At 9PM tonight, PBS will air Central Park Five, co-directed by Ken Burns and his daughter Sarah Burns. An adaptation of Sarah Burns’ book The Central Park Five: The Untold Story Behind One of New York City’s Most Infamous Crimes, Central Park Five is a searing examination of the 1989 sexual assault on Trisha Meili, a crime for which five young men, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise and Yusef Salaam were convicted after coercive interrogations and wrongfully imprisoned. Though their convictions were vacated in 2002 after Matias Reyes confessed to the attack on Meili, a civil suit filed by a number of the men in 2003 is still pending, the district attorney in the case, Elizabeth Lederer, still works for the city of New York, and the city attempted to subpoena outtakes and additional footage from the Burns’ film, an effort that was just recently blocked by a judge.

I spoke at length with Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and Raymond Santana, one of the Central Park Five, in Pasadena in January. We discussed the role of the media in the case, the impact of courtroom sketches, and why Lederer, who the Burns’ believe had grave doubts about the prosecution, has never spoken about her involvement in the case. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I think the movie is tremendous, and it’s wonderful to have all of you here. I wanted to start out by asking, one of the things that really struck me about the documentary that I’m not sure is completely explicit, but that really came across to me, was that New York in this time was a place that was not really safe for women or for young men of color, and this was a case that ended up pitting these two populations that were being poorly served against each other. I wasn’t sure if that was something you wanted to pull out explicitly or that was more interesting to have as an implicit thread.

Ken Burns: We took a lot, we made a lot of narrative decisions that were at least superficially different than other movies that we’d made, so in fact we were trusting that a lot of things would have to remain implicit and not explicit. Explicit could be explicated by narrative. And in this case what we felt would just contain as much of the story as possible, filled with all of its excruciating paradoxes and contradictions. Not the least of it is that. I think that’s a really good point, that the most vulnerable are in some ways the symbolic antagonists in this invented drama.

Sarah Burns: I think Craig Steven Wilder does a good job of giving you at least some sense of that, of the vulnerability of minority teenaged boys especially, as the people who were most likely to be victims of the crime that people were seeing and were concerned about. And that was something that was forgotten. That’s sort of an important thing to understand, both that that was happening, and the way the media was covering not only this case but the time in general was such that we were seeing those people who were most likely to be victims as the source of our problems and not the victims of them.
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Central Park Five, the latest documentary directed by Ken Burns with his long-term collaborator David McMahon and Burns’ daughter Sarah, is a searing portrait of how detectives and prosecutors coerced confessions out of Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, and Kharey Wise, which also implicated Yusef Salaam, in the 1989 rape and assault of Trisha Meili. McCray, Richardson, Wise, Salaam, and Santana, who I had the privilege to meet and speak with yesterday, had their convictions vacated in 2002. Matias Reyes, whose DNA has been matched to that found on Meili’s body (there were no DNA matches between Meili and the Five), has confessed to the crime. In other words, the facts of the coercions, the false convictions, and the true perpetrator are not controversial, even if the city of New York has yet to settle a civil suit filed by the Five. So it was disappointing to hear from Burns yesterday at the Television Critics Association press tour that some of his regular and long-term funders had been afraid to back the project.

“A good deal of the money also came from the Atlantic Philanthropies, a foundation we had not had any relation with before, but who is willing to take on a sizable part of our budget in large part because so many others had avoided what they feared would be too controversial aspects of this story,” he explained in his introduction to the film.

Burns refused to name names, and was gracious about the fact that underwriters always have a lot of choices, even from among his slate of projects, but he didn’t mince words about the funders who expressed anxieties about the subject material or the tone of the film.

“I did not begrudge sponsors. They’re not obligated,” he explained. “We normally sort of work on a ten year plan. We have a film on the history of Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Sarah and Dave and I are working a film on Jackie Robinson. Lynn Novick, who’s been here before, and Sarah Botstein and I are in the middle of a massive series on the history of the Vietnam War. Dayton Duncan, who we were here with last summer on The Dust Bowl, and I are in the middle of researching and beginning to write a history of country music. We have a biography planned of Ernest Hemingway. All of those things are part of it. And underwriters have had a chance to sort of cherry-pick and choose what they want to do. And these are tough times for underwriting. And I think particularly for some, the notion of not knowing what the final product would look like, it was something that prudence suggested they stay away of, which is sad.”

But Burns also offered a rebuke to the idea that his other movies are sentimental or uncontroversial—or unconcerned with racial justice in the way Central Park Five is.

“There are aspects…in almost all the films in which we’ve been unwilling, in fact unable, to present a comfortable, sentimental or nostalgic version of American history,” he said. “And more often than not, scratching the surface of American history, we’ve dealt with race and this is certainly about that. I think it speaks volumes, this story, about America and our tortured racial history.”

The coverage of the Central Park Fives’ exoneration wasn’t nearly as loud as the media calls, in some cases, for them to be literally hung when New Yorkers were convinced they were guilty. Central Park Five is an opportunity to correct that balance, and to give Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise, and Yusef Salaam back some of their dignity and names, some of the slim recompense available to them, given that the years they lost to prison are unrecoverable. It also could help shift the sentiment on their civil suit against the city, which also cannot restore those years, but could give the Five some compensation for lost earnings and lost time to develop their careers. It’s a real shame that any funder would be more willing to back an argument about race in history when the victims of cruelty aren’t available to be helped, than to support the funding of a project about a shameful event of recent memory that could do some substantive good today.

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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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.

Ken Burns is good at finding a way to frame big, epic narratives, and as it turns out, that skill applies to the 2012 presidential election as well as to his excellent forthcoming two-parter on the Dust Bowl, which airs the weekend before Thanksgiving. In his endorsement of Obama, he’s found he perfect cultural reference to use to think about the election:

One of my favorite movies of all time is Frank Capra’s “It’s A Wonderful Life,” starring Jimmy Stewart. In the film, Stewart’s character, a despondent and near suicidal George Bailey, who runs a small savings and loan in the town of Bedford Falls, is given a gift: the chance to see what his town would be like if he’d never been born — if he’d never extended a helping hand to his neighbors when they needed it most, never helped his community understand how much they depended upon one another. In this alternative vision, the town’s plutocratic banker, Mr. Potter — without the decent George Bailey to counter him — rules everything. A bottom-line-is-everything, every-man-for-himself mentality runs unchecked, resulting in Bedford Falls’ metamorphosis into “Pottersville,” an amoral, soulless place.

The movie has a happy ending, thank goodness, but its themes endure to this day and echo in the current presidential election, which at its core asks the question: What kind of country are we? Are we Bedford Falls or Pottersville? Are we all in this together — and stronger and better because of it — or are we entirely on our own, with a few “makers” on the top of a heap of “takers?” I’m supporting President Barack Obama because there is no question about his answer to that question. Having observed Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts, and then watching him in the Republican primaries as he tacked this way and that whenever it suited him (but mostly to the far right, the Tea Party radicals, even the birthers), I can’t be sure of him.

It also makes so much sense that Ken Burns’ favorite movie is It’s A Wonderful Life.