Ken Burns versus the critics (well, "versus" might be a stretch, as might "critics")

Perhaps it was his default personality: friendly, gracious, slightly meek, the kind that reminds you Ken Burns chose a career that was part filmmaker, part fundraiser. Or perhaps it was being in a room packed with TV critics who had strewn his path with rose petals of praise these past 17 years, since his documentary "The Civil War" debuted on PBS.

Or maybe it was the fact that almost none of us in the room was Latino.

Whatever the reason, Burns succeeded in deflecting criticism of his upcoming opus, "The War," where — in the original cut sent to critics, at least — he had managed to produce 14 hours of film about the men who fought World War II for the United States without including a single significant voice of Hispanic origin.

The oversight had exploded in the press last year, led by a University of Texas professor, Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, who leads an oral history project to record the memories of Hispanic women and men who took part in the war. Burns at first stiffened, saying the film was done and ripping it up would make it hard to finish by its scheduled airdate this fall. HACR, an umbrella group of 14 Latino organizations, vowed to boycott Anheuser-Busch and Burns' other corporate underwriters. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus got involved.

Burns finally relented. And yesterday, doing that thing he does so well — spin stories that sound so wonderfully heartfelt, they must be true —  the slightly built baseball and crosswords fan made it sound like there was no controversy at all, that he was on the side of La Raza all along.

"There's been a kind of a hot political battle," Burns said when the question came up. "We listened.  We heard that.  We produced some new material and included it at the end of three of the episodes." There will be seven total, airing over two weeks starting Sept. 23.

"These are stories that are as powerful as anything in the film and as good as anything we produced in the film.  So, no, we feel it was our obligation to listen and to hear.  I've been in the business, as you know, of telling stories that haven't been told in American history for the last 30 years and have tried to do that.

"It was, of course, painful to us, on one level, that people would misinterpret what the film was about, but we didn't have the luxury of abstracting this. These people" — Burns meant World War II veterans — "are dying; 1,500 a day is now the statistic.  It was important in a network and for filmmakers who wish to be inclusive, to have heard this. 

"I think we've found the right balance, had the right compromise, that permitted us not to alter our original vision and version of the film and at the same time honor what was legitimate about the concerns of a group of people who, for 500 years, have had their story untold in American history."

It was such an earnest and generous response, it almost made you forget that when Burns made his baseball documentary 13 years ago, he had a Latino problem, too.

Earlier in the day, PBS president Paula Kerger also took heat from critics over the handling of the situation, but managed to escape without serious, ah, burns. Kerger said "The War"  will now be longer because no material will be cut to make way for the new stories about Latino vets. The film, she said, "should be as long as it needs to be to tell the story he needs to tell, and that's why he's in public broadcasting."

Kerger also said PBS had commissioned other films to buttress Burns' film, "including another documentary that talks specifically about the Latino experience during the war."

Meanwhile, another program that promises to make the fall interesting for PBS got its first preview. "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial," an episode of "Nova" scheduled to air Nov. 13, will recreate the widely covered 2004 trial over a school-board policy in Dover, Pa., that would have required science teachers to give evolution and God-made-this theories equal time.

Since cameras weren't allowed in the courtroom, "Nova" hired actors to re-enact portions of the transcript. First the O.J. civil trial, then Michael Jackson, now public television.

Unlike Ken Burns, who waited for trouble to come his way, Paula Apsell, the executive producer of "Nova," and the makers of "Judgment Day" seem to have sensed from the get-go they would take a lot of abuse from the intelligent design proponents. The producers said they went to great pains to represent the anti-evolution point of view, even as the Seattle organization that leads those efforts stonewalled "Nova's" requests for interviews.

"If you believe that intelligent design got a fair shake in the trial, then you'll certainly believe that it gets a fair shake in this program because this is a program about the trial," said Apsell.

Judge John E. Jones III (shown here portrayed by Jay Benedict), who was appointed by President Bush, ruled for the teachers who refused to teach intelligent design, and the voters turned out the anti-evolutionists in the next school board election.

Jones, appearing in L.A. to help promote the two-hour program, said he didn't cut people off at the trial, and let everyone have their say. Jones quoted the journalist Margaret Talbot, who wrote after the trial in the New Yorker, "It was a science class that everybody wished they'd been able to take when they were in school."

Comments

[David]

Seriously people, is the lack of a Mexican in a documentary worth the time it takes to lodge a complaint? Why aren't there Polynesians, Australians or Penguins interviewed? Surely they had a signifigant role too. Everyone's voice needs to be heard equally. Go interview the Africans who fought in the war.

And evolution happens. Look at your appendix and your wisdom teeth.

[Mark Jeffries]

Not Mexican, racist. Latino.

And what's your opinion of African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Native Americans, Jews, women, gays and lesbians--as if we didn't already know?

[David]

Listen Mark, you are too quick to jump to conclusions. Read the whole comment.
There are more stories from that war than any 1 documentary could cover. LOTS of different cultures were affected, but LA RAZA, the most racist organization since the KKK, has more pull with the ACLU and its lobby than the NAACP could ever dream.
That is why we hear these cry-baby stories about LATINOS, but not about the real news, millions of criminals invading America, a lame duck of a president, a fake war to boost oil futures.

I don't like communist China either, you got a problem with that?

[Aaron]

Your point about Australians and Africans fails because this is about Americans in the war, and Americans only. That was Mr. Burns' focus and we should stick to that.

What is interesting to me is that PBS has worked exceedingly hard to attract Latino viewers, harder than any other English-language network. It bought "American Family." It airs documentaries during Hispanic American Heritage Month. It lured Ray Suarez away from Talk of the Nation to the NewsHour. And yet when the most important program of the year is being put together, over the course of half a decade ... nobody at the helm is saying, wait a minute, where are the Latino voices?

[Mark Jeffries]

And don't forget v-Me, although that's technically not PBS.

[Jesse]

I think we really need to save judgment for after seeing the thing--it's not really productive to criticize it or speculate in the meantime.

But from everything I've seen, this movie isn't about groups, it's about individual stories.

[Larry Fafarman]

I don't understand why people are still kicking around the Kitzmiller v. Dover decision. That decision was completely discredited when it was revealed that the opinion's ID-as-science section was ghostwritten by the ACLU. Even good unreviewed district court opinions have limited value as precedents, and this was not a good opinion.

Also, Jones lied when he said that he let everyone have their say. He denied the intervention petition of the publisher of the book "Of Pandas and People," then thoroughly trashed the book in the written opinion. The name of the book appears 75 times in the written opinion.

[Larry Fafarman]

"Judge John E. Jones III (shown here portrayed by Jay Benedict), who was appointed by President Bush, ruled for the teachers who refused to teach intelligent design, and the voters turned out the anti-evolutionists in the next school board election."

There are misleading statements here. Judge Jones did not "rule" for the teachers, because they were not the plaintiffs. The teachers were not required to "teach" intelligent design but were only required to read aloud a one-minute statement that mentioned intelligent design. By refusing to read the statement, the teachers reneged on their agreement that the book "Of Pandas and People" could be used as a supplemental text (however, I feel that the teachers should have been given more say in the wording of the statement). The requirement that the teachers read the statement aloud was not unreasonable -- in Peloza v. Capistrano School District, the 9th circuit federal appeals court ruled that a teacher could be required to teach Darwinism even though it conflicted with his beliefs.

Also, the school board elections were close, and voter concern about the cost of the lawsuit was a big factor in the defeat of the incumbents.

(Larry, you're right. I should've written that Judge Jones, a Bush-appointed conservative republican whose selection for the case was originally hailed by creationists, delivered ID the judicial equivalent of a body slam. But space was tight that day.--AB)