Being a columnist means keeping up with the news cycle, of course. But for the past couple of years, I’ve been carving out time to work on a much bigger project in the midst...
| |  | | | | Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics | | | | | | The Ken Burns "The Vietnam War" session at the Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour in Los Angeles in July. (Rahoul Ghose/PBS) | Being a columnist means keeping up with the news cycle, of course. But for the past couple of years, I’ve been carving out time to work on a much bigger project in the midst of the day-to-day churn. And last year, before I’d even completed work on my five-part series about pop culture and the police, I started work on this year’s project: a deep dive on Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s forthcoming 10-part documentary, “The Vietnam War,” premiering on Sept. 17, that looks at how the movie got made and where Burns and Novick are in their careers. The series will start rolling out on Sept. 14, when we publish a piece that looks at Burns’s desire to give Americans a shared experience on a difficult subject and whether that’s something that’s even possible in the age of President Trump. We’ll follow with a look at why it took 10 years to make the documentary here and in Vietnam. And we’ll conclude with a profile of Novick, who I’d be willing to bet most of you don’t know much about, but who is essential to the films she and Burns direct together. The written pieces are important to this project, but there’s more to it than that, too. Adriana Usero, who produced the videos for the police series, is back again with this project. And I’m incredibly excited to share with all of you that Burns and Novick sat for an extensive series of interviews with me that are the core of my first podcast: “The American War,” which looks at how the movie came together and the big issues it raises, will start rolling out on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and anywhere else you get your podcasts the morning after each installment of “The Vietnam War” airs. I realize this may all sound a little meta, almost a documentary about a documentary. But as I reported this project, sitting in on the final editing sessions for the movie last year and doing dozens of hours of interviews this summer, it felt like “The Vietnam War” and this moment in American politics were converging. The roots of so much of our present division are rooted in the soil of the Vietnam era. And as we argue over whether reconciliation or confrontation will best serve us in the months and years ahead, Burns’s approach to movie-making and to evangelizing for American history are a fascinating test case. I can’t wait to share this series with you. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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