Photo credit: Janet Donovan & CPB
It’s not every day you can chat with documentarian Ken Burns “up close and personal,” but such was the case at an intimate dinner in his honor at the annual Corporation for Public Broadcasting Board of Director’s gathering chaired by Elizabeth Sembler and Pat Harrison celebrating Burn’s The Roosevelts: An Intimate History that chronicles the lives of Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, three members of the most prominent and influential family in American politics.
“It is the first time in a major documentary television series that their individual stories have been interwoven into a single narrative. This seven-part, fourteen hour film follows the Roosevelts for more than a century, from Theodore’s birth in 1858 to Eleanor’s death in 1962. Over the course of those years, Theodore would become the 26th President of the United States and his beloved niece, Eleanor, would marry his fifth cousin, Franklin, who became the 32nd President of the United States. Together, these three individuals not only redefined the relationship Americans had with their government and with each other, but also redefined the role of the United States within the wider world. The series encompasses the history the Roosevelts helped to shape: the creation of National Parks, the digging of the Panama Canal, the passage of innovative New Deal programs, the defeat of Hitler, and the postwar struggles for civil rights at home and human rights abroad. It is also an intimate human story about love, betrayal, family loyalty, personal courage and the conquest of fear.” Production Notes
David S. Ferriero, Sharon Percy Rockefeller, Pat Harrison, Ken Burns – Photo courtesy of CPB
President and CEO for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Pat Harrison welcomed guests on behalf of her CPB colleagues: “I really want to welcome you to this glorious event at The National Archives,” she said. “We are so pleased you could join us for this very special evening at a place where our country’s history really comes alive and just as importantly is accessible to all Americans. Tonight of course, the archives provides a perfect setting for Ken Burns, who through public media has connected to millions of Americans…… connected them to our own history, our own stories in ways that are so powerful and relevant to our lives today.” Burns is known for his use of archival footage and photographs, thus the Archive connection.
Ken Burns and Pat Harrison
“I want to thank the Archivist of the United States David Ferriero and also Bruce Ramer, CPB board member who also serves on the Board of Directors of the Foundation for The National Archives. To both of them, we thank you for making this evening possible,” she added. “All of you here this evening are so very special to CPB and pubic media. You’re all actually distinguished guests. We have with us tonight good friends personally and professionally – PBS President, CEO Paula Kerger and WETA President and CEO Sharon Percy Rockefeller. We also are very proud that we have public media colleagues from local stations and from across the country who participated in the CPB board meeting earlier today.”
Pat Harrison, Ken Burns and Kathleen Parker
“As many of you know, or some of you may not know, the public media exhibition is to ensure that we provide high quality program that really does educate, it really does inspire and it really does inform. It’s on air, it’s online locally and nationally. It’s commercial free, it’s for free to every American when and how and where they choose. Americans place such high trust in public media, as we tell America’s story in all of its complexity and increasingly in all of its diversity,” Harrison reiterated. “CPB‘s role as legislated by Congress is to serve as the steward, a very old fashioned but important ward of the federal appropriation, ensuring that the funds we receive really do strengthen and advance public media. Not just for public media, but so we can serve the American people in ways that really enhance their lives and strengthen our civil society. To help carry out our mission, CPB relies upon a distinguished board of directors. I don’t know if you know this, but CPB is the only public media board who members are nominated by the president of the United States and subsequently confirmed by the United States Senate.”
Sharon Percy Rockefeller and Ken Burns – Photo courtesy of CPB
“We’re all here because we are united in our mission to preserve and advance universal access to public media, so that it will continue to provide trusted high quality content to all Americans. We are honored to have Ken Burns speaking with us here tonight. His work brings history alive and instills in Americans a sense of belonging, a sense of their past and their great connection to the world, which is at the very heart of public broadcasting,” said Board Member Liz Sembler.
David S. Ferriero, Archivist of the United States; Pat Harrison, CEO/CPB; Ken Burns, Dr. Judith Davenport, CPB Board Member – Photo courtesy of CPB
Burns has been making Public Television documentaries for thirty-three years and has been nominated for two Academy Awards and has won Emmy Awards, among other honors.
“There’s something a little bit awkward about this evening because we are so definitely preaching to the choir. I’m not sure I need to talk to anyone in this room about the value of public broadcasting, public media and how transformative it is,” said Burns after many introductions and accolades. “There’s repeating that we are an underfunded, tiny organization that manages to produce with one foot in the marketplace and the other currently out of it – the best shows, the best science, the best nature, the best public performance, the best public affairs, the best history and just about the best everything on the dial. We live in an age when we are literally buried in an avalanche of information with almost no meaning attached to it. There’s not a mechanism that assumes in terms of which the meaning can be digested and transformed into understanding, which would be thereby useful and we could employ it in our lives. Then I think we get public broadcasting and define that moment when these things come together. It maybe The Roosevelts, may be Frontline. “
David Fanning, Executive Producer, Frontline; Elizabeth Sembler, Chair of the Board, CPB; David S. Ferriero, Archivist of the United States
Burns on the making of The Roosevelts: “I had backed into the story of the Roosevelts mainly because my long time collaborator Jeff Ward who had polio when he was a young boy had written two extraordinary volumes. He and I had been talking about it. I assumed we’d do something on Franklin Roosevelt but after a while we began to realize how inter-related the Roosevelts were. It’s very funny. With the exception of a couple of historical books, almost nothing has put all three of these presidents together. It seems now in retrospect obvious that we would put them all together. For some reason they’ve been segregated perhaps for the superficial differences between Theodore a Republican and Franklin and Eleanor Democrats for the most part. They were both progressives, they were equally as liberal in their social policies. Nobody had told them there’s a complex intertwined family drama that we wanted to tell. Most tellingly we sort of acknowledged that he was stricken……. Franklin Roosevelt was stricken in the summer of 1921 with infantile paralysis at the age of 39 and all of a sudden 12 years later, he’s president of the United States.”
Ken Burns and Pat Harrison – Photo courtesy of CPB
“I think that all three of those Roosevelts, particularly Eleanor, had distance in their eyes. They both understood what all three of them stood for, what the issues of the day are. In a way we are so deeply related to those Roosevelts because they set in motion a kind of activist government that was interested in everyone. We do not preach to the upper Westside of Manhattan nor to San Francisco but we reach, sometimes, numbers that are as great in Alaska and Oklahoma and Arkansas and West Virginia as they are in those other places which is exactly the way it should be.”
National Archives – Photo courtesy of Creative Commons
“It was Franklin Roosevelt who had the foresight to create this building here,” said Burns. “He is the man with the first presidential library. He understood how important it was to collect things. In his idea it was, that it was really important for an open democracy, to collect the stuff that it produced. This film maker would not be here weren’t it for this building and the extraordinary staff that Theodore oversees here and all the extraordinary buildings of artifacts that are contained in this building that are strictly DNA of fundamental building blocks of the films that we make.
All three of them are unique individuals and it was our intention not to paint them in a hero fashion, nor was it our intention to employ revisions that would then sweep away anything good in order to examine the tabloid. This was an intimate history but it was not a tabloid history.
We are interested in understanding where they came from, what they were made of, what became of them, how their childhood experiences and how some of these traumas shaped them. Doris paints this really beautifully at the end of the film that we are all broken and indeed people are strong in the broken places. It is the story of The Roosevelts.”
The Roosevelts:
“We live in peril right now, where we lament for lack of heroes,” explained Burns. “It’s not true. They are everywhere, but we need to apply the right standard of heroism. Heroism is the negotiation sometimes between the war between people’s great experience and their everyday weaknesses. It is that negotiation that war between us that defines heroism. Achilles had his heel and hubris to go along with all of his great strengths. It was our intention to take three legendary human beings, three deeply flawed human beings, equally wounded human beings and try to do what John Keith said William Shakespeare did, which was, have negative capability.
Shakespeare in Keith’s film had this ability to hold intention, a person’s strengths and their weaknesses. The moral experience wants us to instantly judge the way we do today, as so dialectally pre-occupied as we are, everything is in that state or this state or north or south or they are straight or rich or poor or black or white, there’s no such thing. The great ones always had fatal flaws and the darker characters always had something to deal with more.”
“That was important for us with The Roosevelts. We got to know the course of the rest seven years, three extraordinary complicated human beings with a great deal of undertone but also a great deal to commend them. We found something universal about their experience that we would have in this story of people the oldest of whom was born in 1858 and the youngest of whom died in 1962.
Everything that we talk about today, they were talking about then. Eleanor was ahead, the distance in her eyes in such an extreme …about race, about poverty, about health, about immigration, about women, about children in the 1920s and the 1930s.
The issues that are still on our lips: “What’s the role of government, what can a citizen expect from his or her government? What is the tension between idealism and pragmatism? What is the nature of leadership? How does character form leadership? How does character itself create it through diversity? These are all the things that we think about in our own lives, we think about it in our contemporary scene and we’re all part of the story we’re telling if there is one. In some ways we live in a media culture that’s obsessed with celebrity and all those things. It seemed important for us to remove the old face from them to make them humanly accessible and then understand an even greater belief why they are so extraordinary.”
You can purchase The Roosevelts series here.
