories of Hispanic women and men who took part in the war. Burns at first stiffened, saying the film was done and ripping it up would make it hard to finish by its scheduled airdate this fall. HACR, an umbrella group of 14 Latino organizations, vowed to boycott Anheuser-Busch and Burns' other corporate underwriters, and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus voted to back HACR.
Burns finally relented. And yesterday, doing that thing he does so well spin stories that sound so wonderfully heartfelt, they must be true the slightly built baseball and crosswords fan made it sound like there was no controversy at all, that he was on the side of La Raza all along.
"There's been a kind of a hot political battle," Burns said when the question came up. "We listened. We heard that. We produced some new material and included it at the end of three of the episodes." There will be seven total, airing over two weeks starting Sept. 23.
"These are stories that are as powerful as anything in the film and as good as anything we produced in the film. So, no, we feel it was our obligation to listen and to hear. I've been in the business, as you know, of telling stories that haven't been told in American history for the last 30 years and have tried to do that.
"It was, of course, painful to us, on one level, that people would misinterpret what the film was about, but we didn't have the luxury of abstracting this. These people" Burns meant World War II veterans are dying; 1,500 a day is now the statistic. It was important in a network and for filmmakers who wish to be inclusive, to have heard this.
"I think we've found the right balance, had the right compromise, that permitted us not to alter our original vision and version of the film and at the same time honor what was legitimate about the concerns of a group of people who, for 500 years, have had their story untold in American history."
It was such an earnest and generous response, it almost made you forget that when Burns made his baseball documentary 13 years ago, he had a Latino problem, too.
Earlier in the day, PBS president Paula Kerger took more heat from critics over the handling of the situation, but she too escaped without serious, ah, burns. Kerger said "The War" will now be longer because no material will be cut to make way for the new stories about Latino vets. The film, she said, "should be as long as it needs to be to tell the story he needs to tell, and that's why he's in public broadcasting."
Kerger also said PBS had commissioned other films to buttress Burns' film, "including another documentary that talks specifically about the Latino experience during the war."
Meanwhile, another program that promises to make the fall interesting for PBS got its first preview. "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial," an episode of "Nova" scheduled to air Nov. 13, will recreate the widely covered 2004 trial over a school-board policy in Dover, Pa., that would have required science teachers to give evolution and God-made-this theories equal time.
Since cameras weren't allowed in the courtroom, "Nova" hired actors to re-enact portions of the transcript. First the O.J. civil trial, then Michael Jackson, now public television.
Unlike Ken Burns, who waited for trouble to come his way, Paula Apsell, the executive producer of "Nova," and the makers of "Judgment Day" seem to have sensed from the get-go they would take a lot of abuse from the intelligent design proponents. And so, to keep it from spilling over into the mainstream press, the producers said they went to great pains representing the anti-evolution point of view, even as the Seattle organization that leads those efforts stonewalled "Nova's" requests for interviews.
"If you believe that intelligent design got a fair shake in the trial, then you'll certainly believe that it gets a fair shake in this program because this is a program about the trial," said Apsell.
Judge John E. Jones III, who was appointed by President Bush, ruled for the teachers who refused to teach intelligent design, and the voters turned out the anti-evolutionists in the next school board election.
Jones, appearing in L.A. to help promote the two-hour program, said he didn't cut people off at the trial, and let everyone have their say. Jones quoted the journalist Margaret Talbot, who wrote after the trial in the New Yorker, "It was a science class that everybody wished they'd been able to take when they were in school."
http://blogs.kansascity.com/tvbarn/2...ersu.html#more
On its own, the TCA wouldn't have interested me, but Goodman's reporting makes for fun reading.
