TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100890/1008250.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.4 KB | 110 lines

                                                                                VIDEO, Page 78

The Civil War Comes Home


Of all things, a surprise smash hit on PBS


    Patrons at the Blue Mill Tavern in New York City's Greenwich
Village last Monday were greeted by a rare sight: the TV set in
the bar was tuned not to Monday Night Football but to a
documentary on PBS. On Capitol Hill, Senator Ted Kennedy, a
Yankee Democrat, and Senator John Warner, a Virginia Republican,
were riveted by the same show. Across the U.S., people debated
the battlefield tactics of Robert E. Lee, marveled at the
letter-writing eloquence of Civil War soldiers and traded
stories of ancestors who fought in the nation's great holocaust.

    It may not quite have been another Roots, but the TV event
that swept the country last week was no less stirring. The Civil
War, Ken Burns' beautifully crafted series, got virtually
unanimous raves from the critics before it was telecast. Even
so, few expected that an audience of great size would sit still
for the 12-hour, five-night history lesson -- a lesson,
moreover, with almost no film footage to enliven it, no
Hollywood gimmicks to romanticize it and no network publicity
machine to hype it.

    Yet for one week America became, improbably, a nation of
Civil War buffs. The Civil War got the highest ratings of any
series in PBS history: a score of 9.0 in Nielsen's 24 major
markets, equal to 14 million viewers, more than quadruple the
public network's usual prime-time audience. Video stores,
meanwhile, reported a burst in sales of blank cassettes to
people who wanted to tape the episodes.

    Not since Gone With the Wind has a mass-media rendering of
the war so thoroughly smitten the nation. "I've had more Civil
War conversations in the last three days in elevators and
waiting in line than I've had in the last 10 years," said
Christopher Nelson, a Washington business consultant and
self-described Civil War nut. "I always thought American history
was so dull," raved Carolyn Randolph, a retired schoolteacher
in Livermore, Calif. "But I'm learning so much." Others regarded
the show in more personal terms. One New York City woman
unearthed an old photo of her great-grandfather, a colonel in
the Union Army, and plans to scrutinize the series on tape to
try to spot him.

    The show promises to have a healthy life beyond last week's
telecast. A companion book is selling briskly (Knopf; $50), and
a nine-volume set of videocassettes is being offered by
TIME-LIFE Video ($188.82). More than 7,000 schools and libraries
have queried PBS about acquiring the cassettes and accompanying
teaching materials. PBS has already scheduled a rerun for
January.

    And creator Burns has suddenly become a star. The phone in
his home in Walpole, N.H., has been ringing almost nonstop. When
he drove into nearby Windsor, Vt., last Tuesday, people on a
street corner cheered. "That doesn't happen to documentary
filmmakers," he says. Though surprised at the outpouring, Burns
finds it explicable. "I have a healthy respect for the power of
the Civil War as a subject to command this kind of attention and
emotion. It's our great traumatic event, and now we seem to be
all collectively reliving it."

    Burns, 37, grew up in Ann Arbor, Mich., and studied film and
photography at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. The films of
John Ford inspired him to become a director; photographer Jerome
Liebling, a professor and mentor, urged him to try
documentaries. Burns got an Oscar nomination for his very first
film, Brooklyn Bridge, and followed it with acclaimed works on
the Shakers, the Statue of Liberty and Huey Long.

    He spent more than five years on his daunting Civil War
project. Recruiting his brother Ric and historian Geoffrey C.
Ward, Burns tracked down and photographed 16,000 old pictures
in 150 different archives, hired such actors as Jason Robards
and Morgan Freeman to tape 2,500 first-person quotes, and, all
told, shot 150 hours of film.

    Though widely praised for its objectivity and
comprehensiveness, the series has drawn a few cavils. Some
Southerners complained it put too much stress on slavery as a
cause of the war. Historian James McPherson, one of the experts
interviewed for the series, noted a number of factual mistakes.
The Union Army, for example, did not have 100,000 soldiers
younger than age 15, as the documentary states; there were
closer to 1,000. Still, says McPherson, "the Civil War is The
Iliad of American history, and maybe Ken Burns is its Homer."

    The filmmaker already has two more documentaries in the
works: on the pioneering days of radio and the history of
baseball. The networks, meanwhile, will almost certainly speed
up plans for their own Civil War projects. CBS has a mini-series
on the Battle of Gettysburg, and NBC is making a movie based on
the 1989 novel Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. Most
important, The Civil War may have revived Americans' flagging
interest in their history. Says Shelby Foote, the Civil War
historian who contributes wise, anecdotal commentary throughout
the episodes: "People who see the series will have a much
better understanding of what made this country what it is." And
of what television at its best can do.


-- By Richard Zoglin. Reported by William Tynan/New York and
Don Winbush/Atlanta, with other bureaus.