Ken Burns Talks About 'Baseball' Documentary

When Ken Burns' monumental doc­umentary miniseries The Civil War aired on PBS in 1990, no one anticipated the mas­sive popularity and unanimous acclaim the film would generate. Hailed by critics as "heroic television," The Civil War captured the hearts and minds of an unprecedented num­ber of viewers, launched a trend in documentary miniseries "event" programming, proved that still photographs and talking heads car­ry the power to fascinate, and cat­apulted the filmmaker to a level of public fame and private financial security virtually unheard of among contemporary American documentarians.

Through such films as his Oscar-nominated Brooklyn Bridge, Huey Long, the Oscar- and Emmy-­nominated Statue of Liberty, and Empire of the Air, Burns has distin­guished himself as a chronicler of the American experience, a mas­terful storyteller, and a careful, con­siderate wielder of the film medium's visual and aural capabilities.

Beginning on September 18, he follows up The Civil War with, perhaps, its spiritual sequel: Baseball, a production of Florentine Films (his Walpole, New Hampshire-based company) and of WETA in Washington, DC. With a team that in­cludes several Civil War vets (notably writer Geoffrey Ward, editor Paul Barnes, and former Bill Moyers producer Lynn Novick, here serving as Burns' co-producer), Burns produced, directed, co-wrote, and executive-produced a nine-"inning," 18-plus-hour sweep through the history of the great American pastime. In an unusu­al marketing move, Turner Home Enter­tainment has planned an $8 million campaign and will release the home video version (at $179.98 a pop, including a pack of baseball cards) while the series is still airing; executives hope cassette sales will top those of The Civil War, which sold more than 2 million units.

International Documentary's Tom White spoke with past IDA Documentary Award-winner Burns during the Los Angeles leg of the filmmaker's barnstorming cross-country press junket this summer, just as the base­ball strike was about to begin.

INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY: What did you discover about America's character during the making of Baseball that didn't surface through The Civil War?

KEN BURNS: I've had as an ongoing subtext the question about race in many of my films. I actually found that Base­ball led to the faultline in America that deals with race in a more powerful way. I think many of the emotions that emerge in The Civil War–about the nature of citizenship, about race and emancipation---found a further development in this se­ries. Very powerful emotions are brought out by this game and its associations, and I was really taken by surprise. Re­flected in the game of baseball are many of the issues that compel our attention, like race, labor, class, questions of hero­ism, popular culture, immigration.

ID: What is the common ground between the two projects?

KB: It's not so much common ground. It just felt like familiar Ameri­can territory–dark, glorious, ironic, all at the same time. It's not so much any­thing that you'd want to articulate the an­swer to; that's why I'm sort of evading the question. Well, I'm not really evading; I couldn't answer it. Unless I think the experience of the collision of the forces of Baseball linked with the experience of the collision of forces in The Civil War produces something. And that some­thing is what I'm looking for in all the work. It's some distinctly emotional resonance that speaks to me, and I say, "Yes!," and that's how it ends up in the film. It's really just a kind of emotional archeology.

ID: You take care as we go through the "innings" to present the backdrop of American histo­ry and how it figures in the evo­lution of our national pastime. In the 1960s, so many tumultuous events and revolutions were hap­pening around the country that baseball seemed to be in danger of losing its relevance.

KB: Very much so. I think it did. I know for me personally it did. We call that episode "A Whole New Ballgame." And I re­member in '68 when I was so dis­illusioned because of Vietnam that I could barely enjoy the victory of the Detroit Tigers–my local team, up in Ann Har­bor, Michigan. There was a black hole, a remission about baseball until '75, when it came back wonderfully with the Red Sox. But it had fallen out; you're right. There's a moment in the episode when Donald Hall is talking about how baseball had seemed to reach a point where you could look at it and it seemed that daily life in America was the opposite---that even though it had represented an American striving, an American exuberance, it now, amid the tumultuous '60s, had a tradition and echo from another time.

ID: And other sports, such as the 1968 Summer Olympics, had an acute politi­cal resonance, with African-American athletes calling for a boycott.

KB: We look at that through the eyes of a Black man, Gerald Early, one of our consultants. He talks in the beginning of the episode about how, as a Black kid growing up, he would go to the stadium with his friends and be inspired, and when they'd come back to play in their sandlots, they would all put their hats over their hearts and sing the national an­them; by the end of the decade, they were making the Black Power salute. That is the last moment of that episode.

ID: About history in general and televi­sion's engagement with it, with the suc­cess of The Civil War, can we expect tele­vision to play a more proactive role in telling America's stories?

KB: I think it depends on two things: one, the willingness of television to make space for that kind of programming; and two, the ability of filmmakers to pro­duce something that does suggest these kinds of powerful associations that tele­vision can make. The strength isn't as much in the art as it is in the communal experience that we all had watching [The Civil War]. And I include myself as a viewer. I had never, up to that point, watched any of my films on television. I consider myself a filmmaker. I shoot films; I edit films; I finish films. My pri­mary goal is to make films to be seen on a large screen in a dark room. So I had avoided seeing my films ever on televi­sion. But something came over me that first night, and I stayed with it that en­tire week while everyone else was watch­ing; I think it has do with the notion of sharing a common path together. And you need to have a medium that is willing periodically to provide that space.

I suppose a third force is that peo­ple are aware of it, and there's this hap­py accident where people can get there and find it and share it and experience it. The medium then becomes an important thing because it may not necessarily report what's going on as much as the conventional wisdom of what's going on.

ID: After a cathartic experience like the making of The Civil War, how did you brace yourself for an even more compre­hensive project like Baseball.

KB: Naively. I was unaware of how staggering a project it would be, and, of course, being a freelancer and not knowing where the next dollar would be coming from, I had already started work­ing six or seven months before The Civil War was broadcast.

A good deal of the budget for Baseball was raised before The Civil War came out. In the case of one of the largest grants I received, from the National Endowment for the Humanities, my proposal was twice as long as for The Civil War. I did not want the Endowment to think that I deserved funding or that I was resting on my laurels. I also felt that I was deal­ing with a subject that was not considered mainstream history; I had to make a com­pelling argument. And I'm still fundrais­ing for it.

"The biggest thing in all the films is just man­aging the ideas faithfully and, probably most important, honorably."

- Ken Burns

ID: How has your status as a celebrity among documentarians changed the process?

KB: The only thing that success has done is that it has impeded the abili­ty to make a film quietly, which is how I always like to make films. You go into a town to work in the archives for a few days, but when I would go into a town when I was researching for Baseball, they'd ask me to speak at the historical so­ciety or meet people, which is really won­derful, but it left a little bit less time to do what I like to do.

I've tried to shield the process. I sup­pose it has changed the process, but in most ways it hasn't. I still live in a tiny, very quiet village in New England. For the past two-and-a-half years, I haven't been anywhere except the editing room from eight in the morning until eight at night every single day, with four other people: supervising editor Paul Barnes; co-producer Lynn Novick; episode editor Wes Paul, who did three of them; and coordinating producer Mike Hill. We all worked very hard.

ID: How many hours of film and sound did you have to whittle down to your present 18-1/2-hour opus?

KB: Hundreds of hours of film.

For The Civil War, I had a half-dozen in­terviews; here, I had 65. I had 25 or so voices; here we had about 80. Plus there was the narration and the management of the music: 520 musical cues. And I do most of the music before wrapping be­cause I want it to be organic and histori­cal. When you're covering 200 years of history, 18-1/2 hours flies really swiftly.

ID: How did your initial conception of the project change in the final product?

KB: In all the films, I've been really fortunate in that it looks like I thought [it would]; however, it goes through a long, circuitous route to get there. The biggest thing in all the films is just man­aging the ideas faithfully and, probably most important, honorably. This is a chronological narrative history. It's not essayistic because I feel that the poten­tial for didacticism is so great that this is not my point of view. My feelings come through by selection, by the way we do things, by the way we respond to them, but it's basically persevering. That's the biggest thing: working out the problems.

ID: Here, as in The Civil War, there are many different stories going on at once.

KB: Right, and as you see when you see the whole thing, seeds are plant­ed in inning one, or two, or three that bear fruit in four, that come to some climax in inning five.

ID: And, like the Civil War, baseball en­dures. Even though the Civil War had an official beginning, middle, and end, it resonates to this day.

KB: And what I'm saying is that we study that resonance by studying baseball. Actually, that's why I see Base­ball as the sequel to The Civil War. For example, the first progress in civil rights since the Civil War is Jackie Robinson. It didn't occur at a lunch counter; it didn't occur on a city bus; it didn't occur at a school or the military; it occurred in our so-called national pastime.

ID: You're very meticulous about pre­senting the contradictions in the spirit of the game. Mario Cuomo introduces the episode about the 1930s with a very mov­ing discourse about democracy in base­ball, yet later in the episode, a historian offers up a substantially less optimistic take on the game–that it wasn't a democra­cy, with the Negro Leagues in existence.

KB: Both views are true. Every moment in American history exudes this kind of tension. That's what's so mag­nificent about the game: it is represent­ing so many different voices.

"Within baseball you can find a microcosm of our society"

- Ken Burns

ID: The beauty of The Civil War lay in how you enlivened the still image. In the case of Baseball, you obviously had motion picture footage to work with, yet you employ stills as much as you do footage. Talk about the advantages of both media.

KB: I'm not sure what the advantage of footage is over stills. I think that we enjoy having footage to view, but the building block of our films is the respect for the still image and what we can do with it: the stories you can tell by going inside of it, the emotion that comes with respecting it, the power that comes from being able to talk about a number of things. The example that I use is Babe Ruth rounding the bases. Basically, we can talk about Babe Ruth rounding the bases, and you have this filmed image. But if you have a still photograph, a bittersweet portrait of him, you can talk about anything–his childhood, his turbulent life, his hitting home runs. The word “motive” ki­netically and emotionally becomes a faultline here; how you use the photographs and newsreels becomes the op­erative thing. I think that despite the fact that we have many more talking heads and lots of newsreel, Baseball is styl­istically consistent with The Civil War be­cause of the emotional tension of stills. Stills tie you to the moment in a way that newsreels often don't.

ID: I think there may be exceptions, though: the Rodney King video, the Za­pruder film–

KB: Which we inure to the mes­sage by their overuse. I'm not sure if the footage from, say, the Civil Rights move­ment–Bull Connor’s militia turning the dogs and hoses on–has been overused, but I certainly feel that the Rodney King video and the Zapruder film have been overused.

ID: Let's talk about distribution. What are your plans for Baseball following the PBS telecast?

KB: It will be distributed in what is called Direct Response by BMG Video, which is the North American wing of Ber­telsmann Music Group. The video will be distributed by a partnership of Turner and PBS Video.

ID: Will that include international dis­tribution?

KB: We're exploring that right now, and I'm saying that only because there are a great deal of rights questions involved in the footage and things like that. I don't think it will have the same reach that The Civil War enjoyed; it went to dozens of countries and became a kind of shorthand for understanding America. It had higher ratings proportionally in Australia than in any other country, in­cluding the United States, because it seemed to be a guide to the strange and complicated people who like to call them­selves Americans.

ID: I'm surprised that you project that the interest may not be as acute as it was with The Civil War.

KB: There might be the barrier of the game itself. War is a common factor in all cultures, I'm sorry to say. So that if you were interested in the most important war in the most dominant country on the globe, you're kind of disposed to look. However, baseball is a kind of iconoclas­tic sport of one country. It's been adopt­ed by Japan as a national pastime and by certain Latin countries, but for the most part, the sport is not the language of the world, the way war is. I would hope that people would overcome that, but I don't presume anything in documentary films.

ID: Here we are in the wake of a very suc­cessful World Cup tournament. Consid­ering the worldwide fervor about soccer, I would think that sport would bear as much meaning to the rest of the world as baseball does to Americans and that many in the international viewing community might be curious about the mean­ing and mythology of our game.

KB: I don't think so. I think that soc­cer exists in the moment. It has a lot to with national identity because it is played against other countries, but I don't think that it's a game that perfectly reflects their democratic society. Within baseball you can find a microcosm of our society, but you can hardly say that soccer, which is played the same way under the same rules everywhere, does that in other coun­tries. I think that people's identities get tied up with their team, which is true of any sport that's beloved. But the sense of the way that baseball insinuates itself into our national narrative as well as our national presence of moment is what makes the game so unique.

ID: And for future projects, you're now working on a piece about Thomas Jeffer­son?

KB: Yeah, we just started dipping our toes in the water; we've been down to Monticello a few times. Again, I think that all of my films are about a glory of American history, without ignoring the dark side. They're not Pollyannaish, and they're not gung ho. With Thomas Jefferson, it is possible to celebrate this ex­traordinary human being, who wrote per­haps the most important sentence ever written in the English language, which begins, "We hold these truths to be self-evident..." But this is a man who composed those words in the shadow of his plantation, in which he owned dozens of human beings whom he, despite his proclamations of the rights of man, saw no need in his lifetime to manumit. And that is our story in one man, the American story. We can found ourselves on the most positive and radical notion ever advanced in human political history, and yet centuries later we still have a difficult time coming to terms with racial justice. That's the core of my work in a political sense, if you will.

ID: I understand you'll also be explor­ing the lives of other historical figures.

KB: I hope to do one on Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and breathe a bit of exciting narrative into a traditionally polemical feminist history, which translate as monosyllabic and dry.

ID: You had started working on the Thomas Jefferson project while working on Baseball, and you had started on Base­ball and Empire of the Air in tandem with The Civil War project. Does that tack pose a difficulty in focusing your ener­gies?

KB: It's a spiritual and psychologi­cal and artistic neck-brace that has to be applied. To try to work on more than one project at once, I seem to have not learned any lessons. When I was making Civil War, I made two films–one on the Congress and one on Thomas Hart Benton–simultaneously. You get really torqued. Empire of the Air was sort of an accident. It was a project I hadn't really intended on doing, but I got so excited about it that we sort of did it. We were wound down, and Baseball was gearing up. It seems like six decades ago.

"I think that all of my films are about a glory of American history, without ignoring the dark side."

- Ken Burns

ID: You likened your process four years ago to The Red Shoes, in which a ballerina is so entranced by her ballet shoes that she cannot stop dancing. Does that analogy still apply?

KB: It applies now, but let's see if I can take them off after Baseball. I have to.

ID: How has this project changed you as a filmmaker?

KB: It's hard to articulate or quan­tify the artistic process that one goes through. It's a perpetual transforma­tion, and you're not sure exactly where the effects of one film evolve and anoth­er begins. It's an incredibly powerful experience to me. It feels like it's been 10 years, not five, in very good ways–my experience has been really dense and rich and very powerful. At the beginning of the making of Baseball, I said that my films were trying to explore the question, "Who we are as a people?". And I realize that the farther along I get making films, the more I'm being forced to confront the real truth, which is, "Who am I?" So much of my filmmaking since The Civil War has been about coming to terms with the demons in me. I remember that while making The Civil War, I just blurt­ed out one day that the Civil War was the great traumatic event of the childhood of our nation and that, like the traumatic events of a child's life, it has permanent and lasting effect. And it didn't take me too long to realize that I share that trau­matic event in my life with the death of my mother, so all of a sudden I began to see parallels, like my interest in civil rights came from the fact that I was ab­solutely stricken with grief and absolute terror by the firehoses and the dogs in Sel­ma when I was a little kid. And the can­cer in my country could perhaps help dis­tract me from the cancer in my family that was killing my mother. Now, that may sound like dime store psychology, but it's really true.

Los Angeles-based writer and arts consultant Tom White, whose baseball career stopped short of Little League, is a currently suffering Mets fan.