Bill Moyers Retrospective to Repeat 13 Documentaries

Beginning tonight, Bill Moyers will spend 13 weeks looking back at some of his previous documentaries for CBS and PBS. But fans need not worry: He hasn’t retired to a rocking chair to ponder things that once were. Moyers will return in the fall with two new series and a special for PBS.

The retrospective, “Moyers: A Second Look” (which will air at 10 p.m. on KCET Channel 28), consists of 3 of his “CBS Reports” and 10 of the various shows he has done for PBS, spanning 18 years of his work. He’ll also update each with what’s-happened-since-then commentary.

First up is “Marshall, Texas; Marshall, Texas,” his 1984 look at the eastern Texas town in which he grew up and how time and circumstance had changed it. The last, airing July 31, is “The Vanishing Family: Crisis in Black America,” one of the last CBS documentaries he did before ending his second tour with CBS News in November, 1986, to begin his third in public television.

The series “sort of fills the gap between our most recent broadcasts and the new material coming in the fall,” Moyers said.

Moyers, whose production offices are at public-TV station WNET here, said the idea for the spring-summer retrospective came from the station’s president, William Baker.

Baker, he said, “noted that a lot of people have grown up in the last 10 years who were in high school and younger” when the programs first aired. And, buoyed by the success of two recent Moyers’ series, “Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth” and “World of Ideas,” Baker thought it’d be good to give the thirtysomething crowd a chance to see the works of yesteryear.

For many, Moyers reckons, “it’ll be new to them, and (it will) give older viewers a chance to see the shows again. A good documentary is more than just a moment, anyway. It’s a slice of time that, like a good photograph, you can look at later and see things in it you didn’t see the first time.”

Moyers’ two upcoming series are the five-part “The Power of the Word,” slated for September, and “The Public Mind,” a four-part November entry.

The first series, he said, “is about contemporary American poets, the people who are really the carriers of language, the couriers of spirit today.”

Moyers describes “The Public Mind” as a look at what Americans know about their problems and those of the nation, and how they deal with them.

It has an unlikely origin.

“It came about because, at the end of the (presidential) campaigns last fall, the General Accounting Office came out with a 22-volume study of the serious issues facing American life,” he explained. “And none of them had been addressed in that campaign.”

The issues, he said, included management of educational programs, U.S. participation in the United Nations, the deterioration of Department of Energy nuclear weapons facilities and the future of civil space projects.

One chapter of “The Public Mind” will deal with a subject that more than a few observers outside Washington have pondered over the years. It is the question, Moyers said, of “politics, news and reality,” or, “are our political system and the news media really dealing with reality?”

His new special, slated for December, is something completely different. It traces the origins and impact of the venerable hymn “Amazing Grace” and includes a cappella performances of it by such diverse performers as pop music’s Judy Collins, country’s Johnny Cash and opera’s Jessye Norman.