Filmmaker Ken Burns offers sneak preview of documentary
Published: December 7, 2008
Filmmaker Ken Burns has long been a fan of the Montana Historical Society’s Research Center, and honors that relationship when he attends a special preview of his upcoming documentary, “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.”
The Historical Society presents the sneak previews at 7 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 22, at the Emerson Cultural Center Auditorium in Bozeman.
Burns and historian Dayton Duncan have spent nearly six years on the project that will be presented as a six-episode series on PBS in the fall of 2009. Filmed at some of nature’s most spectacular locales, from Acadia to Yosemite, Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon, and the Everglades of Florida to the Gates of the Arctic in Alaska, the production focuses on the ideas and individuals that created the nation’s grand system of parks.
Burns and Duncan will talk about and show video clips of the new production and answer questions from the audience. Society Director Richard Sims will introduce the program.
The society has the premier collection of Yellowstone National Park photographs, including the work of F. Jay Haynes, who began taking photographs of its wonders before it became the nation’s and the world’s first national park.
The new production will include rich and poor, famous and unknown, and all of the “people who were willing to devote themselves to saving some precious portion of the land they loved, and in doing so reminded their fellow citizens of the full meaning of democracy,” Burns said.
Burns, described by The New York Times as "the most accomplished filmmaker of his generation," has been making documentary films for more than 30 years. Since the Academy Award-nominated Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, he has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made, including “The Civil War,” “Jazz” and “Baseball,” and “The War,” about World War II.
Tickets are $15 and limited to the first 650 people who buy them. They will be sold at the Society Museum Store in Helena, Cactus Records in Bozeman or online at www.montanahistoricalsociety.org.
A book and video signing with Burns and Duncan follows the talk. All proceeds benefit the work of the Montana Historical Society.
