On November 18 and 19 at 8 PM, PBS will be airing the next documentary from Ken Burns, The Dust Bowl. The two-part series is shattering account of the real estate boom and beliefs about climate change that lead homesteaders to destroy Midwestern sod, and the drought that turned that soil into dust storms resulting in a devastating, years-long environmental catastrophe. Burns and his producer Dayton Duncan were able to track down children who lived through the Dust Bowl, never-before-seen photographs and home movies of dust storms, and to weave them together with historians’ testimony to explain how the Dust Bowl influenced everything from American environmental science to women’s abilities to live up to their gender roles in a place where it was impossible to keep homes clean and children safe.

In July, I had a long conversation with Burns and Duncan about the research that made The Dust Bowl possible, why they relied on first-hand accounts rather than scientists to help advance our understanding of climate change, why art can be a better vehicle for communicating difficult ideas than journalism, and the role of government in American life. This interview has been edited for clarity.

I actually want to start out by asking you what attracted you to the material in the first place. Watching both parts of the documentary I was really struck by the parallels between our present situation and the regulation that leads to businesses encouraging people to overreach, and then the reluctance to contract with the American dream.

Burns: Well first of all, I should say my interest is born in my best friend’s interest, Dayton Duncan, who has been talking about this for more than 20 years as a subject. It’s something that comes down to me sort of with a kind of shorthand, the conventional wisdom that suggests just the most superficial of associations. So for us it’s always the ability to dive deep into a subject and find a human and intimate dimension to it that belies those conventional wisdoms and supplants them with something that’s more enduring and more, I think, impressive in a way.

Now, the thing we’ve discovered in every film we do is the way in which it always mirrors the contemporary. Whether it’s the Civil War or our most recent film on prohibition, they seem to be what Ecclesiastes said, that there’s nothing new under the sun – that they mirror political tendencies, economic tendencies, human foibles, human strengths –

For everything there is a season except the seasons come over and over again.

Burns: Exactly. They do indeed, and they tend to repeat themselves. I’m not a firm believer so much in that, as I am in the sense that human nature remains the same. And so what we watch in creatures is the same mixture of greed and generosity, the same degree of sort of mean spiritedness and courage. So all of these things are in play if you’re willing to, as public television allows us, dive deeper into a subject than the sort of dramatic, superficial retelling. We keep the drama, but we dive down deep.

And so in this case, we have an oral history of more than two dozen individuals—children—who survived the devastation of their parents’ farms, and their lives and sometimes even the lives of their siblings. This is an amazing story, and I think without pointing neon arrows at it, it can’t help but remind us. It’s not just ripped from today’s headline, about a a severe drought that’s afflicting a good deal of the country, but in all the intricacies of that political and economic … political and economic dimensions you brought up in your excellent question.

Well, one of the things I thought was fascinating – and I didn’t realize it until after I’d seen the movie – is that you put out an appeal for people to send photographs and films.

Burns: We had just finished a film about the Second World War, and we had been dealing with people at the very end of their lives…We were quite anxious that we had maybe missed it. And then I recorded some appeals that were played in the local stations in the area of “no man’s land,” in Colorado, Texas, and Kansas, and Colorado and New Mexico, and also the Central Valley in California that permitted us to at least use the resources of this extraordinary grassroots, bottom-up network to sort of reach out to people. And then our co-producer, Julie Dunfee, and another researcher, Susan Shumaker, went down on the ground and spent the shoe leather necessary to find the people to talk to them, to see if they were viable, to visit nursing homes. And what we realized is that we would be able to recreate the Dust Bowl through the memories of children and teenagers. Their parents are long gone, but their memories are as vivid and as accurate and as, in some ways, compelling, as ever because they were children watching this apocalyptic ten year period happen around them.

Did you get much in the way of photographs or actual video footage from them directly?

Duncan: Well, you know, central to the research was the PBS network and Ken’s appeal on that. And it’s surprising, he’d say “Send your stories or things to this station – not to us.” And then they would willow through it and send us the things. Cal Crabill, [one of the documentary's subjects], that’s how we found out about him. He saw it on a station in California and decided to write, and tell us about his story…Because it took place in the 30s in a relatively poor and sparsely populated part of the country we have a couple of home movies that are in the film. We have a lot of footage that was taken by newsreel companies once the catastrophe was becoming more self-evident. But we’ve got lots of photographs in the film and in our companion book that have never been published before – that people brought to us, and also from the historical societies that might have them in these folders. A couple of the ones of the storm descending on the town of Elkhart, Kansas, one of it descending over Hooker, Oklahoma, nobody’s ever seen those before.

So we were really pleased at the amount of material to add to the things that are already available, though took some searching from the FSA photographers, Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein and others. So we had a great amount of terrific visual material to choose from. We had about 6,000 photographs that we collected-

Burns: Which is surprising.

Duncan: -and we used about 400.
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It’s been four years since John McCain tried to tarnish President Obama by suggesting that the candidate was a celebrity–as if all famous politicians aren’t–rather than a man of substance. The tactic didn’t work. If anything, the first Obama term in office was evidence that we were ready for a president who was a celebrity, whose wife’s fashion choices were scrutinized and imitated, whose pop culture tastes made headlines and drove viewership, and whose administration became the subject of pop culture itself, from Leslie Knope’s Joe Biden obsession on Parks and Recreation, to Comedy Central’s sketch show Key & Peele, which built its audience in part on the strength of Jordan Peele’s Obama impersonation and its Anger Translator sketch. And now that the 2012 election is over, it’s clear that the dynamic worked in the opposite direction. Campaigners on both sides used these three entertainment industry tactics during the election. And I’d predict that we see more of them in the future:

1. Campaign movies: In 2008, the Obama campaign aired a thirty-minute primetime special in support of his candidacy. This election featured movies even more prominently. There was the so-called “King of Bain” documentary, When Mitt Romney Came To Town, which was produced and distributed by a Super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich’s candidacy:

In the general election, 2016: Obama’s America, a so-called documentary by conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza about Obama’s supposed radicalism, made $33 million at the domestic box office. Dreams From My Real Father, a hilariously paranoid attempt to prove that President Obama’s real father was a Communist and deeply terrible beat poet named Frank Marshall Davis who purportedly seduced Stanley Ann Dunham, was mailed to voters in swing states.

Mainstream movies that tried to capture the spirit of the campaign had more mixed success. Butter, an attempt to satirize both Midwestern butter-carving, and Michele Bachmann, ended up doing only $73,000 in domestic box office in a very limited run: condescension and Bachmann’s fading political star proved not to be a winning combination. Jay Roach’s The Campaign, the Will Ferrell-Zach Galifianakis vehicle about a suddenly-competitive House race, did better, taking in $86 million. The combination of Ferrell’s star power and a more generalized indictment of political dishonesty was probably always going to be a more potent bipartisan draw. In the future, I wouldn’t be surprised to see mainstream movie studios starting to produce or acquire documentaries about the candidates themselves. 2016 is the kind of thing that might be an embarrassment, but it demonstrated that there’s real money out there in catering to politically-engaged audiences for the studio that wants to reach out and grab it.
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Ken Burns looks to be having one heck of a fall in between The Dust Bowl, which airs on PBS in November and is excellent, and The Central Park Five, which examines the railroading of five young men in the so-called Central Park jogger rape and assault case, and which Burns directed with his daughter Sarah:

I was struck by the moment in the trailer when former New York City Mayor Ed Koch—the attack happened in April of his final year in office—said “Central Park was holy. It was the crime of the century.” If something holy is profaned, the people who profaned it must be monsters. And some of the easiest people it is to transmute into monsters, the so-called “wolfpack” who attacked Trisha Meili, are young men of color. That’s an awful kind of magic, born out of emotional needs that often spring from dark places, rather than any particular desire for the truth.

In the documentary The House I Live In, filmmaker Eugene Jarecki caputres the emotional, societal, and human repercussions of the four-decade failed war on drugs. The film follows the consequences of the drug war into people’s homes, and provides faces and imagery for harrowing statistics: The U.S. holds 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, including 500,000 Americans convicted for nonviolent drug offenses. Meanwhile, drug police enforcement has marginalized hundreds of thousands of Americans, while drug use has remained virtually the same since President Nixon formally launched the war.

Jarecki’s film puts faces and stories to a drug war that has affected all corners of the criminal justice system and has disproportionately hurt poor black communities. The many chapters of contraband laws, Jarecki commented to ThinkProgress and chronicles in his film, “act as a thinly veiled force for racial and social control.” One surprising aspect of The House I Live In is how far the disappointment and frustration reaches, from inmates and their families and friends, to dispirited police officers, prison guards, and judges. We spoke with Jarecki about The House I Live In, which won the grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and is now playing in theaters. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

What was one of the most surprising thing you discovered when researching and creating the film?

Probably the hidden humanity from inside a machine. That’s really at the end of the day the discovery over and over that makes for interesting cinema in making a move like this. You approach a gigantic machine from the outside and what you know of it is very little and what you see is evidence qualities and it’s evident qualities in our system of mass incarceration is that it’s a vast faceless predatory cannibal that eats human beings for its own perpetuation. So from the outside that’s all I knew and of course that produces the impression that from the inside you’ll find people who are faceless, predatory animals.

And of course then you get inside and there’s these people everywhere who are a stone throw from yourself and are on the inside because they’re locked inside or are on the inside because their job has them locked inside with those who are locked inside. and you find over and over again that the people inside are people who are like yourself.

Why is this issue so understated?

When you live in the public and live with this monolithic impression of this institution you assume faceless and you go back to bed assuming that all is well. So it’s only if by some chance an American comes into contact with the prison system because, god forbid, someone they know or love gets caught up in it or they themselves become an addict, or they themselves have an experience that exposes them to it and they awaken.

When I went into this prison system, I thought I’d be able to see it from the outside and see what was wrong with it. What you see from outside is superficial and frankly what you see from outside is true of many prison systems in the world. Ours is unique in that we have and industrialized system of mass incarceration. Not a lot of our western allies have such a thing. what we have is so widespread with 2.3 million people behind bars, 45 million arrests over 40 years and a trillion dollars have made us the world’s largest jailer. On the other side of that is so many people we incarcerate for long periods are nonviolent.

We’ve had many chapters of contraband laws in America to act as a thinly veiled force for racial and social control and we saw that historically and yet something that happened in the modern era that was different and profound that was the declaration of war on drugs by Richard Nixon in 1971. When he did that all the problems that accompany war emerged in this otherwise sort of adhoc dynamic of the occasional drug law that occasionally would put particularly Chinese immigrants away to jail because of opium or particularly harass Mexican Americans who might be a threat to U.S. jobs.

Now all the problems that accompany war emerged in this otherwise sort of ad hoc dynamic of the occasional drug law that occasionally would put particularly Chinese immigrants away to jail because of opium or particularly harass Mexican Americans who might be a threat to U.S. jobs. What we find in the modern era is that war is declared. And of course what does war bring, it brings industrial complexes like the military industrial complex. It brings vested interest, it brings the potential for tremendous profit, it brings the potential to convert risk into profit, fear into profit. That’s what wars do. And wars get perpetuated by the dynamic between fear and profit whether it’s economic profit or political profit varies from time to time. In the drug war it’s both. you have short sighted politicians seeking short term gain from the political profit of appearing tough on crime.
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A documentary about the life, work, and opponents of the late conservative publisher Andrew Breitbart, Hating Breitbart, is on its way to theaters, and its director, Andrew Marcus, is perturbed that the movie received an R rating from the Motion Picture Association of America. He told the Daily Caller that the rating should have come from “gutter behavior of the Congressional Black Caucus and their enablers in the progressive institutional left media” depicted in the movie because ““The hatred aimed at Andrew and the tea party was pornographic!” But like Bully, the documentary about children who are tormented for reasons ranging from their sexual orientation to simple social awkwardness, Hating Breitbart was rated R for the language that appears in the film. And like Bully, which eventually cut a number of incidences of the word “fuck” to earn a PG-13 rating, Marcus is trimming Hating Breitbart to try to bring the rating down.

The best argument for giving both Bully and Hating Breitbart PG-13 ratings even with all the original language in them intact is that it’s a realistic, honest look at the behavior of both sets of subjects. There was something perverse about protecting children from words in Bully that were spoken by children in the target demographic. And Breitbart’s use of language was a part of his style, as the Daily Caller suggests in a description of one of the scenes in the movie:

But Breitbart is the one uttering a few choice adult words. During one sequence early in the film, he looks into the camera and inveighs against what he saw as a conspiracy among liberal media elites to cast conservative politicians and commentators as Neanderthal throwback villains.

“What the left has stood for with political correctness,” he says on screen, looking into the distance, “is to try and get those with whom they disagree to shut up. And the tea party movement, and Sarah Palin, and Michele Bachmann, and Allen West and all the people who have gone out there against the mainstream media and said, ‘You’re going to call us racists? You’re going to call us potential Timothy McVeighs? Fuck you!’”

Then Breitbart looks into the camera and takes a pregnant pause before half-whispering his conclusion.

“War.”

Marcus may be irritated that his movie got an R rating, but the decision is in no way inconsistent with the MPAA’s previous decisions. I’d be in favor of a standard that recognizes that life, even as 12-year-olds are exposed to it, is sometimes obscene. But as it is, the ratings are fairly consistent in shielding younger viewers from obscene language, if not the ideas that animate it.

One of the best documentaries I saw at the Sundance Film Festival in January was Escape Fire, a look at doctors, patients, and hospital administrators who are trying to bend the curve on health care, both by looking at costs and insurance, but even more importantly, at what we get for our money and our insurance. From Sgt. Robert Yates, who makes the decision to kick his addiction to pain medication after suffering serious combat injuries in Afghanistan and recovers with the help of alternative therapies as part of the military’s grappling with overprescription, to Dr. Erin Martin, who moves from clinic to clinic looking for a way to practice patient-centric medicine and to focus on outcomes rather than services, the movie raises questions far beyond the problems addressed by the Affordable Care Act. I spoke with the movie’s co-director Matthew Heineman about how to tackle some of the biggest, hardest changes in health care. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

There are a lot of different stories in this movie—in a way, it reminded me of reading through Atul Gwande’s archives at The New Yorker. How did you find your subjects for the movie? And here there any who didn’t make the cut?

I think from day one, Susan [Frömke, Heinman's co-director] and I started making the film about three years ago as the health care debate was heating up. Like so many Americans, we were so confused about all the rhetoric, all the hyperbole. Health care was dividing our country. We wanted to cut through that and find out why our system was so broken, and who was out there trying to change it? We ddn’t want to make a film that was just about the problem, we wanted to be about solutions. We found characters and storylines who looked at the story through different angles…Like many films that we’ve done, we spent six to eight months doing research before we even turned on the camera…It was a pretty organic process. We met a few of our experts early on in that process, Dr. Andy Weil and Dr. Dean Ornish, and through them met some of our subjects…It’s a really complicated, wonky subject. So we know we also had to make it interesting, make it entertaining. We didn’t just want to make a film with a bunch of talking heads. We knew we wanted powerful, human stories that would carry the narrative, so at all times, that was in the back of our heads, how can we find characters that tell larger truths about our health care system, but that also have some sort of narrative arc. We found that in Dr. Martin, the primary care physician that’s struggling in a system that’s preventing her from practicing the way she wants to practice, and to find a place where she can practice the kind of medicine she wants to, [in] Sgt. Yates.

So much of the focus of our debate over health care reform is about getting people the insurance that will let them pay for care. But Escape Fire seems to be oriented towards the next debate: what it is that we’re paying for in the first place. I loved Sgt. Yates story because it got at the heart of what our expectations are for our care, and what we’re open to.

Completely. I think health care is incredibly, incredibly important. But i think the key question that our film presents is access to what? Access to a disease care or a health care system? Access to expensive care, to high-tech care, or oriented towards health care and patient-centered care? So many of these films are preach to the choir and are so partisan. We really didn’t want to make a partisan film. We wanted to make a film that would bring all stake-holders to the table…We screened the film at 62 medical schools. Last week we screened it at the Pentagon. And I think what we’ve found is that change doesn’t really have to come from Washington, change can really come at the local level, community by community, and hospital by hospital.
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Lauren Greenfield’s Queen of Versailles was one of the first movies to sell at the Sundance Film Festival, and one of the best documentaries I saw there. The movie follows timeshare mogul David Siegel and his wife Jackie as they seek to build the largest house in America, a palatial mansion they’ve dubbed Versailles. In addition to exploring America’s consumption addictions, Queen of Versailles is also a concise explanation of the roots of the financial crisis: the Siegels’ business relies on cheap credit, both to fund the construction of new timeshare developments, and to get customers to take out loans so they can afford the second homes that are, for them, an embodiment of the American dream. The movie follows the Siegels as they overextend themselves on their home, and as they experience the consequences of their customers’ defaults. It’s a sharp, surprisingly sympathetic story. I spoke with Greenfield about her relationship with the Siegels, American consumption, and how the fate of the 1 percent impacts the 99 percent. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How did you first get interested in the Siegels’ story?

I’m a photographer also, and I had been working on a project about wealth and consumerism. My last film had been a short called Kids + Money. I was photographing Donatalla Versace. Jackie was one of Donatella’s best customers at the time. I made a picture of Jackie’s gold, blingy purses that ended up being in Time’s 100 Best Pictures. Jackie told me about building America’s biggest house. In [another] picture [Jackie showed her], there were 7 kids on the steps of her private jet. I was also working a project about women and aging, and the fact that she had all of these kids, I was just interested in her as a subject…I was interested in her character as a billionaire. She didn’t act like we expect rich people to act, she didn’t have this protective veil that we expect to come with wealth. There was that dichotomy that, eventually, spoke to me about the American dream and the connection between this house and the American dream.

You mentioned that Jackie was different from other rich people you’d encountered. What was the difference?

In my own work on wealth, when I photographed rich kids in Los Angeles for example, there was a jadedness that I never saw in Jackie. She loves the stuff. She wasn’t part of upper-class society. She didn’t use the money as a way to join a country club with other rich people. She would socialize with people from her family, which was all kind of part of the entourage, and they’re not rich. Her relationship with the domestic staff was non-traditional and non-heirarchical in a way. She didn’t have the protective barriers of wealth. She’s very open, very generous. I saw in her a way to document an inside view of wealth…The thing about Jackie and David is they kind of embody our virtues and our flaws of the American scene…As over the top as Jackie is, I’ve gone to Costco and loaded up on a cart of stuff I did not intend to buy because it’s two for one or bigger is better. I started out with this inside view of the rich, but at a certain point, it turned, and that turned for me when they had to put their house on the market. A lightbulb went on, and I realized they were similar to people that I’d photographed in foreclosure cities, in the crash in Dubai. It became an allegory for the overreaching.

What do you see as David and Jackie’s virtues? Much of the movie is about their mistakes.

I guess what I mean by the virtues is they’re both rags to riches stories. Jackie came from humble origins, was really smart, and then, a flaw of American culture, realized that her beauty would get her further than her engineering degree. David also came from nothing and is totally devoted to his work. In a way, they are success stories. But what they did with their success was build bigger and bigger. As they fall financially, you do see them finding other values. And for Jackie, it wasn’t until the hardships came, that I really saw her as a survivor. In the beginning, with all the stuff, you wonder if you love him for money.
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The Invisible War, the Kirby Dick-directed documentary about the sexual assault epidemic in the military, was one of the best movies I saw at Sundance. Its exploration of the culture of which scandals like the Tailhook case are just a symptom is powerful. And the movie takes on a rarely-discussed subject, how sexual assault affects men both as victims and as through their wives’, daughters’, and parents’ trauma. The Invisible War is a difficult movie to watch, but it’s a moving and bracing one, and it’s helped spark a national conversation about the damage done by indifference and abdications of responsibility within the chain of command. I spoke to the movie’s producer, Amy Ziering, about finding men and women who were willing to come forward about to share their stories, and how the military can lead society—if it decides it wants to change. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I’m curious how both of you came to this subject matter.

We read an article in Salon about four or five years ago, and we were kind of shocked and appalled by what we’d read, and started doing our own investigating, and found [the story] was correct if not worse. Of course, we’d been aware of things like Tailhook and Aberdeen, and these scandals that were reported in the press. But we hadn’t been aware that it was an ongoing problem in the way that it was. The statistics were one of the things the article helped us point us towards. These flare-ups that were reported in the press as these one-off situations were symptoms of an underlying chronic condition. They would get attention when there was this cluster issue that rose to the surface. It’s misperceived in that way…It’s served the military and promoted what we we have called a coverup. Its ideal situtation is [assaults are] presented as a strange, aberrant occurrance as opposed to something that’s ongoing and daily. They do temporary damage control and everything moves on.

How did you find your subjects? Given the consequences women often face for speaking out about being sexually assaulted, it couldn’t have been easy.

We did extensive investigative work. we went to VA centers and put out flyers. we talked to everyone who was an advocate in any way, we used social media, we had a Facebook page. One reason this issue hasn’t come forward is it doesn’t breed naturally outspoken advocates. The nature of the trauma is so severe and radically debilitating that people are reticent to speak up because of the retaliation they’ve experienced, and because of the difficulties they’re having in their day to day lives. It’s hard to become an activist when you can barely get out of bed…That was a very long process. By the time we decided who we were going forward with as our main subjects, we built a good, trusting relationship. We were careful to preselect people who we thought would have the stability, wherewithal, fortitude to handle public scrutiny when the film came out. The last thing we wanted this to do was negatively affect anybody. Any interview, we said your mental health comes first, we can stop and start.

How have they reacted to seeing the movie?

Hugely positively. It’s been life-changing just to feel like they’re not alone, they have this community, and to feel suported and believed. That’s a huge difference to someone who’s been marginalized. Two of them said it saved their marriage. Many of them, when they’ve shown relatives, the change in the relatives’ attitudes really improved all their family relations…We’ve had several people offer to fix Kori’s jaw, and we have three families that have banded together to undertake that.
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