Snack: Ken Burns

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Dan Bova** (0:29)
Hey everyone, welcome to another snack size edition of our show How Success Happens. I'm Dan Bova, writer and editor at entrepreneur.com. So we here at the How Success Happens podcast, we being me and super producer Emily, are gonna take a weekend off to eat, drink and hopefully not blow off any fingers while lighting fireworks on the 4th of July.
And since by the time this episode drops, we'll have just rung in America's 250th birthday, I thought we could take a listen back to a convo I had with America's storyteller, Ken Burns. So as you know, Ken is quite the filmmaker. His documentaries like The American Revolution, The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, have earned him tons of Emmys and Oscar nominations. Now, I spoke with him a couple of years back while he was promoting the Vietnam War documentary, and he had so many incredible things to say about his process and the art of storytelling and the state of entrepreneurship in America that I thought we'd share some snack-sized highlights right here. So to kick things off, I asked Ken how he produces such an incredible amount of work and how he answers that huge question, what should I do next?

**Ken Burns** (1:57)
I'm sorry to say in a kind of admission of kind of foolishness that I'm thinking usually about 13 or 14 films ahead. I'm now working on six or seven at the same time, which is insane. You can do two or three. And I don't mean things that are back burner, but things that are actually planned. And a lot of that has to do with the economies of scale that our labor-intensive historical projects require.
The film that I'm finishing on, The Vietnam War, was 10 years, more than 10 years in the making. And that's from the moment we decide to do it. And then we're in public television, so you're going out to raise the money from a whole variety of very, very kind people like Bank of America or individuals who participate in the Better Angels Society, which is a nonprofit that I help sort of kickstart to raise money from individuals of wealth to foundations, to government granting agencies like the National Endowment for the Humanities and Corporation for Mobile Broadcasting. So you need this long view. And so yeah, but the actual selection is not based on any kind of market research. It's not based on any kind of sense of, well, this will do well. It's a gut feeling. It's like, it's the chemistry that happens between friends. You got a lot of ideas, 50, 60, 70 film ideas. I mean, if I were given a thousand years, I wouldn't run out of topics in American history, but maybe there's 50 or 60 things I'm thinking about. And then every once in a while, one drops from your head to your heart, you go, got to do that one. And then you sort of add that to the queue, and it just becomes finding the bandwidth and figuring out who the collaborators are, which is the number one thing is who the collaborators are.

**Dan Bova** (3:45)
So given all the time that goes into these projects, I wonder what happens if, let's say, five years into research, Ken realizes, man, things aren't really working out.

**Ken Burns** (3:57)
I know I'm really lucky.
For many years, people would say that question, and I would say, well, I've always wanted to do a history of Dr. King, and I know that the family is very controlling, so I assume that that wouldn't happen. And then, just completely coincidentally, the family wrote me a letter saying, we think you are the one person to do the film on our father and husband. And I said, you are right, I am the person. But after a day of talking to them, I realized that that controlling interest, very understandable, a man that belonged to the rest of us, a father and a husband you couldn't control in life, was perhaps controllable in death. And so I very early on walked away from that.
But not yet. So I feel comfortable that a lot of it has to do with public television, a lot of it has to do with my stubbornness. And people always say, well, 10 years, don't you get bored? And I go, actually, it's so hard to leave a project that you've been working on for 10 years, that each day it actually gets better and better and better. So it's the opposite of how we operate today. It's the opposite of a quarter model, which is judge me quarter to quarter, a corporate model I should say, judge me quarter to quarter. It's the opposite of what a intensely focused media now is all about, but it actually works. And I don't live in Los Angeles or New York City. I live in a tiny village in New Hampshire, which permits us to do the deep dives, to do the necessary research and to keep the sanity in the course of a 10 plus year project.