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NEWS from D A N K L O R E S C O M M U N I C A T I O N S 386 Park Avenue South, 10
th Floor, New York, New York 10016 tel 212.685.4300 fax: 212.685.9024
September 7, 2008
The documentarian films 'The National Parks: America's Best Idea' and finds a rare occasion to relax in Montana's wilderness. By Christopher Reynolds September 7, 2008
Glacier National Park, Mont.
It's too early for civilians. As dawn's first light falls on the jagged peaks, creeps down the
dwindling glaciers and glides across glass-faced Swiftcurrent Lake, most of the tourists in
the Many Glacier Hotel are still snoozing.
But down at water's edge, three early risers huddle around a camera. One of the guys,
leaning on a tripod and waiting for the clouds to arrange themselves over the jagged
peaks, has a Beatles haircut, the build of a shortstop and a face you've seen before
somewhere.
Perhaps during pledge week.
"I want more of the color," he says, peering through a viewfinder. "OK, I'm doing it," he
says. And the film rolls.
Yes, it's Ken Burns, solemn PBS documentarian of the Civil War, jazz, baseball, Frank
Lloyd Wright, Mark Twain, Congress, the Brooklyn Bridge and more than a few other
American characters and institutions. Beside him stand cinematographer Buddy Squires
and writer Dayton Duncan. Upstairs in the hotel, Burns' wife and 3-year-old are still
sleeping.
So what exactly is Ken Burns doing on his summer vacation?
A six-part, 12-hour series, of course.
"The National Parks: America's Best Idea" is to air in fall 2009 on PBS. This choice of
topic may surprise some, given the body counts and civil-rights gravity of other subjects
Burns has chosen. His last series, nominated for several Emmy awards, covered World
War II. Other projects in the pipeline cover Prohibition, the Dust Bowl and the Vietnam
War -- doom, destruction and gangsters on every side.
So why drag his cameras out here to the Canadian border, amid the peace, quiet,
scampering children and slowly retreating glaciers?
When you boil it down, Burns says, almost all of his work is about the way American
geography connects with the American character. And one of the country's most startling
innovations, he says, was the creation of a national park system in the late 19th and early
20th centuries.
"For the first time in human history, land was set aside not for the pleasure of kings and
noblemen and the very, very rich, but for everybody, for all time," says Burns, lounging
in a chair downstairs at the Many Glacier Hotel.
If that phrasing sounds suspiciously like a Burns script, that's not so surprising. Burns,
the son of an anthropologist, has been exploring American institutions on film for more
than 30 years, ever since his graduation from Hampshire College in Massachusetts in
1975.
Those first few years were lean -- he remembers using food stamps in 1977, grossing
$1,200 in 1978 while trying to woo backers for his first documentary.
"I looked 12 years old, and I was trying to sell the Brooklyn Bridge," he recalls fondly.
"I've got two binders of rejections at home."
The explorer
Of course he did sell the project eventually. "Brooklyn Bridge" aired on PBS in 1982, and
the work has been steady, if not frenetic, ever since. Burns splits his time between tiny
Walpole, N.H., and Manhattan and at 55, still radiates boyish enthusiasm, his
conversation quick and thick with literary and historical allusions.
Out on the trail, you don't hear a lot of hikers huffing out such phrases as "the apotheosis
of our exploration" and "the portal to immortality," but Burns does. Then again, he's also
sound-bite savvy enough to sum up his life's work in three words.
"Race and space," he says. In works on the Civil War, baseball and jazz, he explored race
relations in American culture. In works on the West and Lewis and Clark and Mark
Twain, he explored how this country's geography and culture have shaped each other.
With the parks project, he says, he wants to explore the movement that set aside
Yellowstone and Yosemite and created the national park system. These seem like
astonishing, out-of-character moves, he says, "in a culture so dedicated to the almighty
dollar, so dedicated to a kind of extractive and acquisitive mentality. It's phenomenal. So
how did this happen? Who were these people?"
The project, written and co-produced by Burns' longtime collaborator and New
Hampshire neighbor Duncan, will also look at other tensions that have long preoccupied
park-watchers -- the constant jostling among recreation proponents, preservationists
and commercial interests, for instance, and the big businesses that shaped the system in
its early decades, especially the railroad moguls and road-builders.
Here at Glacier, that means taking notice of Louis Hill, whose westward routing of the
Great Northern Railroad helped determine the park's territory. And George Bird
Grinnell, the naturalist and anthropologist who pushed for the area's designation as a
national park in 1910.
And Stephen Mather, the early National Park Service director who in 1921 chose the
route for Going-to-the-Sun Road, an epic 53-mile highway that crosses the continental
divide, its higher reaches chiseled into stony slopes. It took 11 years to build the road,
which opens in summer and is buried by snow the rest of the year. (Fall snows usually
close Going-to-the-Sun Road by late October or early November. This year, road-
improvement work will limit access beginning Sept. 15. For details: www.nps.gov /glac.)
Besides Swiftcurrent Lake's mountain views, the pseudo-Swiss architecture of the Many
Glacier Hotel and Going-to-the-Sun Road, Glacier's attractions include Logan Pass,
where you can tramp around on mid-summer snowfields about 6,600 feet above sea
level, a snowball's toss from the Continental Divide; and Lake McDonald Lodge, where a
gallery of mounted animal heads gazes down upon the woodsy lobby.
R&R time
Because so much of the parks project is in the can already, Burns and his team have the
rare luxury of relaxing here. Duncan has brought his wife and son. When Burns isn't
chasing the good light at dawn and dusk, he and his wife, Julie Brown, take their 3-year-
old daughter, Olivia, to play with pebbles on the shore, to sit for a moment on a horse at
the stables near the hotel and to glide around Josephine Lake on a midday boat cruise.
It's their first time here.
"Louis Hill and the Great Northern [Railway] made this park," Burns says. "They thought
that by controlling the access to this park, by setting up the resorts, more people would
ride on the railroad. And it was true. It was a big success."
Fortunately for nature lovers with short attention spans, the big ideas and historical
details in the Burns project will come with a hefty dose of sweet scenery. Along with the
archival photography that has become a hallmark of Burns projects, the filmmakers have
spent about $15 million over five years gathering fresh footage of just about all of the 58
parks. Duncan, in fact, has been to every national park but the one in American Samoa.
Burns, juggling multiple projects, has been to far fewer. But after all these years, he and
the gang fall into an easy rhythm in the field, their patter playing on footnotes in
American history, lines from long-ago scripts and pratfalls from three decades of
stumbling around North America in the predawn dark.
It is understood that most mornings, Burns will wake up first, Squires will be last and
Duncan will turn up sometime in between, filling idle moments by fussing with his pipe,
always ready to drive miles for a good slice of pie. Squires will bring his own coffee
maker and get the best pictures.
"In the material world," Squires says, "light and weather equals emotion equals
storytelling. So you take advantage of what nature gives you."
"God is our gaffer," Burns says that night, scanning the dusk horizon for possibilities.
"And he's not working today," says Squires, seeing none.
By the third afternoon in the park, the shooting is all but done. With his daughter
napping, Burns grabs Squires and me and another guy for a power hike toward Grinnell
Glacier. Through the loose rock and bear grass we climb, Burns leading the charge and
quizzing Squires about changes in camera technology.
At about 6,000 feet, we reach a spectacular spot above Grinnell and Josephine lakes, and
I pull out my camera. Burns, who has been waiting for me to catch up, can't help but
sidle over.
"Now if you put these four trees in the foreground, with the lake behind," he says, "I
think you can get the depth of field to work for you in a sort of Impressionistic way."
Who could argue?
The thrill of nature
The next morning, just before he and his family head off to Lake McDonald Lodge for the
last few days of this quasi-vacation, I ask Burns about his own history as a park tourist.
Clearly, he's been waiting for the question.
"My family life was horrifically tragic," he begins. "There was never a moment when I
wasn't aware that my mother was tremendously sick with cancer. I was told when I was 6
or 7 that she was going to die within six months. She died a few months short of my 12th
birthday. I didn't have a childhood."
But one weekend when Burns was 6 or 7 and the family was living in Delaware, his father
met him after school and drove young Ken to spend the night at his grandmother's house
in Baltimore. The next morning before dawn, Burns' father woke him and they hopped in
the car.
"We drove from Baltimore to Front Royal, Va., which is at the top of Skyline Drive, at the
top of Shenandoah National Park," Burns recalls. "The Skyline Drive runs down the
spine of the Shenandoah Mountains, and it is spectacular. We drove through tunnels,
which I'd never done. We drove through clouds, which I'd never done. We saw deer on
the road, which I had never seen. We saw a bear. We stayed in a little cabin, just my dad
and me. We had a campfire. We took a hike to see a waterfall, which I had never seen.
We turned over logs and saw these bright orange salamanders. And they scampered
away, and I caught one.
"And I will never forget the thrill of it. . . . It isn't just these places. It's who you see them
with."
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