The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Burns: Streaming platforms offer $30M, but only PBS allows 10-year timelines
“There's no other place where any of these films could have been made. You know, I could go out to a you know, a Streaming service or to a premium cable channel and say, hey, I'm making a film on Vietnam, and with my track record, they'd say, how much do you ne…”
Burns: Viewing work as a conventional career ladder is a form of imprisonment
“In fact, later on, as Robert Penn Warren told me when I was working on Huey Long, he said, careerism is death. So I've actually never used the word career I use the word, unless I'm speaking like this, I use the word professional life, because he had instilled…”
Burns: Avoiding NYC overhead for rural New Hampshire was his best decision
“So I used to say that that was the best professional decision I made moving to Walpole. It's not. It's actually the second best professional decision. The best decision was to stay there. And it's because this is so labor intensive. It requires so much time. I…”
Burns: Saying no is easier in business because yes exposes one to criticism
“That, you know how it's so much easier in the business world, or in most of the world, to say no. To say yes is to lay yourself open for criticism. To say no is to protect your flank.”
Burns: Florentine Films routinely rejects sponsors' attempts to influence content
“There have been many, many times when people have tried to cross the line, trying to influence content, trying to tell us what to do or not do, or that this is a little bit too hard, or this is too this or that, and we just go, sorry, you know.”
Burns: Retaining IP ownership prevents studio executives from sanitizing historical truths
“My insistence that I am not giving up the ownership of the film, because the second you do that, then there's someone else who might say, About James Baldwin, ah, I'm not sure about that. You know, there's some suit somewhere that would wish that it would not …”
Burns: Brooklyn Democratic boss funded early documentary with a $1,000 cash envelope
“And met with the Democratic boss of Brooklyn, who died in jail, I believe, or at least went to jail, and he gave me an envelope with a thousand dollars in it from the Kings County Democratic Club”
Burns: First major documentary effectively paid him two cents per hour
“The budget was about a 180,000, a little bit more, and changed 383, something like that, and I calculated I got paid two cents an hour.”
Burns: Florentine Films maintains shooting ratios of 40 or 50 to one
“You know, we have shooting ratios of 40 or 50 to one, right?”
Burns: Not a single Civil War photograph captures an active battle
“Of the hundreds of thousands of photographs taken during the Civil War, not a single one is a battle. Not a single one.”
Burns: Florentine Films layered 15 to 20 audio tracks on documentary scenes
“It was usually just tramping feet, firing guns, just one or two tracks, and we were doing 15 or 20 tracks.”
Burns: Florentine Films structures each documentary as a separate zero-profit LLC
“Each project is its own separate LLC, it's its own bucket, there's no profit margin, there's no contingency, we just empty that budget, everybody gets paid, and essentially, we are all still freelance in this company, right? We exist as long as there is an ope…”
Burns scales to seven concurrent productions to sustain his freelance workforce
“What I needed to do in order to keep that team going was not just have one project, but have two, or three, or now seven going at once, and so it's economies of scale, so it feels like the same not Sisyphean, but like you're climbing Mount Everest in terms of …”
Ken Burns enforces strict no-yelling rule and washes dishes at Florentine Films
“We don't have any yelling. That's the, that's my number one rule, and at lunch I wash the dishes at the editing house, and so we speak to people about that.”
Burns: Ken Burns has gone six months without taking salary
“I've gone at times periods of six months where I haven't drawn a salary because we're coming to the end of a project, and I realize that money can be spent better on something else.”
Ken Burns: Watching his father cry at 'Odd Man Out' sparked his filmmaking career
“That's what made me want to become a filmmaker, so I saw my dad cry for the first time watching Sir Carol Reed's Odd Man Out with James Mason about the Irish troubles, and he just cried, and I suddenly, I got it instantly. I was, by that time, just 12, and, bu…”