Award-Winning Documentary Filmmaker

Program Title: An Evening With Ken Burns

Ken Burns has been making documentary films for more than twenty years. Since the Academy Award nominated Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, he has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made, including The Civil War (1990) and Baseball (1994). Stephen Ambrose, the historian, has said of Ken's films, "More Americans get their history from Ken Burns than any other source."

JAZZ (a GM Mark of Excellence Presentation that will air on PBS in January, 2001) is Burns's third epic documentary, a ten-part that follows this most American of art forms from its origins in blues and ragtime through swing, bebop and fusion. As with The Civil War and Baseball, which with JAZZ constitute a unique trilogy of American life and culture, Burns explores in detail the culture, politics and dreams that gave birth to this most integral part of American history and life. As he wrote in the introduction to the companion book (Knopf, 2000), "having grappled with many Constitutional issues in our Civil War series and many other films, and having explored our national pastime and its exquisite lessons in our series on Baseball, we have over the last six years struggled to understand the utterly American art form of jazz.

Ken's epics have received numerous accolades. The Civil War was the highest rated series in the history of American public television and attracted an audience of 40 million during its premiere in September 1990. The columnist George Will said, "If better use has ever been made of television, I have not seen it and do not expect to see better until Ken Burns turns his prodigious talents to his next project." The series was honored with more than 40 major film and television awards.

The eighteen and a half hour long Baseball, for which Ken was also the director, producer, co-writer, chief cinematographer, music director and executive producer, attracted more than 45 million viewers. David Bianculli of the New York Daily News said that the film "resonates like a Mozart symphony." Time Magazine wrote that "Baseball is rich in drama, irresistible as nostalgia, and...an instructive window into our national psychology." The film won numerous awards, including an Emmy, the CINE Golden Eagle Award, the Clarion Award, and the Television Critics Award for Outstanding Achievement in Sports and Special Programming.