Filmmaker will continue PBS work
Entertainment: Sneak preview of World War II project shown at dinner
Ken Burns says public TV lets him avoid commercial concerns.

Ken Burns, the documentary filmmaker best known for "The Civil War,” "Baseball” and "Jazz,” is committed to public television.

On Wednesday, Burns and Paula Kerger, president and chief executive officer of the Public Broadcasting Service, said during an Oklahoma Educational Television Authority dinner celebrating "Oklahoma's Digital Future” that Burns will continue to make documentaries exclusively for PBS through 2022.

Burns, whose latest documentary series, "The War,” premieres on PBS stations on Sept. 23 — 17 years to the day after the premiere of "The Civil War” — offered a sneak preview of two segments from his World War II documentary during the dinner at the Oklahoma History Center.

Burns said in a Thursday interview that his decision to renew with PBS was mainly because of the freedom he is given to create his documentaries without compromises.

"There are no commercials. It is not dumbed down. It is not programming in the service of a delivery vehicle for those commercials,” Burns said. "It is given the time and resources to develop more fully the ‘other story,' the hidden histories in the case of my work.

"I am not a historian — I am a filmmaker,” he said. "I want to be an artist, and I want to make a great work of art. There is only one place that allows me to do that.”

Kerger joined PBS in March 2006 after working as president of the Educational Broadcasting Corp., which oversees Thirteen/WNET and WLIW in New York, two of the largest PBS affiliates. She said PBS offers filmmakers such as Burns an environment free of commercial concerns and financial expectations, allowing them to create without fiscal pressure.

"At the end of the day, our concern is not going to be how many eyeballs are watching, which translates to advertising sales, or whether it's going to have any other financial impact or return,” Kerger said.

"The War” is a 14½-hour documentary looking at World War II from the perspective of people who fought and the families and loved ones they left behind in four cities: Waterbury, Conn.; Mobile, Ala.; Sacramento, Calif.; and Luverne, Minn. Burns said his idea was to offer more personal history of the war, rather than traditional documentaries that study generals, troop movements and battle plans.

"We would pick these towns and just try to give the human, universal sense of what went on by following their experiences.”