KEN BURNS: Talking Radio

Ken Burns, the Emmy-winning filmmaker of “The Civil War,” turns his eye on a little-known chapter in American history in “Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio.”

Based on Tom Lewis’ book, “Empire of the Air” examines the dark, tragic backstage drama in the lives of three remarkable men who were radio pioneers--David Sarnoff, Lee de Forest and Edwin Howard Armstrong.

De Forest, who called himself the “Father of Radio,” invented the radio tube but didn’t know how it worked. Armstrong figured out how de Forest’s tube worked and went on to refine and enhance the technology of radio.

And Sarnoff, an immigrant from Russia, worked his way up from being an office and delivery boy for the Marconi Company, to become president of RCA.

Burns, who is working on his nine “inning” series, “Baseball,” for airing on PBS in 1994, talked about “Empire of the Air” with Times Staff Writer Susan King.

Why do we know so little about radio’s origin and history?

This is the story of the 20th Century. You ask anybody who invented the light bulb and they say Thomas Edison. You say the telephone, and they say Alexander Graham Bell. Now, who invented air conditioning? Who invented the jet plane? Who invented radio? Who invented television? We don’t know. These are the things that most profoundly affect our lives and we don’t know. Why is that so?

Corporations have intruded themselves into what we thought was a heroic American process and all of these things make us more passive. (The inventors) don’t exist. It is all corporate, it is all P.R.

When you fly in a jet plane you are unaware of geography, when you sit in a cool room you are suddenly no longer subject to seasons and when you listen to a radio and watch television, you engage passively and so we tend to atrophy and our curiosity atrophies.

Did you know a lot about radio before you started this project?

My friend Tom Lewis was in the process of writing (the book “Empire of the Air”). He just told me the story. I wasn’t really supposed to do this film. I was supposed to go out of “Civil War,” which was a handful, to the baseball thing. Tom was going to ask me to help him raise the money and find the filmmakers to make (“Empire of the Air”). I had no time to even do that, but then as I got to hear the story I got sucked in. I made this film on weekends, at night, on times I should have been on vacation.

I tried to stay fairly ignorant of the gritty details of the book because I needed to be the audience’s representative. It is a hugely complicated story, further complicated by science and technology, which most people, including me, are rather uninterested in.

I was interested in the men--the psychology, what made them tick. I was going to explain technology only as far as I needed to make you understand it was a big thing. That, to me, is all you need to know. Because what is really interesting is how you can have three different men from three very different backgrounds messing up their lives.

Did you have any idea when you began this project, it would end up being such a dark, almost sordid story?

I have never had a film that had that kind of darkness. Even my Huey Long film and my Thomas Hart Benton film, which were sort of the predecessors to this, have an essential sense that the human spirit is still there some place. But what is so sad is this 20th-Century fable has a kind of inner dark lining.

What type of men were David Sarnoff, Edwin Howard Armstrong and Lee de Forest?

On a simplistic level, Armstrong is the hero, de Forest is the fool and Sarnoff is the villain, but all of a sudden you blink and the lines are distorted again.

There is something heroic about applying abstract clinical science to the mass market, which is what Sarnoff did. There is something heroic about speaking Yiddish and raising yourself up and in 30 years being head of the largest firm. There is something heroic about the stick-to-it-ness of de Forest.

But all of these men suffer from the same disease. It’s a male disease, a 20th-Century disease and it has to do with ambition being kind of a poison in the bloodstream which ultimately corrupts--and, hey, they forget to see their own selves in perspective. They forget to see a kind of relativity. They even forget to appreciate what they have created. None of these men listened to the radio. And why is that? It is even a wonder to me that we even have radio any more after what they did with it.

Were people willing to talk about these three men?

We talked to Sarnoff’s son, who basically wouldn’t say anything. He had no affection which he could demonstratively show about his father. What is amazing is that this film is populated with these engineers who have been waiting their entire lives to tell what they know is one of the great injustices. A few just lept out of their chairs wanting to talk about Armstrong and his greatness.

“Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio” airs Wednesday at 7 p.m. on KVCR, 8 p.m. on KCET and KPBS.