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this little ball of energy who cared not a bit about how
the film was going or what I was doing during die day."
He traces his interest in history and film to his
parents, Robert and Lyla Bums. “My mother was sick
my whole life, and she died of cancer when I was 11," he
says. "There was never a time when I wasn’t aware of her
dying. Because of that, I think that story and memory
became an important part of who I am.”
His father, an anthropology professor who relocated
the family to Michigan and Delaware for his teaching
jobs, would let Bums break his bedtime curfew if a good
film was on late-night television. "He also took me to tire
Gnema Guild in Ann Arbor to see old films or French
new wave films," Bums recalls. “Watching a film was
the only time I saw my dad cry. So I became aware of the
power of film.”
For his early films—including an Academy Award
nominated 1981 documentary, Brooklyn Bridge —Bums
did all the research, conducted every' interview, held the
camera for every shot, and wrote every line of narration
and script. With success came the financial resources to
hire assistants for subsequent projects. “The best thing
I’ve learned since then is to delegate to people 1 trust," lie
says. “Fortunately, I work with some amazing, creative
people who share this vision with me.”
A fresh approach
Bums' challenge for Tlx War wasn’t finding tal
ented crew members, but rather coming up with a fresh
approach to a story that’s been examined and exploited
hundreds of times in books, films and television pro
grams. He found it by bringing the story tome to four
unique communities from different geographic regions.
They were chosen partly because. Bums says, they aren’t
the first towns that come to mind when people think of
the East, South, North or West.
"This way, we don’t go into these towns with precon
ceptions of what they’re like," to explains. "We wanted to
anchor the stories in towns that could be anyplace.”
During World War 11, Waterbury’s industrial niche
made it a major supplier of armaments; Mobile was
selected because of the war letters of one of its citizens,
Eugene Sledge; and Sacramento fit the demographic that
Bums wanted to tell the story of the Japanese-American
experience during the war.
But tow did he pick Luverne, a farming town to
4,617 in the southwest comer of Minnesota? Tracing the
life to a former fighter pilot from Luverne, Bums came
across the archives of the local newspaper, Tlx Rock Comity
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Star Herald, and the sweeping, profoundly resonant,
World War 11-related columns to editor A 1 Mclntosh,
whose poignant chronicles during the conflict set the
exact tone that Bums had been looking for.
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Bums’ dad let him stay up to watch late-night TV movies.
"We read his columns and thought, ’Oh my God,
tore’s our Greek chorus',” Burns says. “His writing is
the single greatest archival discovery we’ve made in
30 years of doing this kind of work.”
Mclntosh’s newspaper columns are read through
out the series by actor Tom Hanks. "When I sent
Tom the script and columns, he wrote me back and
said, ‘Man, this guy is fantastic. I’m having dreams
about him'," Burns adds. “Al’s words are the first
heard and the last heard in the series. I can’t overstate
his importance to the way we tell this story.”
Other prominent voices in the program include
Mobile’s Dr. Sidney Phillips, who was 17 when he
joined the U.S. Marine Corps the day after the Japa
nese attack on Pearl Harbor. He describes The War
as "a good film, probably the best I’ve ever seen on
World War II.”
All movies about war are limited, Phillips says,
because nothing can fully capture the horror and
drudgery of combat life. “They can never be totally
realistic, because you can’t show the misery of lying
all night in the cold rain or going without a bath day
after day," says Phillips, who fought at Guadalcanal
island in the South Pacific and in other major cam
paigns of the war.
Respect for history
"There is an honesty to Ken’s filmmaking because he
treats history with respect, capturing the drama of every
day life in even die most remarkable of times," John
Wilson, senior vice president and chief TV programming
executive at PBS.
As Bums anxiously waits for The War to air, he’s been
editing his next series, a history of Ameriai’s national
perks. He’s also accompanied The War to a few' special
showings, including the Cannes Film Festival, which
screened all 14-and-a-half hours.
"People stood up and cheered," Bums say's. “This
French woman, who didn’t speak any English, came up
in tears and put her arms around me and just sobbed. It
was one of the great moments of my life, to see that this
film can travel outside of America and still be effective.”
He had a similar experience when to previewed the
film for some World War II veterans who weren’t in the
film. "One guy just broke down afterward,” Burns says.
“He slid he'd waited all his life, and someone has finally
shown it the way he remembered it. That’s the best
review I’ve ever received.” yf
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