The presence of Ken Burns’ father looms large in his son’s latest PBS epic.
But viewers won’t know it.
An unidentified photograph of Lt. Robert Kyle Burns Jr. is the first and last image in “The War,” a 15-hour documentary series about World War II that launches Sept. 23.
Burns hadn’t planned to use the photo, a beloved possession since college. After all, his dad had spoken to him about the war only once before his death in 2001.
But as “War” began taking shape as personal reminiscences of vets from various American towns, Burns decided the image “would be a quiet way to honor my father,” he said.
There is nothing quiet about “War,” however.
Its ear-splitting, raw combat footage is as shocking to the senses as the savage opening scene of D-Day in Steven Spielberg’s acclaimed “Saving Private Ryan.” With one exception: “Those guys (in the film) got up and went to craft services,” Burns said. “My guys don’t get up. They’re dead.”
Seven years and $13 million in the making, “War” is Burns’ 22nd historical documentary – all have been for PBS.
Even with specks of gray in his hair, the 54-year-old Burns occasionally gets carded. He credits his youthful appearance to “excessive worry and travel.” Everything about Burns is excessive, from his evangelical promotion of projects to his inexhaustible work ethic.
PBS’s rain-making poster boy never takes time off. Even at his New Hampshire lake house, he gets itchy after two days. “Fridays, Mondays don’t mean anything to me. I cannot imagine not working.”
It shows. Burns and his producers spoke with more than 600 potential subjects for the seven-episode “War,” winnowing the list to 40 interviews with men and women from places like Mobile, Ala.; Sacramento, Calif.; Waterbury, Conn.; and tiny Luverne, Minn.
Burns wasn’t looking to document another war. Quite the opposite, in fact.
His 1990 masterpiece “The Civil War” – the top-rated limited series in PBS history – “was so wrenching for us, we felt spent. We vowed not to do another war film. Period. End of statement.
“It was too heavy. Too close. We’re emotional archaeologists. We’re not just excavating dates from the past. These are not products or ways to make a living. These are grand obsessions.”
Still, aging vets and/or their children kept pleading with Burns to turn his unique, quintessentially American lens on World War II. He politely declined.
Until the late ’90s, that is, when he read that U.S. vets were dying at the rate of 1,000 per day. Suddenly, Burns felt he couldn’t let their memories die with them.
These aren’t our ancestors, he thought. These are our fathers, our grandfathers.
Also, it didn’t hurt that his friend Tom Brokaw had blazed the trail with his hugely successful “Greatest Generation” franchise.
Brokaw, an adviser to “War,” “did an amazing service to our country by giving an unusually reticent generation permission to speak,” Burns said. “He probably should be given a medal for that.”
Burns is not so quick to endorse “greatest” laurels. The war “brought out the best and worst in a generation, and blurred the two so they became, at times, almost indistinguishable.”
In January, Hispanic groups attacked Burns – and PBS – for the absence of Hispanics in the series.
Numerous independent filmmakers urged Burns to maintain his own artistic vision and not to bow to outside pressure.
After thinking “long and hard,” Burns added two Hispanic vets and, for good measure, an American Indian. In total, they add 20 to 30 minutes’ length to the film, Burns estimates.
Did Ken cave? No, he simply lives to fight another day.
