Ken Burns' latest opus

Sunday the Post-Gazette's Diana Nelson Jones reviewed Ken Burns' "The National Parks: America's Best Idea" and I wrote a feature story about the program. I didn't have time to watch the whole thing and with Diana's request to review it, I didn't have to. But I wish I could have seen it all because unlike some Burns productions -- "Baseball" and "Jazz" -- this one is on a topic I'm quite interested in.

My father worked for the National Park Service and I love vacactioning in the parks. The first night of the Burns film lost my interest after the first hour; Diana told me nights two (8 p.m. last night, WQED) and six (8 p.m. Friday) were her favorites. So I watched those two installments and they definitely reignited my desire to someday see all of this nature mini-series that's filled with amazing images of wildlife and beautiful desolation.

But one thing that nags at me is Burns' decision to use producer/writer Dayton Duncan as an on-camera expert. Granted, a documentary is not journalism, but the approach still struck me as sort of wrong. I was happy one of my colleagues asked Burns about his decision at press tour last month. Here's what Burns and Duncan said:

KEN BURNS:  Yeah, let me start there.  You are right. There is a sort of unwritten rule that you kind of don't do that unless, of course, you are the avuncular host whose ideas are themselves the compelling part and raison d'etre for the show or whatever it is itself.  But in this case, I've never done that with the exception of Dayton.  And that's because quite often the work that we've done, mostly about the American landscape, THE WEST, LEWIS & CLARK, MARK TWAIN and HORATIO'S DRIVE, before this, he has known as much, if not more, than almost anyone else on the planet about that particular subject.  And he doesn't see the questions.  He doesn't have any say in the editing room about what stays or what doesn't stay.  He doesn't have a sense of where stuff goes when we initially try it.  We treat him exactly the same way we would treat any of our talking heads.

 And what I think he brings, because we do our interviews before the script has in any way congealed -- I mean, so many of my colleagues will go and say, "Look, we're on  page 23 of Episode 7, can you get us from paragraph 2 to paragraph 3?  That was terrific.  Say it again.  Do it again."  We just listen to Shelton.  I just listen to Dayton and try to find those bytes that may or may not work.  So there's some episodes where he's not in it. What we think is less the thumb on the scale than it is a chance for us to continue to show our sense that history ought not to be the excavation of dry dates, facts and events, but could be some emotional archaeology that would touch something higher.  And I know of no one in all of the subjects that we've done that understands that particular subject in a way that is so emotionally compelling as Dayton.  So the fact that he's my friend, the fact that he's my co-producer and the writer of this series is actually something that we are able, in a kind of church-and-state way within our process, to completely separate.  And the interview that we do, the best parts get extracted, just as the interview with Shelton, unexpectedly glorious and then goes into the mix.  And stuff goes in and goes out, and the decision is entirely mine.  But I think you would agree, if you had the opportunity to see the whole film, that Dayton's contribution is so -- as it was in THE WEST, as it was in LEWIS & CLARK, where he and the late Stephen Ambrose essentially were the talking heads, anchor us in an important not only historical and factual way, always critical, but in that emotional dimension that I think provides the glue that makes these complex past events stick and remain permanently part of the viewer's reception of the information.

DAYTON DUNCAN:  I was just going to add that when I see those things, as a writer, like you in the form of reporter, everything I see, I think, God, I should -- I'd like to be able to edit that, you know.  I wish I could say it better.  I wish that I was as automatically eloquent as Shelton.  And as a producer, it helps me in those times when I'm interviewing somebody to understand, having been on the other side of it -- you know, when Ken  tells me, "It's time for you to sit down and I'm going to ask you questions now," it helps me empathize with them, to know that that next night and the night after that, all they are going to do is lie awake saying, you know, when I was asked that question, what I should have said was this. And I get the same opportunity that they do, which is that you don't get the chance to go back.

Also, here's a fantastic Time magazine essay on Burns' film that's quite timely.