WALPOLE, N.H. — When Ken Burns was working on his first professional documentary, in 1979, he pestered playwright Arthur Miller for an interview on its subject, the Brooklyn Bridge. Miller had written “A View From the Bridge,” so Burns figured he would have wisdom to share about the stately span.
But when the fledgling filmmaker traveled to Miller’s farm in Connecticut, “I arrived with heart pounding, he’s 6-foot-5 and leans in, `I don’t know a god-damned thing about the Brooklyn Bridge!’” Burns recalls. “I just must have looked so mortified.”
The playwright did not give him a chance to reload his camera. Burns got to ask a single question and to this day can quote, to the word, how Miller replied: “You see, the city is fundamentally a practical utilitarian invention and … suddenly you see this steel poetry sticking there …. It makes you feel that maybe you, too, could add something that would last and be beautiful.”
Just like that, the unknown Ken Burns had: 1) the ending of his film, 2) a story to tell in graduation speeches he would be asked to give when he, too, became famous, and 3) a mantra for his life: “Maybe you, too, could add something that would last and be beautiful.”
Burns, whose latest documentary series, “The War,” begins Sept. 23 on PBS, always has been drawn to statements that sum things up in the broadest way. Posted on the wall of his office, behind his own farmhouse in Walpole, N.H., is a pearl from Tyrone Guthrie, the Minneapolis theater impresario: “We are looking for ideas large enough to be afraid of again.” Burns is forever quoting historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. also, about how our fractured society suffers from “too much pluribus and not enough unum.”
So it is in “The War” that the opening minutes have former Marine pilot Sam Hynes saying, “I don’t think there is such a thing as a good war. There are sometimes necessary wars,” thus providing a theme that runs through Burns’ seven-parter, all 14&189; hours of it.
Burns has a sum-it-up for himself, as well. He says right out that he’s about “Waking the dead” and that this stems from his mother’s death when he was 11. He volunteers in interviews and speeches that there wasn’t a day of his childhood when he wasn’t aware of her cancer and that it influenced “all that I would become.”
He did not see this link until well after he had earned renown for “The Civil War,” which captured the nation’s imagination in 1990 and gave people a new way of looking at still photographs, which freeze a moment in time but which he animated by zooming in, or scanning over them, the technique now called the “Ken Burns Effect.” He says he was telling a friend how for years whenever he got a birthday cake, “I’d blow out the candles and wish that she’d be alive. He said, `What do you think you do for a living? … You make Jackie Robinson and Abraham Lincoln and Louis Armstrong come alive. Who do you think you’re really trying to wake?’”
Burns sometimes gets dinged for being too heartland; one critic for the Los Angeles Times chided his “pure Hallmark” moments. But the whole point of his latest series is the contrast, the Hallmark against the horrors.
Whatever success he had with another war, tackling World War II was risky, given the others who have done it, twice in the case of Steven Spielberg (“Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan”) and Clint Eastwood (his “Iwo Jima” films). While those were fictionalized, Burns is the first to downplay the difference.
Burns’ work — “manipulated truth,” he calls it — is as orchestrated as any feature film. The still photos and war footage come without sound, meaning the cacophony of combat is all imposed, as are the hiss of a welding torch at the Mobile, Ala., shipyard and the nickering that punctuates the story of a Waterbury, Conn., man who gets to horseback ride while others were dying overseas.
Or there’s Anne Devico recalling New Year’s Eve 1943, when she and her girlfriends joined the throngs in New York, where she spied this “good-looking dreamboat” in uniform who later that night “kissed me and said, `I’m going to marry you.’” When the screen shows black-and-white footage of girls checking out a serviceman, viewers may believe they’re witnessing that encounter, when it’s other girls found by Burns’ crew among the reams shot in Times Square that night. “Oh, thank you, God!” he says of that discovery.
He’s not producing a textbook but “an epic poem,” and he’s tried to distinguish his from the other World War II films by focusing on the interplay of home front and war front.
In “The War,” Burns has done away with the professorial types who have provided insight, but also distance, in his other films. Here, only those who lived the events get air time, such as Katharine Phillips of Mobile, who volunteered at the Red Cross canteen after her brother joined the Marines. Speaking with a drawl that makes “war” come out “waaugh,” she recalls how the boy next door rode with Patton across Europe and how everyone was consumed with zeal to “kill the Japs ” — that said with a nervous laugh.
Burns refuses to embarrass his talking heads. Despising snarkiness, he edits out anything that would make them look foolish, although he does let one veteran describe taking potshots — and seeming to enjoy it — at Japanese soldiers who jumped off cliffs on Saipan, opting for suicide over capture.
“The War” features letters written from Italy by Babe Ciarlo, who was under fire in the Anzio campaign, but kept telling his family back in Waterbury that everything was swell. “We’re having beautiful weather… this afternoon I might be swimming in the Tyrrhenian Sea.
“Nothing ever happens here…. I guess it’s like Waterbury … dead,” the 20-year-old writes, and the viewer inevitably wonders: Is he, too?
Burns’ views race as the ugly through-line in our history, and “The War” is replete with reminders of injustice: white Memphis shipyard welders reacting violently to blacks being allowed to “join iron,” or Japanese-American volunteers being placed in a segregated unit, and given deadly duty, even as their families are in internment camps.
All that made him totally unprepared when he was accused of discrimination — for leaving one group out of his World War II saga. “Where are the Latino stories?” asked Gus Chavez, who launched a “Defend the Honor Campaign” to force Burns to amend the series.
Burns at first said no — his film was in the can and, “Don’t you know what I’ve done all my life?” But when the hardball politics didn’t abate, he realized it was “a debate I was never going to win” and added two Hispanic veterans, and an American Indian, at the end of three segments.
He doesn’t know if that will mollify the critics, but he’s put a positive spin on the brouhaha’
“The War” ends with a reminder that 1,000 World War II veterans are dying every day, then plays its haunting theme song, “American Anthem,” sung by Norah Jones. “America, America, I gave my best to you,” she sings to snapshots of the main characters back home, and as husbands and wives, a white couple, black couple and Japanese Americans, all young again.
Oh, yes, the last image of “The War”: It’s an incredibly young serviceman, smiling broadly, really beaming. The camera pans up the photo of him in dress uniform until it reaches his hat, tilted to the side. He’s never identified, he’s just another GI Joe.
But not to Burns. That’s Dad.
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