A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

On September 23, 2007, the 300-plus member stations of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) aired A Necessary War, the first of seven episodes of The War: A Ken Burns Film. Produced and directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, this 15-hours-long documentary series tells the story of how four American towns – Waterbury, CT, Mobile, AL, Luverne, MN, and Sacramento, CA – and their citizens experienced World War II. Written by Burns’ long-time collaborator Geoffrey C. Ward ( The Civil War, Baseball, Prohibition, and The Vietnam War ), The War is a bottom-to-top look at the Second World War as told by now-elderly members of what former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw calls “The Greatest Generation.” They are a cross-section of American society who experienced “the War” either in far-flung theaters of operation around the world or on the home front back in the States. Their stories – some of which are wryly humorous, and some of which are simply horrifying – reflect The War’s tagline: In ex...

(C) 2011 A&E Home Video WWII in HD: In November of 2009, History aired a 10-episode miniseries titled simply WWII in HD, which was "shot and remastered in high definition" and culled from - as the package blurb puts it - "three thousand hours of color film few knew existed" from several countries' archives. Essentially, producer Lou Reda and writers Matthew Ginsburg, Bruce Kennedy and Liz Reph take a page from the Ken Burns playbook and follow the wartime experiences of 12 American men and women who participate in World War II either as combatants (Jack Werner, Shelby Westbrook), caregivers (Jane Wandrey) or reporters (Robert Sherrod, Richard Tregaskis) from Pearl Harbor Day to VJ Day. The narrative, which combines color footage collected over a two-year world-wide search in Allied and Axis archives, interviews with now-elderly veterans and dramatic readings from the 12 "characters'" letters and journals to recreate as vividly as poss...

The World at War Last Days in Vietnam The Civil War: A Film by Ken Burns Vietnam: A Television History The War: A Ken Burns Film Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns The Cold War Prohibition: A Film by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick Victory at Sea The West: A Film by Stephen Ives A Film by Ken Burns: The Roosevelts: An Intimate History Empire of Dreams: The Making of the  Star Wars  Trilogy The Vietnam War: A Film by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick The Central Park Five: A Film by Ken Burns The American Experience: Battle of the Bulge

In 1971, a young British television producer named Jeremy Isaacs and a team of writers, directors, editors, and other production staff began work on   The World at War  a 26-part documentary about World War II. Isaacs knew that the war is too vast and complicated a topic; not even 26 hours of television air time (including commercial breaks) is enough to cover every campaign, battle, or major personalities.  After consulting with Noble Frankland, then the director of the Imperial War Museum, Isaacs decided to cover 15 decisive campaigns and battles, with the rest of the episodes devoted to such specific topics as the rise of Hitler in Germany, life in occupied Europe, day-to-day life inside the Third Reich, and the Holocaust.    The emphasis of the series is not so much the  history  of the war but rather the human  story , not only because simple dry facts and endless clips of censored war footage are mind-numbingly dull, but because televis...