Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 25, 1992 TAG: 9201250396
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-15 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAMES ENDRST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
RADIO DOCUMENTARY HAS THE BURNS TOUCH
Ken Burns had his chance to cash in. And he didn't take it.That pretty much elevates you to saint status in Hollywood.
But Burns, creator-producer of the unforgettable PBS documentary "The Civil War," knows what his now-famous television masterpiece might have looked like in the hands of a commercial network.
"First of all, it wouldn't have been 11 hours; it would have been a couple of hours in an evening," Burns said during the PBS portion of the January press tour in Los Angeles.
"And Dan Rather would have walked from behind an antebellum column in a sweater. If Ted Turner had had it, all my black-and-white photographs would have been colorized. There would have been an ad every six to eight minutes, and pretty soon the Time-Life ads would become indistinguishable from the program."
So Burns stuck with PBS, where the class - not the money - is.
"There have been a lot of very, very generous offers and ideas," said Burns of his post-"Civil War" period. "But the fundamental reason why I don't intend to move is that this is not only my home - and being a historian, one kind of honors the past and where you've been - but this is the only place on the dial where you can be free of commercials, where you can have a measure of creative control over your project, a lack of interference."
His latest project, "Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio," to be broadcast Wednesday (at 9 p.m. on WBRA-Channel 15 in the Roanoke viewing area), may not be as ambitious as "The Civil War," but it certainly proves the filmmaker's point.
Based on the book of the same name by co-producer Tom Lewis, "Empire of the Air" tells the little known and dramatic story of three men who were instrumental in the creation and development of radio and modern communications.
The first, Lee de Forest, was the so-called "Father of Radio," the man who invented the vacuum tube, which became the very foundation of the electronics industry. The second, Edwin Howard Armstrong, created FM broadcasting. The last, and best known, is David Sarnoff, the media giant behind RCA and later NBC.
"This was really a film that I had not planned to make," Burns said. "But there was something so compelling about the drama of these three men, so complicated, so dark, so unknown. You know, we're used to a kind of sanitized version of history. And here, the rug had been lifted and some of the dirt swept out. And it was fascinating dirt."
Jason Robards is the narrator of the two-hour documentary, which features interviews with Garrison Keillor, Red Barber, broadcasting historian Eric Barnouw, and radio writer-director-producer Norman Corwin ("Lust for Life"), as well as friends and relatives of the three central characters.
Burns once again weaves words, pictures and music together brilliantly in a style familiar to fans of his work, this time even going so far as to offer up a blank screen briefly to elicit the proper radio response from television viewers.
Like most people, Burns had never heard of de Forest and Armstrong but was familiar with Sarnoff. But he said he knew, "from being an amateur historian, that history is really about the seamier sides. I'm not foolish enough to think that American history is this Pollyanna-ish lesson of continual uplift. But I thought there was an unbelievable conspiracy of silence that reminded me how much in the 20th century history is there for those who can afford it, for those who can buy access to it, for those who can afford to publish it. The whole rap of the 20th century is that it's supposed to be the era of the individual. It's exactly the opposite. The free individual in this society got stomped on at almost every juncture."
Biography, said Burns, is the best way to understand an age, conveniently dividing the world into heroes, villains and fools.
But Burns said the story of radio as told by "Empire of the Air" lacked an important fourth character: "the poet," as Abraham Lincoln was to the Civil War - someone "to come out of his blindness and see himself for what he is."
Burns himself has become television's poet, and in his next documentary, due in 1994, he steps up to a "Civil War"-size project called "Baseball" - a promotional message he sends via Morse Code in the closing seconds of "Empire of the Radio." (He also just received a grant from PBS to produce a series called "The West," which will examine the history of the American West.)
Though he now sports expensive suits instead of blue jeans and sneakers - something he said had mortified a few of his fans - "Business-wise I've always tried to separate myself from what I guess would be called normal careerism. The poet Robert Penn Warren told me once . . . that careerism was death," he said. "And I really took that to heart."