Ken Burns’ Prohibition
Ken Burns has turned his attention to prohibition in the US in his latest project.Burns,one of the most prolific and highly-regarded filmmakers around,and his long time collaborator Lynn Novick, talk exclusively to TBI about the series and his other documentaries
G
etting documentary films made is increasingly a tricky proposition, with decent slots on TV few and far between and funding hard to pull together. These are evidently not,
however, concerns for Ken Burns. The noted US film- maker whose credits include The Civil War and Jazz runs off a slew of projects when asked about what is on his to-do list. First up is editing The Central Park Five, a film about the notorious 1989 Central Park jogger case, then there is a doc about Major League Baseball’s first black player, Jackie Robinson, itself a spin-off from Burns’ seminal 1994 film Baseball. There is also a his- tories of the Vietnam War and a biography of Ernest Hemmingway in the works. Then there is what Burns describes as a “mammoth series” on the Roosevelts. All will be on US public network PBS. The next project that viewers will see is Prohibition, a five-part series about events before and during the prohibition of alcohol in the US. Burns and long-time collaborator Lynn Novick worked with the former pub- lic editor of The New York Times, Daniel Okrent, on the series as he was writing and researching his book, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. Prohibition documents a period in US history that resonates today, according to Burns. He says: “As Ecclesiastes says in the New Testament, ‘there is noth- ing new under the sun’. Prohibition describes what happens when a wedge issue campaign metastasizes with unintended consequences – or what happens when a group of people have lost control of a country and want it back. But it’s important not to be political. We just wanted to tell a ripsnorting historical story and it is possible, if you want, to join the dots.” A host of A-list talent is voicing their series including
Tom Hanks, Jeremy Irons, Paul Giametti, John Lithgow and Samuel L. Jackson.
Rather than go straight into events after the ratifica- tion of the 1919 Eighteenth Amendment, which enshrined the rules against the manufacture and sale of liquor in law, Burns has attempted to put events in a deeper historical context, with an opening episode documenting the ideological fervour that was sweep- ing the US through the 19th Century.
“For us the idea is we always want to tell the back
story,” Burns says. “Everything on TV in the US is superficial and we want to steer clear of that. That applies to nothing more so than prohibition, with the
10 TBI June/July 2011 Ken Burns and Lynn Novick
idea of Model Ts careening around town with guns blazing. That’s exciting, but we are telling a bigger story.” Novick agrees: “We think we know about prohibition and the 1920s and, frankly, it’s such a cliché and a
bit of a joke in our culture. The more we worked on it the more we realised why it came about and the impli- cations after it went into effect. It’s about what happens when you pass a law that a huge proportion of people think shouldn’t be there.” She is confident that the story, although ostensibly an American one, will generate interest globally: “I think we’re all fascinated with human folly and this is a universal cautionary tale about what happens when certain actions prevail to the detriment of society. Elements of the story apply to people everywhere.” Burns’ unique visual style is also employed in the new film. The process of panning across and zooming into stills, dubbed ‘The Ken Burns Effect’, is still a key tool in the filmmaker’s armoury. “We never felt a still photograph is a lesser force than film, but felt it repre- sents a reality that embraces our participation. It’s essentially the same technique, but we’ve gotten bet- ter at using it,” Burns says. The factual filmmaker’s prolific output is possible because of his relationship with PBS in the US, which gives him, Novick and their associates the carte blanche to explain the subjects they want to cover. “We are fortunate to make films for PBS. They have no editorial input – none,” adds Novick. “They know that we will deliver it on budget and on time and we’re lucky in that our funder does not get involved with the content at all. And there are no ads, which makes it a different kind of filmmaking, we don’t tailor it to the commercial breaks.” Prohibition, which was made by Florentine Films with WETA TV Washington for PBS, will run to five episodes. PBS International is shopping the interna- tional version, which has a shorter introductory episode and is tweaked to fit the international broad- casters’ requirement for 52 minute-long episodes. TBI
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