Walpole, N.H.--If this were a Ken Burns film rather than real life, music would be tickling in the background. A light noodling ,, on a piano, a tune falling somewhere in that narrow yet evocative band between winsome and wistful.
The rolling New England countryside would be sepia-toned rather than the lush green of summer's end, with perhaps a crease or two in the corner authenticating once-forgotten, attic-emerged oldness. And then the talking head of Shelby Foote would appear over the horizon.
But, no, Ken Burns has yet to turn his cameras and his trademark style of the sentimentalized documentary -- call it "sentimentary" -- on his home of 15 years. Rather, he's churned out "The Civil War," the luminous 1990 series that became PBS's most popular show ever, and now "Baseball," an 18 1/2 -hour historical epic that begins its nine-day run Sunday night.
Planned to coincide with the most exciting part of the season, the pennant races that lead to October's World Series, "Baseball" instead will play as literally the only game in town. Now that the team owners have cancelled the rest of the strike-interrupted year, there will be no World Series, only "Baseball," the mega-series.
While that can only boost viewership, the pall cast over this and future seasons adds a sense of poignancy to the already emotion-laden documentary, which traces the history of the treasured American pastime from the 1840s to the present. Running as it will in the vaccuum of real baseball makes the film seem even more about something in the past, history to be revisited, rather than part of everyday life.
"It will probably do better ratings, but I didn't want the game to be gone," says Mr. Burns, a Red Sox devotee and the son of a native Baltimorean and Orioles fan. "I love my game of baseball."
Even without the strike, the near universal adulation of "The Civil War" created a natural audience for whatever Ken Burns turned out next. He's become a celebrity since "Civil War" (he's been one of People's most beautiful people, not the usual milieu of serious documentary makers), and some of that has spilled over on this mostly hidden hamlet on the Vermont border.
"Every once in a while, a car will drive slowly by the house," says a bemused Susanna Steisel, a longtime friend of Mr. Burns and an associate producer of the baseball series. "One fellow drove from California, knocked on the door and said, 'I want to work on "Baseball" with Ken Burns. I'll work for nothing.' " (He started as an intern and later joined the staff.)
Such is the cult of Ken Burns that seemingly everyone from no-name fans to stars like Gregory Peck, Paul Newman and Jason Robards wanted to work with him. Or somehow get a piece of him: This month's Life magazine tells how Mr. Burns made a recent appearance in the state with local heroes including Mike Flanagan, the former Orioles great -- and it was the filmmaker who got mobbed by the fans.
"That and 50 cents will buy you a cup of coffee," is Mr. Burns' somewhat disingenuous take on his stardom. The sentiment loses some validity after it's repeated to interviewer after interviewer. Mr. Burns' celebrity is certainly buying "Baseball" a lot of free publicity.
Whole new ballgame
But, there is a downside: As is the natural cycle of media worship, the once-adoring press is starting to turn on him. After ,, watching the PBS teaser last month, "The Making of Baseball," ** Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post decried what he called "an act of institutional self-abnegation wherein PBS flung itself in adoration at the feet of Burns, who on the evidence supplied in these 30 minutes scarcely needs additional ego reinforcement."
Newsweek weighed in with this shot: "The problem is that Burns, never one to underrate the breadth of his acuity, has succumbed to a case of Heavy Meaningitis."
Yet most reviewers can't deny the power of his style when he's at full throttle. The Newsweek review continues, "Burns's strongest suit remains his imagery. The documentary trick of bringing still photos to life by panning and zooming within their frames is getting awfully tired, but rarely in this filmmaker's viewfinder. . . . You don't just look at Burns's photos. You listen to them."
It is the slow, ponderous pace and the sheer length of "Baseball" that has drawn the most critical huffing. It seems to represent the sense of bloat that has surrounded Mr. Burns since the success of "The Civil War" turned him into the proverbial 800-pound gorilla.
"My style is to open things up," Mr. Burns says in a recent telephone interview, relating how "Baseball" expanded from the concept of nine one-hour episodes into its 18 1/2 -hour length. "It covers 200 years of American history. I could have done 18 hours alone on the Baltimore Orioles or the Brooklyn Dodgers.
"Any idiotic theory is going to get more than 18 hours of coverage today. Think of how much time people spend watching 'Wheel of Fortune.' "
On this particular day, Mr. Burns is in Colorado, where the Telluride Film Festival is screening part of "Baseball" and awarding its maker with a life's-work tribute not only for "Civil War" but a raft of other highly acclaimed documentaries. Not bad for a 41-year-old.
Back home in his crisp and tidy village, where a sign instructs you to keep your horse off the common, he's still the talk of the town.
At the ice cream place, the girl behind the counter is telling someone he comes in all the time, and once, Carly Simon was with him. And elsewhere in town, a few of the "Baseball" crew members, after several years of researching, interviewing, filming and editing, are tying up the loose ends and bracing for the anticipated barrage of calls and mail and requests after the series airs.
They weren't so prepared the last time. "After 'Civil War,' it was just Camilla Rockwell and me in the office, and the phones! It was amazing. People were calling to tell their stories," recalls Ms. Steisel.
At the core of Mr. Burns' Florentine Films operation is a group of longtime, loyal friends, like Ms. Steisel and Ms. Rockwell, people who knew him in college or moved up here as many post-hippie, artistic-creative types have done over the years a la ice cream moguls Ben and Jerry. On this recent day, the women had to take the phone off the hook to enjoy a rare and quick lunch together, Chinese take-out on the large table on the second floor of the barn-turned-offices behind Mr. Burns' home. The offices are cluttered with the flotsam and jetsam of the cottage industry that is Ken Burns -- posters, videos, coffee table books and, most of all, mail.
"After 'Civil War,' things just blew up. We hired someone just to deal with fan mail, we thought she'd be here for two days. Four years later, she's still here," Ms. Rockwell says.
When you speak of Ken Burns, pre- and post-"Civil War" distinctions continually emerge.
Pre-, he made well regarded if not widely viewed films, on the Brooklyn Bridge, the Shakers, Huey Long and other quintessential American topics. He lived quietly with his wife, Amy Stechler, and their two daughters, Sarah, now 11, and Lilly, 7.
Post-, there's a sense of overall inflation. His treatment of his subject matter has gotten bigger, vaster, and more exhaustive. He's approached for autographs, interviews, runs for political office -- no joke, both parties -- and blank checks for the projects of his choosing. (General Motors has underwritten him through the rest of the century.)
Ms. Steisel, who has known Mr. Burns for about 20 years, ponders a question about how Mr. Burns has changed as his renown has grown. "I wouldn't want to answer that," she says initially, before coming up with this response later in the day: "He's grown a beard."
Well, there is at least one major change: the break-up of his marriage to his former college sweetheart about a year ago. But Mr. Burns has said it had nothing to do with his work and the ensuing limelight.
Such attention is, of course, the opposite of the usual lonely life of the documentary maker. "The life of most documentarians is you don't get any attention at all," says Paul Barnes, "Baseball's" chief editor. "When the acclaim came for 'Civil War,' it surprised everyone. He reveled in it, frankly. I think as time goes on, though, it's getting to be a little too much. It gets in the way of the work. The pressures are very high."
'I love my job'
His friends say he is happiest when he's working on a film -- which is good, since he's almost always working on a film.
"I haven't taken more than a week's vacation in the last 20 years," says Mr. Burns. "I love my job."
What's not to love? When someone like conservative columnist George Will says of your "Civil War" series: "Our 'Iliad' has found its Homer," it can be hard not to start believing your own blurbs.
"I see them as epic verses told in Homeric form around an electronic campfire," he says of his work.
Such howlingly absurd hyperbole is tempered by Mr. Burns' unbridled enthusiasm and seemingly genuine belief in what he is saying. He goes on to compare baseball to both the Odyssey and Blake's grain of sand that reveals an entire universe.
Stuff like that makes the critics crazy while at the same time turning him into a folk hero to his audience, who long to view history as personal and emotional, and grand, sweeping subjects like the Civil War and baseball as intimate events linking them to their fathers and grandfathers.
He has been criticized for his now-familiar style of going for the emotional, for taking the facts of history and dressing them up with haunting music and the misty, water-colored memories of myth. Mr. Burns himself would agree: "We document, but we also create," he told Life magazine.
"Baseball" is not a straight history of the game. Rather, it takes a metaphorical approach, showing how baseball parallels other trends in American history.
"Race is the central subtext," Mr. Burns says. Race is indeed a running theme throughout the series, from segments on the former Negro League to the ultimate integration of the major leagues. "But there's also the history of labor, the exclusion of women, the rise and decay of American cities. There's nothing more revealing than baseball."
Although he rightly considers himself "the conductor," Mr. Burns notes the importance of the group effort in creating something as massive as "Baseball." It's hard to pin a number on how many people worked on "Baseball"; some 20 people have gotten editing, producing, cinematography and assisting credits. But that figure doesn't include the consultants who reviewed episodes -- some of them, such as "Total Baseball" encyclopedia editor John Thorn, the New Yorker's Roger Angell and Life editor/Rotisserie League inventor Daniel Okrent, also appear as
talking heads in the film. And yes, "Civil War's" resident raconteur, Shelby Foote, makes some return appearances.
The series has been about four years in the making -- Mr. Burns drafted his proposal in 1989, and began doing interviews the following year. Working largely here in New Hampshire, some 200 miles from Boston, rather than in the more frenetic film meccas of Los Angeles and New York, kept distractions to a minimum.
"Documentary filmmaking is very intimate. You're in close quarters, you're constantly interacting, you need to get into good rhythms," says Lynn Novick, who joined Mr. Burns in 1989 to help "mop up" the Civil War series and begin working as his co-producer on "Baseball." "It's not like a corporation, where everyone has strict responsibilities."
Like others on the team, she had known and admired Mr. Burns' work and eventually landed a job with him. She previously had worked with Bill Moyer on his "World of Ideas" program.
"In each one of my films I've chosen an essential amateur," Mr. Burns says of his co-producers. "I'm looking for someone who has an energy and who is hungry. I don't want someone who will do things by formula. I have a style."
That style is research-heavy and anecdote-rich. Ms. Novick estimates she read more than 200 books on baseball as part of her research. Either Mr. Burns or she conducted the 65 or so interviews that are sprinkled throughout the series.
The game plan changed over the years as they gathered raw material, Ms. Novick says.
Initially, they planned not to interview any ballplayers, and even the finished product is skewed more toward the interviews with baseball literati than players, people like George Plimpton and Doris Kearns Goodwin. (A budding historian even as a child, she tells a great story about how she would meticulously score all the Brooklyn Dodgers games, thinking that was her father's only way of finding out what happened while he was at work.) Ted Williams and Mickey Mantle granted interviews, while Joe DiMaggio and Sandy Koufax declined.
As Mr. Burns and Ms. Novick were interviewing and filming, other members of the crew were looking for visuals -- bits of newsreel film, still photos, even home movies. Ms. Steisel, for example, and her fellow associate producer Dave Schaye combed through thousands of photographs from private and public archives across the country to find the ones that give "Baseball" that now-familiar Ken Burns look.
"Everything sort of happens at the same time," Ms. Steisel says of the researching and interviewing and photo-searching. "I wouldn't even say there is a first step. Ken has always done it that way."
She recalls finding photos through a Chamber of Commerce in a small southern town, or in someone's scrapbook. She's particularly proud of unearthing a picture of Negro League organizer and player Rube Foster in action. "I finally got to a woman at the Chicago Historical Society and told her we're desperate for a picture of Rube Foster playing, and she went down to where they keep their glass plate negatives and found this beautiful photo of him that as far as we know no one has ever seen," she says.
Finding photographs was only half the battle; getting clearances to use them was the rest. Ms. Steisel groans at her quick cram of copyright laws and the endless phone calls to locate the proper approval.
Still, her memories of working on the film are positive. "We really got close," she says of her fellow workers. "People moved up and lived here for two, three years. We became friends, and together we created something."
It was a collaborative process, though sometimes a noisy one.
"It's not all polite in here. It can get pretty impassioned, but that's good," says Mr. Barnes, the chief film editor. "Sometimes, Ken will dig in his heels. Over three days, I might wear him down.
"At the same time, he's open to other people's ideas. Generally the editing sessions don't just involve me and him. Five, six people will watch. Sometimes when you edit, you get so much into it, you won't recognize things. You have to be open."
Mr. Barnes recalls one particular battle over including broadcaster Bob Costas speaking about going to Yankee Stadium with his father.
"I argued for days to get rid of Costas," he says. "Ken, everyone loved Costas. They wore me down." (Mr. Barnes, who previously has worked on documentaries like "The Thin Blue Line," is gracious enough to admit that screening audiences love the Costas story.)
On this particular day, he's finishing some final remaining tasks like getting snippets of film for PBS to use in promos. He's working in the now-empty house "downtown" that was used for editing the film and once was bursting at the seams with all the activity. "At the height of it, two sound engineers were working in the hallway, didn't even have their own rooms," Mr. Barnes says.
"I ended up in a closet on the floor with the pictures," Ms. Steisel recalls. "That was the archives."
The equipment has been piled aside to allow workers to refinish the floors, but it's still a jumble. Bins of outtakes and storyboards with shuffle-able segments ("Cobb: I have to be the best," "Gehrig gets sick and dies.") are everywhere. Leaders of film are hanging next to the washer and dryer. The original reels fill shelves, and research material is neatly boxed and ready for shipment to the University of North Carolina, which will archive it.
"It's very easy to work up here," Mr. Barnes says.
"I live in one of the most beautiful towns in America," says Mr. Burns, reveling in his good fortune of not having to move to the big city to pursue his work. "I can get everything I want here."
Or bring it there. His recent addition is an exact duplicate of Thomas Jefferson's garden house, the bricks made by the same supplier Monticello turns to for its replacements, and surrounded by apple seedlings just like the former president's.
It's a too-perfect case of life imitating art, or at least presaging it: Mr. Burns is already at work on his next excavation of the American soul: a biography of Thomas Jefferson.
VOICES OF 'BASEBALL'
Stepping up to the plate, or rather the microphone, in "Baseball" is an impressive lineup of celebrities, giving voice to the words of everyone from Ty Cobb to George Bernard Shaw. Here are some of the cameo voices: actors Gregory Peck, Paul Newman, David Caruso, Julie Harris, Anthony Hopkins, Ossie Davis and Paul Winfield, humorist Garrison Keillor, horror novelist Stephen King, playwright Arthur Miller, former Speaker of the House Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill, former presidential press secretary Jody Powell, author Studs Terkel and journalist Tom Wicker.
Musicians heard during the film include Bruce Hornsby, Branford Marsalis, Natalie Cole and Carly Simon.