By Ian Parker
*“Documentaries are traditionally advocacy,” Burns said. He sees his films as acts of “emotional archeology” that aspire to be art.*Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson
Like Steven Tyler, of Aerosmith, Ken Burns has a summer house on Lake Sunapee, in New Hampshire. The property is furnished with Shaker quilts and a motorboat; every July 4th, a fifteen-foot-long American flag hangs over the back deck. He bought the house in the mid-nineties, with money earned from “The Civil War,” his nine-part PBS documentary series, and its spinoffs. When PBS first broadcast that series, in a weeklong binge in the fall of 1990, the network reached its largest-ever audience. The country agreed to gather as if at a table covered with old family photographs, in a room into which someone had invited an indefatigable fiddle player. Johnny Carson praised the series in successive “Tonight Show” monologues; stores in Washington, D.C., reportedly sold out of blank videocassettes. To the satisfaction of many viewers, and the dismay of some historians, Burns seemed to have shaped American history into the form of a modern popular memoir: a tale of wounding and healing, shame and redemption. (The Civil War was “the traumatic event in our childhood,” as Burns later put it.) History became a quasi-therapeutic exercise in national unburdening and consensus building. Burns recently recalled, “People started showing up at the door, wanting to share their photographs of ancestors.”
Burns is now sixty-four. He is friends with John Kerry and John McCain. He has been a character on “Clifford’s Puppy Days,” the animated children’s series—“What’s a documentary?” “Great question!”—and has been a guest at the Bohemian Grove, the off-the-record summer camp in Northern California for male members of the American establishment. Visitors to his office see a display of framed Burns-related cartoons, most of which assume familiarity with his filmmaking choices: an authoritative narrator offset by more emotionally committed interviewees, seen in half-lit, vaguely domestic surroundings; slow panning shots across photographs of men with mustaches; and a willingness, unusual in the genre, to attempt compendiousness, to keep going. Last year, a headline in the Onion read “Ken Burns Completes Documentary About Fucking Liars Who Claimed They Watched Entire ‘Jazz’ Series.”
Burns’s company, Florentine Films, is based in Walpole, New Hampshire, where Burns has lived since the late seventies. The company has thirty-four full-time employees, and a schedule of documentaries that extends to 2030. When Paula Kerger, PBS’s president and C.E.O., recently introduced Burns at a public event in Los Angeles, she quoted a tweet that described him as “the Marvel Studios of PBS.” Burns’s future plans—of varying uncertainty—include a series about country music, to be broadcast in 2019, and multipart films about the Mayo Clinic, Muhammad Ali, Ernest Hemingway, the American Revolution, Lyndon B. Johnson, Barack Obama, Winston Churchill, crime and punishment in America, and the African-American experience from the Emancipation Proclamation to the Great Migration. Burns, who has not yet strayed from American subjects, and whose work tends to display a kind of wishful patriotism—a soaring appreciation of something that’s not quite there—explained Churchill’s place on the list by saying, “Thank God that he had an American mother.”
At Lake Sunapee, which is an hour’s drive from Walpole, Burns likes to take a daily walk. A three-mile loop, on quiet streets, leads him up a hill, and then down to Sunapee Harbor, which has the tidy calm—a bandstand, a little museum—of a place about to be turned to ash in a disaster movie. When I joined him one morning in July, he was wearing a T-shirt, decorated with palm trees, advertising a public radio station in Miami. He walked fast. He pointed out a house that he knew to be currently occupied by witches, and a small hotel that had the air of being “back in the forties or fifties, when there were no interstates.” The people of Sunapee either knew Burns as a neighbor or recognized him as a public figure. He is made conspicuous by an unusual mass of collar-length hair, which resembles the removable piece on the top of a Lego figure. (In 1975, Burns had long hair, and a hairdresser cut most of it off; he still uses that hairdresser, exclusively.) As we walked, Burns said hello to everyone. When he congratulated a man on the progress he was making in the construction of a house, the man explained his success by saying, “I’m old and alone.”
When Burns bought the lake house, in 1994, he was recently divorced, and had two young daughters. One of them, Sarah, is now a writer and director of documentaries; she made “The Central Park Five,” in 2012, with her father and David McMahon, her husband. Lilly, her younger sister, is a showrunner on “Broad City,” the Comedy Central series. Burns remarried in 2003, and with his second wife had two more daughters. This summer, when he came to the lake with the girls—now twelve and six—he had again recently divorced. Alongside more troubled thoughts, he was able to describe optimism: since the breakup, he said, his relationships with his younger children had “quadrupled in their intensity and love and intimacy.”
His apparent openness and his buoyancy—for more than thirty years, he’s had an audience for Dad jokes—are sometimes obscured by speechifying. His default conversational setting is Commencement Address, involving quotation from nineteenth-century heroes and from his own previous commentary, and moments of almost rhapsodic self-appreciation. He is readier than most people to regard his creative decisions as courageous, and he told me that when people make uninvited suggestions about how he might change his working habits he imagines someone saying, “Mr. Cézanne, how about some watercolors?” As Peter Miller, a close friend since junior-high school, in Ann Arbor, recently noted, fondly, Burns is “not without ego.” He can be sharp, almost peevish, in response to criticism of his work. But he’s keen to appreciate jokes about his reputation. A few years ago, he appeared with the comedian Eugene Mirman in a short film promoting Hampshire College, their alma mater. (“Stop panning!” Mirman shouts at one point. “I’m being panned to death!”) Recalling this, Burns noted, “There’s always this surprise that I’m a good sport.”
When we stopped by the general store, a man took a moment to connect the face and the career. He filibustered—“Ah, ah, ah . . . ”—before continuing, “I watch all of your documentaries. I can’t get enough of them. They should have more.”
Burns began to reply: “In September, we have—”
The man interrupted, to give his name.