Every single one of Ken Burns’s documentaries has run on public television in the U.S. — and that’s not going to change, even though docs are booming on digital platforms.
Why Ken Burns won’t leave PBS for HBO
“I’m at the dance with them that brung me and I think I’m leavin’ with them,” the co-director of “The Vietnam War” says.
Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival
“I’m at the dance with them that brung me and I think I’m leavin’ with them,” Burns said on the latest episode of Recode Media with Peter Kafka.
Burns co-directed the new 18-hour documentary series “The Vietnam War” with Lynn Novick, who previously worked with him on “Prohibition,” “Baseball” and “The War,” a 2007 series about World War II. He said they’re loyal to PBS because of the values of public broadcasting, but also because they doubt a private company like Amazon or HBO would invest in the lengthy creation time of each series (10-and-a-half years, in the case of “The Vietnam War”).
“I was with the head of HBO, who’s a friend — Richard Plepler,” Burns said. “And someone said, ‘Why isn’t Ken with you?’ And he paused for a second. I just filled the void: ‘Because you wouldn’t spend as much as we spent over 10 years.’ And that’s the point here.”
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“The Vietnam War” will be available to stream on Netflix and other online platforms, Burns noted. But on the new podcast, he said he doesn’t want one of those platforms to be able to tell him how to do his work.
“There would be a suit, or maybe an open-collared person, who would say, ‘You know what? Too long. Too short. Not sexy enough. Too sexy. Too violent. Not violent enough,’” he said. “Every single film I’ve made for public television has been my director’s cut.”
“I want you to watch my film, because I can say to you, ‘If you don’t like it, it’s all my fault,’” he added. “I know lots of friends in Hollywood who say, ‘Well, they wouldn’t let me use this actress or I wanted to go with this writer, or I wanted to have this scene, but no.’”
The first five episodes of “The Vietnam War” will be available to stream online starting Sunday, Sept. 17, and will be broadcast nightly on PBS over the course of that week. After that, the remaining five installments will be spaced out on TV, airing one episode per week.
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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
