After 35-year gap, it’s Ken Burns’ revolution
Back in 1990, Ken Burns showed TV critics an extraordinary film.
He was 37 then, but looked much younger. He was a cherubic-looking guy with the enthusiasm of a kid and the vocabulary of an ancient scholar.
Burns (shown here, nowadays) had already made seven films on subjects — from Huey Long to the Statue of Liberty — that could be grasped in one night. But this was something else — the Civil War, spread over nine nights and 18 hours.
Members of the Television Critics Association praised it; still, he recalls, many wanted to “warn me that no one was gonna watch it, because there are these things called MTV videos that (have) eroded people’s attention span.”
The result? The film, he said, “remains the highest-rated program in the history of public programming.” Read more…