Name: Ken Burns | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #615
Uploaded: 2025-10-07T19:43:40.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Ken Burns | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #615' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-10-07. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Ken Burns | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #615' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-10-07. Transcript available.

Ken Burns | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #615

Today's guest is a filmmaker. He's a historian. He's a writer. He is a cartographer
of time,
if you will. His name is ubiquitous with documentaries. He's covered some of
the
biggest events in U.S. history, and his new film, The American Revolution,
premieres in November. I had a great chat with the one and only Mr. Ken Burns.
Yeah, and if you'd like to sit back, whatever you feel like, Ken, if you start
feeling comfortable,
just let us know and we'll get you. I'm kind of an edge of the seat guy. You
are? Yeah. Wow.
Excited. That's an, I've never heard somebody say like I'm an edge of the seat
guy. Yeah. Like
you're edging or whatever. And I know that's like, it's just, I'm excited. Yeah.
You know,
oh yeah. If I were an animal, I'd be a puppy. Oh yeah. You know, kind of by the
door. Yeah. Come
on, come on, come on. Yeah. What are we doing? It must be horrible that an
animal, they don't even
give it a key on its wrist or anything. That's right. For it to think it could
have any, it's just
sitting by the door. Yes, exactly. Waiting. Yeah. Like if your wife or husband
were like that,
and they're just sitting by the door, you'd get them help. Yeah. Or you at
least give them like a,
right. A hug. Yeah. Or a spare key so they could at least have a chance. Right.
You'd get them a
little button they could hit. Yes. Right. Just to, to walk out. Yeah. That
would help. Yeah. Um,
we good Zach? Ken Burns, thank you so much for hanging out, man. My pleasure.
My pleasure. Good to be with
you. And thank you for all your, uh, your examination of, um, humanity, I guess,
through documentaries. I,
I was like, I know about you as most people did, you know, kind of when you, uh,
burst onto the scene
with the Ken Burns effect, I think that's when it, that's when it kind of hit a
lot of my culture,
you know, you're like, instead of hiring actors and everything, we're just
going to slightly.
Want to hear the story of how that happened? Yeah. It's really pretty cool. So,
you know,
I've been trying to make films about American history since like the mid seventies
and I'd had
some success, a couple of Academy award nominations, but I hit the jackpot when
this big series in 1990
came out on the civil war series, which, you know, use the photographs and
stuff like that. And,
and our idea was to energetically explore the landscape of a painting and treat
an old photograph
like it was a feature filmmaker's master shot, having a wide, a medium, a close,
a tilt, a pan,
a reveal, an insert of detail. So we were just sort of very energetically
exploring the landscape of,
of each image. And so I got a call in 2002, November, and it said it was Steve
Jobs. I went,
really? And he goes, yeah. He said, will you come out and visit me? And I said,
yeah,
that's me knocking at the door. So a few weeks later in December of 2002, I'm
in a room with him.
We're talking and he brings in a couple of pretty nervous, uh, engineers. Yeah.
And they're,
and I'm a Luddite and particularly, you're a Luddite. Yeah. Meaning we're not a
big computer
person. It represents a group in England in the 19th century who were opposed
to technological
changes. And so, okay. So Mennonite, Luddite, Amish, similar. Well, not quite.
It wasn't religious
as much as a kind of a social anyway. Okay. So Amish without the dairy kind of.
That's right. Exactly. So it's, it's basically folks who are opposed to it. I'm
not, I'm just
inept. So my children and my grandchildren helped me with all of that. Anyway,
Steve is saying, look,
we've been working on this thing and every Mac computer that comes out next
month, January of
2003 is going to have this feature on it. And he's showing me and it's sort of
like you can upload
your photographs and pan and zoom on them. Very, very simply kind of crude,
superficial, uh,
version of, um, what we do or try to do with our stuff to wake up the image, to
wake the dead,
you know? So, um, I'm looking at it and I'm kind of going cool. Cause I don't
really know what's
going on. And, um, and he says, so we'd like to keep the working title. And I
said, what's that?
And, and he said to Ken Burns, if I can, I said, you know, I don't do
commercial endorsements.
He goes, what? And the engineers kind of blanched. And I'd known a little bit
that he had a temper.
He never showed it to me, but we went back to his office. And after an hour, I,
I worked out
agreement that he could use it, but I'd, um, yeah, I already had a temper. His
iPhone always had a
crack screen. Maybe, but I know some folks who got yelled at. He never, he said,
what? So at the
end, I walked out and he basically agreed to give us what turned out to be over
a million dollars of
hardware and software that we gave away to nonprofits, except for one or two
computers that stayed in the
office. Cause we didn't have a good Mac computer in the office. And then we
became friends for the
rest of his life. And so whenever I visited Silicon Valley, I'd stay with him,
you know,
his kids, his daughter, uh, became an intern for us for, uh, a couple of semesters.
Uh, so it was a
really good relationship, but it is really funny. It's the technological tail
that wags the dog of what
I'm trying to do, which is take these old things where you don't have newsreels
or you don't have
living witnesses and try to wake up moments in the past and make them as
dramatically compelling
as you would, if you, you could talk to some veterans say of, of the Iraq war,
who's still alive.
Well, you certainly mastered it, man. You know, I mean, and the, and the Ken
Burns effect,
it's like, that was at the time where everybody was trying to be, could
suddenly, everybody could
suddenly be a filmmaker, right? That's right. Well, what, this is what Steve
did. I mean,
by inventing this, he made us all filmmakers. He made us, it democratized it
all. And what you
needed were the tools to be able to polish it. I mean, my kids now and my grandkids
can,
do stuff with this that I wouldn't have any idea how to do it. And one of the
cruder tools is the
Ken Burns effect, which has saved lots of vacations, lots of birthdays, lots of
memorial services,
lots of bar mitzvahs, you know, it's great point. You know what I mean? And
people say, oh, like,
man, you didn't ask him for a cut. And I said, no, I don't do commercial
endorsements. But if I'd said
like, I want one 100th of a penny every time it's used, he'd go, okay, we'll
call it the pan and zoom
effect. You know what I mean? It was like, it was like, the great thing was to
just sort of split the
difference in the middle and not be so obstinate that I couldn't yield. I don't
do commercial
endorsements. So it was sort of awkward. But at the same time, I wasn't endorsing
a thing. I was
endorsing an idea of how you use and manipulate images is which is what I do
for an image. Right
living. And also you manipulate the past, right? Just in a way to bring it to
life. That's right.
It's almost like you're giving CPR to it in a way, you know, I can't believe
that you said that
because my mom was sick from the time I was born, like a couple years in. And
you grew up here in New
York City, which is where we are. No, no, no. I was born in Brooklyn. I grew up
in Delaware and
Michigan and came east to Massachusetts for college. But my mom had cancer from
the very,
very beginning. And she died. From when you were a child? Yeah, when I was 11.
And it was just a
horrible, just, just the worst, shittiest growing up. And my dad had some
mental illness stuff. So it
was really hard. I'm not alone in having a hard childhood. But it's not self-pity.
You're just
sharing. But I watched my dad cry at a movie after my mom died. And he had
never seen him cry when she
was sick or when she died or at the impossibly sad funeral. And I realized at
12 years old, I go,
I'm going to be a filmmaker. This is 1965. This is, you know, a long time ago,
60 years ago.
Great time. It's way too long to be without a mom. But I, but I said, I, that
meant I'd be John Ford
or Alfred Hitchcock, Hollywood directors and stuff like that. And then I went
to Hampshire College in
Amherst, Massachusetts. And they were all documentary, still photographers and
filmmakers that reminded
me that there's as much drama in what it, what is and what was, is anything to
human imagination.
So I'm a documentary filmmaker. By 22, I'm making films in history. And I've
been doing that for 50
years. So I had a crisis of going through a crisis. My late father-in-law was
an eminent psychologist.
And I said to him one night, I said, I seem to be keeping my mom alive. And he
goes, yeah,
I bet you blew out your candles on your birthday, wishing she'd come back. And
I go, how'd you know?
And then he named two or three other things that only I knew, you know, really
intimate stuff.
Because that's how children like that operate?
Yes. And, and it's just, you know, what grief does and what the inability to
express it when you're 11
years old or when you're two years old and realize there's never a moment when
there's not a sword of
Damocles hanging over your head that's going to ruin everything. So, so I just,
I, I said, what do you
mean? And he goes, well, look what you do for a living. You wake the dead. You
make Jackie
Robinson and Abraham Lincoln come alive. Who do you think you're really trying
to wake up? And then
all of a sudden I knew that's what I do. I'm waking the dead. And it's
everything is a conversation
with this woman that has not been around for 60 years, 60 years, which is way
too long to be
without a mom. It's all a love story, isn't it? In a way, life, you know, there's
a, there's a
musician, Steven Wilson Jr. Who's really great. He's a great poet. Um, and he
says that grief is
only love that's got no place to go. Yeah. It's that's, that's perfect. Man, I
just, well,
just think about the energy, the propulsion of this loss just for me is, and,
and also my father's sort
of, he's the smartest guy I knew, but kind of a Maserati without a clutch, you
know, looked really
good, sounded boom, boom, really good, but couldn't get into first gear that,
that made me, you know,
such, you know, keep working on me. I've got 40 films, you know, I'm not
stopping. All my friends
are retiring and I'm like, what, what's retiring? You know, I'm, you know, yeah,
you're drinking
plasma at the house and taking electrolytes. I got stuff to do. I got, you know,
if I were given a
thousand years to live, I would never run out of topics in American history.
Like, so this is sort of a,
you know, I make films about the U.S., but I make films about us. You know what
I mean?
Got you. Yeah.
A lowercase, two letter, plural pronoun, all of the intimacy of us and we and
our, and all of the
majesty, complexity, contradiction, and even controversy of the U.S. And it is
a magnificent
space to operate in. I feel incredibly lucky and privileged to be, have the
responsibility. It's a
huge responsibility to dive into something like the Vietnam War. Right now, the
American
Revolution, which we just finished and, you know, or the Civil War or World War
II or the
biographies we did. Huey Long, you know, we're talking about from your state of
Louisiana,
which is just like one of the great unknown stories. It's such an amazing story.
Yeah.
There he is. Good job. Yeah, man. Oh, he was like a, he was definitely a big,
he had a mass, more personal power than anyone else in the history of the
United States in a state
context. He was both governor and United States Senator, which is not legal.
And he was already
running for president against Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 when he was assassinated
in, in September
of 1935 in the state house in Baton Rouge, in the big, magnificent art deco
state house he built as
a kind of monument to himself when he was governor. Yeah. Kind of wild to build
a monument while you're
alive. Yeah. And then it also immediately kind of turned into a mausoleum. Yeah,
exactly right.
Pretty wild how that works. Well, as children, we would go there and,