Ken Burns

SAN ANTONIO -- Hector Galan figures he must have been in the right place at the right time. The award-winning filmmaker, who is based in Austin, Texas, met PBS President Paula Kerger in San Antonio at events scheduled long before Ken Burns' 14-hour documentary The War became the subject of a national controversy. So Galan thinks he might have been in mind when discussions turned to who would help the network out of the crisis that developed when critics charged that Native American and Latino voices were excluded from the documentary about World War II. A half-million Latino soldiers served in the war, many earning decorations of valor.

Unless you waited in line for five days to get one of the coveted audience seats at the Supreme Court, you probably experienced this week's oral arguments on same-sex marriage as something of a Ken Burns film. Websites and TV broadcasters played audio of the proceedings as cameras panned over drawings made by courtroom artists. The only thing missing was some kind of soundtrack, maybe a dulcimer plucking folkishly, for it to be worthy of a PBS pledge drive. But if this treatment is evocative — or necessary, when a documentarian like Burns is working with a long-ago historical event such as, say, the Civil War or the early days of baseball — it seems downright archaic for something happening right now. Somehow, at a time when we've come to expect real-time access to news events everywhere else, what happens in the Supreme Court remains largely away from public view.

Documentary filmmakers are accustomed to living without the renown of their wealthier Hollywood cousins. They know that the puffy paychecks and heady headlines will go to such Tinseltown directors as Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee and Steven Spielberg.Yet a modest splash of this recognition has trickled into Walpole, N.H., where documentary filmmaker Ken Burns operates his Florentine Films company.Although Mr. Burns may not be a household name, he certainly has established himself as the country's best-known documentary director.

While the War of 1812 might be known as "America's Forgotten War" elsewhere, that's definitely not the case in Baltimore and Maryland. Our obsession with all things 1812 is one of the regional characteristics so pronounced that it is lampooned in "The Second City Does Baltimore" satire now running at Center Stage . And Monday night, area viewers will have the chance to feed that appetite with two hours of a carefully researched documentary about...

Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder who believed passionately in the equality of man. He pushed for a weak central government, yet without asking Congress or anyone else spent $15 million (more money than was in the U.S. Treasury) to double the size of the country. He campaigned hard to become '' president, yet once said the country needed a revolution every 20 years or so -- hardly the words of a national leader.Some would label Jefferson an opportunist at best or a base hypocrite. Ken Burns calls him America's soul and, for the next two nights on PBS, does a pretty fair job of explaining why."

The last image to appear in Ken Burns' two-hour documentary, Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip is that of a goofy bulldog wearing road-racer goggles. The last sound viewers hear as the final credits roll is a hearty "woof-woof. This is not The Civil War, or Jazz or Baseball - those monumental, multi-night epics that Burns created while re-inventing the documentary for mainstream television audiences. And, as splendid as those mammoth works were, this smaller, less self-important film is more fun to watch and not one whit less historically sound.

Opening night of the much-ballyhooed "Baseball: An Illustrated History": Let's put it this way. Ken Burns, driving force behind the 18 1/2 -hour undertaking on PBS, has his work cut out over the next eight innings. Someone drilled a three-run homer off him in the first inning . . . and it hit the warehouse on the fly.Maybe it was a case of expecting too much under the flood of advance publicity and the commercialization that no doubt will see Burns doing personal appearances on QVC and the rest of the home shopping network stops.

Ken Burns' best work hypnotizes. Literally.And, though, Burns' "Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio" lacks the sustained transcendence of "The Civil War," it has stretches that will pull you into its story and transport you like almost nothing else on television."

The narration hums like poetry. The pictures seductively pull one toward the screen and into their world - even the still photographs seem to shimmer with the hidden energy of the moments they captured decades ago. The music is organically sublime - driving everything, from rhythm to tone. It's the heartbeat of the film. Those elements form the template for a Ken Burns' documentary, and all are present in Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, a four-hour, two-night PBS film premiering tomorrow night.

If anyone does American biography better than Ken Burns, I can't wait to see that work. But for now, I don't think it gets much better than Mark Twain, Burns' biography of author Samuel Clemens that starts tonight on PBS. Not all of it is so terrific, to be sure. There are stretches during this two-night, four-hour film that drag, especially in Part One. But there are other stretches, especially in Part Two, that absolutely sing with such a strong sense of storytelling and surfeit of insight into Twain and the American character that we can't help but be dazzled.

Few Americans look at baseball with a sharper eye than Ken Burns , the celebrated filmmaker and lifelong Red Sox fan. He has spent at least five of the last 20 years studying the sport with the same perspective he brought to the groundbreaking Civil War project that launched his career. Burns sees the good and bad in everything and has found a way to maintain his joy about the things he truly loves, most notably his family, his work and his guiltiest passion, baseball. When Roger Clemens was indicted Thursday, Burns was at the Comcast SportsNet studio in Chicago, preparing for an appearance on "Chicago Tribune Live.

One of the marks of an artist is his or her ability to take something that we think we know inside and out and then show it to us in such a way that we see it in a totally different light. The great artists also often evoke a deep emotional response in us as part of that process. Ken Burns, public television's documentary filmmaker laureate, does that with Baltimore Orioles legend Cal Ripken in his new production, "The Tenth Inning," set to premiere Sept. 28 and 29 on PBS. Burns and his co-director, Lynn Novick, showed clips from the new film and fielded questions from staffers at The Baltimore Sun last week.

Committing yourself for 12 hours to any TV production is a big deal. But before you decide you don't have the time for Ken Burns' new multipart documentary, "The National Parks: America's Best Idea," consider just giving it a 30-minute tryout. Watch the first half-hour tonight on PBS, and I bet you will become hooked on one of the best and most rewarding viewing experiences of the TV year. This is a film with both beauty and brains - it is gorgeous to look at, it will make you think and possibly even stir your soul.

At first glance, there is nothing particularly striking about the picture -- a static, studio-style portrait in black and white of an unidentified, boyishly young Army lieutenant smiling into the camera. But it appears under the opening title at the start of Ken Burns' latest PBS documentary, The War, and again as the final image of an elegiac montage on which the 14 1/2 -hour documentary ends. The bookend placement in the seven-part film suggests special importance, and that is indeed the case: The young officer is Robert Kyle Burns Jr., the filmmaker's father, shortly after he graduated from Baltimore's City College, and just before he headed off to Europe near the end of World War II. Looking for similarities between father and son, one first notices the elder's eyes and their wide-open sense of youthful promise captured on the eve of heading off to war. At the start of the film, they are just the eyes of the filmmaker's father.

SAN ANTONIO -- Hector Galan figures he must have been in the right place at the right time. The award-winning filmmaker, who is based in Austin, Texas, met PBS President Paula Kerger in San Antonio at events scheduled long before Ken Burns' 14-hour documentary The War became the subject of a national controversy. So Galan thinks he might have been in mind when discussions turned to who would help the network out of the crisis that developed when critics charged that Native American and Latino voices were excluded from the documentary about World War II. A half-million Latino soldiers served in the war, many earning decorations of valor.

Whether his words were spoken or written, no 20th-century storyteller could bring the American Civil War to life like Shelby Foote, the novelist and reluctant television star who died Monday night in Memphis, Tenn., at age 88. As a writer, Mr. Foote spent 20 years, 1954 to 1974, crafting The Civil War: A Narrative, three volumes and 3,000 pages that the Modern Library, in 1999, ranked No. 15 among the century's best English-language works of nonfiction. Though popular, the books did not make Mr. Foote a household name.

At the start of "Frank Lloyd Wright," filmmaker Ken Burns' PBS biography of America's most famous architect, you will hear Wright talking about Beethoven. Listen closely."My father taught me that a symphony was an edifice of sound," Wright says in an interview recorded before his death in 1959. "And I learned pretty soon that it was built by the same kind of mind in much the same way that a building was built. I used to sit and listen to Beethoven. He was a great architect. The two minds are quite similar because they arrange and build, plot and plan in very much the same way."

When filmmaker Ken Burns set out to make "Jazz," his 10-part series on this most American of art forms, it wasn't just an exercise in music history. Just as he addressed larger issues of American culture and history in his award-winning films "The Civil War" and "Baseball," he sees "Jazz" as a lens through which the larger American experience can be viewed. " 'Jazz' is an opportunity to see how we are as a people," he says over the phone from his offices in New Hampshire. "In many ways, I've made the same film over and over again, just asking that question of different subjects.

Jack Johnson was a turn-of-the-century Muhammad Ali - a black man who could stylishly frustrate, taunt and dominate his white ring opponents with unparalleled boxing skills and an equally unrivaled gift of gab. All this while racial epithets were being hurled at him by angry crowds - and by the sporting press. To the sportswriters of the day, Johnson was "The Dinge," "The Ethiopian" or "The Big Smoke." "Jack Jeffries resembled a Greek god," the Los Angeles Times assured its readers before his meeting with Johnson in 1902, "while Johnson was just a good-natured, black animal - a long, lean, bullet-headed, flat-chested coon."

The narration hums like poetry. The pictures seductively pull one toward the screen and into their world - even the still photographs seem to shimmer with the hidden energy of the moments they captured decades ago. The music is organically sublime - driving everything, from rhythm to tone. It's the heartbeat of the film. Those elements form the template for a Ken Burns' documentary, and all are present in Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, a four-hour, two-night PBS film premiering tomorrow night.