Ken Burns on understanding the bloody global war that was the American Revolution

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Welcome to On Deadline, your radio news from Odyssey newsrooms across the country. The Hollywood box office is on a hot streak we haven't seen since before the pandemic. Is it here to stay? Let's check in with KCBS in the Bay Area, and then we'll talk to Ken Burns about his patriotic new documentary.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:18)
Travis Knox, associate professor at Chapman University's film school and director of the creative producing program. You know, for years, or at least in recent years, we've been told, you know what, the theaters are dying and dead. Streaming is the way that we watch first run movies now.
But is there a chance people are getting streaming fatigue?

**Travis Knox** (0:42)
Well, from a financial standpoint, you know, they call it churn, where you, you know, join Paramount Plus for 30 days, watch everything and drop it again. People are getting tired of now having to have six or seven subscriptions that they have to subscribe to.
Also, I think, I heard the other day the average person takes 20 minutes to figure out what to watch. I don't know so much again if it's fatigue. I think people like communal experiences. I think putting something original that a certain target audience wants to go see is going to bring them out. And also we do have a variety of movies, or I should say a larger variety of movies this year than we've had. It's the most since we've come out of the pandemic.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:22)
So much has been said about the young directors behind these blockbusters. You've got Curry Barker of Obsession is 26, Kane Parsons just turned 21 days ago from Backrooms. Is there an interest maybe from the younger generation?

**Travis Knox** (1:38)
I don't know if it's director specific in that they're dying to see something made by that person, but it feels like it's their own. You know, Backrooms in particular, this is their thing that they can latch on to that's not nostalgia, like going to Minecraft or Mario. It's something that to them, it's original and fresh.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:57)
I wonder if maybe we're just returning to normal.

**Travis Knox** (2:01)
I think it's a lot of that for sure.
The problem for movie theaters is that they've kind of done the wrong thing in the sense that they have just, there's so many more screens now than there were 30, 40 years ago. But on the inverse of that, there's so many more options. Good storytelling is on TV. I actually get asked to do this presentation once in a while about streaming, and so I take it to the decades. If you look at 1980, there were 17,000 movie screens in the US, and there was only about 80 original scripted TV shows.
The fact that blows especially students' minds is when I mentioned the number one show in 1980 You may remember it was Dallas. One out of three homes watched that live at the same time. If you flash forward going into the pandemic in 2020, we had 41,000 screens. This is from 17,000 to 41,000. And yet we had almost 500 original shows. And there's good storytelling on TV now. And I think anybody that really pays attention to streaming, there's a much higher quality.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:02)
You can't talk about good storytelling without adding two words. Ken Burns.
Here he is on KCBS. He's talking about his series, The American Revolution on PBS.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:14)
What do you want them to know before they go into it?

**Ken Burns** (3:16)
Nothing. We make our film for someone who's curious, but perhaps ignorant of what went on. We make no assumptions. We are aware of the fact that what we have collectively been taught, not just in school, but what seeps in the conversation is woefully inadequate, that it's very superficial.
The revolution is encrusted with the barnacles of sentimentality and nostalgia, that it's a bloodless gallant myth. We accept the violence of our civil war and all the 20th century wars, but we, I think, trying to protect the big ideas that happened in Philadelphia in 76 and then 11 years later with the Constitutional Convention in 1787, that we think that somehow it might be diminished if we communicate just how bloody this revolution and also civil war and also global war was. But that was our mission to try to tell it. So I think that you don't have to come in with anything other than an open mind, which is exactly what folks have done. And I can report that the last, you know, seven, eight months of it being out there, streaming and broadcast have been, you know, tens of millions of Americans across, you know, all areas have been watching it. And it's been really gratifying to see the response. And I think, as you indicated, as we approach the 250th, particularly in difficult times, that it's important maybe to go back to the origin story and figure out what we were originally about and what we may still be also about going forward.