Winnowing ‘The West’

Ken Burns counts out on the fingers of both hands, in order, his films for PBS. They are 10--from “Brooklyn Bridge” in 1981, which drew an Oscar nomination, through “Civil War,” which made him rather rich as well as famous, “Baseball” and now “The West.”

But “The West,” which kicks off PBS’ fall season Sunday, is different from the rest. For on this eight-part, 12 1/2-hour series delineating the saga of the American West from the 1500s through 1914, Burns is executive producer and creative consultant, not the director. He’s a “foster parent,” he says during an interview, “rather than having true parentage”--the first time PBS’ peripatetic documentarian has parceled out a film.

As if on cue, Stephen Ives, director and co-producer of “The West”--at 35, he’s seven years younger than his mentor--arrives and takes a seat next to Burns on the couch in a Pasadena hotel lobby. So whose film is it?

“It’s Steve’s film,” Burns answers quickly, “because the director signs the film.”

“I’m sort of the originator of it,” Burns elaborates. “It was my idea to do it, and I set the thing up.” But he couldn’t direct it because he was busy making “Baseball.”

“What was fortunate about the timing is that, by the time I was done with my commitment to ‘Baseball’ in the summer of ‘94, it was the time when Stephen had finished the production [and] was in the editing room, where I could be the greatest help,”

Burns says.

Burns, Ives says with a smile, was a “classic switch-hitter. He would come in and be very intensely involved, helping us to craft the stories and structure the episodes. But then, because he’d have to go away to work on ‘Baseball,’ he’d come back and he always had kind of a. . . .”

“Distance,” Burns prompts.

“A distance and a perspective,” Ives continues, “which was incredibly valuable to me as a director because after five years . . .” one could obviously become too close to the work.

The production of “The West” (shorter than the 18 1/2-hour “Baseball,” longer than the 11-hour “Civil War”) spanned five years, 72 filmed interviews, 100,000 air miles and visits to more than 100 archives and private collections. (There is also a hefty $60 companion book by historian Geoffrey C. Ward, co-writer of the series with Dayton Duncan.)

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The $8-million series, narrated by actor Peter Coyote, received major financing from General Motors, the National Endowment for the Humanities, PBS and the Corp. for Public Broadcasting.

Ives’ initial contact with Burns came when he wanted to use a snippet of “Brooklyn Bridge” for an industrial film. Ives, whose father, David, was president of WGBH in Boston from 1970-1984, had graduated from Harvard in 1981 with a major in history and then taken up filmmaking in Texas.

Through David McCullough, who narrated Ives’ PBS film “Where the Heart Is” as well as some early Burns films (and later “Civil War”), the filmmakers met in Dallas in 1985 at a showing of Burns’ “Huey Long.” Ives later became co-producer on Burns’ “The Congress” and a consulting producer on “Civil War” and “Baseball.” He also did a film on Charles Lindbergh for PBS’ “American Experience,” which was seen in 1990.

Although Burns and Ives had some differences on how to craft “The West,” their historical vision was essentially in sync: that heroes and villains belonged to all peoples of the West. What they sought, according to Burns, was “an honest, diverse, complicated history that is unafraid of controversy and tragedy but isn’t some knee-jerk recitation of a catalog of crimes that renders American history as a catalog of white crimes.”

Sometimes they found good and bad within the same person--such as Narcissa Whitman, whose story is depicted in Episode 2, which will be seen Sept. 16. A Christian missionary who took in a family of seven orphaned children whose parents had died on the Oregon Trail, she loathed the native people whom she lived among and was trying to convert. She and her husband, Marcus, eventually were killed by them.

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As for differences between Burns and Ives, one of them involved the use of inner-titles, a staple of “Civil War.” Burns wanted more of them, Ives none at all. They compromised. “The upshot,” says Burns, “is we have far fewer than in the other films. In fact, I think it works to the rhythm of this series better.”

For Burns, who is “possessed by American history,” the West was an obvious calling. “This is the other great [American] story--like the Civil War. . . . I’m also curious about the undertow of history--how something can be so positive and yet be filled with tragedy.”

Ives sees the American West as the “ultimate four-way stop sign” where Native Americans, whites, Chinese, Latinos and blacks collided and the history became a “mixture of pride and shame.”

“I hope that people will look at ‘The West’ in a clear-eyed way,” says Ives, “and recognize that all of the things that this country went through to become [what] we are today--a continental nation . . . the wealthiest, most powerful country in the world--were astonishing achievements [that] should never be diminished, especially when you look at the cost and the struggle it took to conquer the West, to cross the distances.

“But I also feel really strongly,” he continues, “that people should not ignore the cost . . . that the casualties that were left in the wake of ‘Manifest Destiny’ deserve to be looked at. If one story of the West leads to the driving of the golden spike at Promontory, Utah, and the linking of the Pacific and the Atlantic by rail--the uniting of the nation East and West after being torn apart by the Civil War, North and South--another path is going to lead you to the blood in the snow at Wounded Knee.”

“This,” says Burns, who at times can sound like a documentary sound bite, “is where the best of us met the worst of us. And nothing was left unchanged.”

Just as with “Civil War” in 1990 and “Baseball” in 1994, “The West” will be competing with the start of the TV season on the commercial networks. Burns professes to be unfazed.

After reciting a mantra that ratings are “not the end-all and be-all,” he asserts: “We have to take our best stuff and put it up with their best stuff. And if we get creamed, we get creamed. . . . More important, we have an afterlife. ‘The Civil War’ is the most watched history film in schools.”

* “The West” will be shown at 8 p.m. Sunday-Sept. 19 and Sept. 22-24, with each episode repeated the same night at 9:30 on KCET-TV Channel 28.