Everything you need to know about Ken Burns and his Vietnam War documentaries

Ken Burns is arguably the most famous documentary in modern America – perhaps world history. This documentary connoisseur has been making powerful documentaries since the early 1980s. His works often feature priceless video footage, photographs, correspondence from ordinary people, and periodicals to create projects, each of which can only be defined as “ an invaluable library of archival content”.

Ken is a producer, director, cinematographer, writer and actor recognized for projects such as Civil War (1990); The War (2007); National Parks: America’s Best Idea (2009); and The Vietnam War (2017) among a plethora of others. Unsurprisingly, his documentaries have seen him nominated for numerous awards, including a few.

Everything you need to know about Ken Burns

The documentary filmmaker was born into what you could call a geek family. Her father, Robert Kyle Burns, studied cultural anthropology and her mother, Lyla Smith Burns, was a biotechnologist. Ken, his parents, and his younger brother and filmmaker, Ric Burns, have moved around a lot. Their nomadic lifestyle saw them record residential stays in Veran, France; Newark, Del.; and Ann Arbor, Michigan, although Ken was born in Brooklyn, New York on July 29, 1953.

Burns’ mother died when he was just 11 years old. She had been battling breast cancer since Ken was only 3 years old.

Growing up, Ken Burns was a voracious reader and always preferred the vivid facts of history to the invented excitement of works of fiction. Armed with an 8 mm camera at the age of 17, he made his first documentary; it covered issues concerning a factory in Ann Arbor. After graduating from Pioneer High School in 1971, he refused the University of Michigan where his father taught and chose Hampshire College instead. This was largely due to their unorthodox and flexible evaluation method.

In 1971, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Film Studies and Design. A year after graduation, in 1976, Ken Burns formed Florentine Films with Elaine Mayes – a college classmate – and then Buddy Squires and Lawrence Hott. They all worked within their personal subsidiaries, Burns being Ken Burns Media

After working for a few years as a cinematographer for Italian national television and the BBC, the filmmaker made his first major documentary in 1981. This documentary titled The Brooklyn Bridge was based on David McCullough’s book The Great bridge It was hailed as a masterpiece in almost every corner of the industry, aired on PBS in the United States, and earned itself an Oscar nomination.

Ken continued that success with The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God, The Statue of Liberty, and Congress, all in the 1980s. Since then, he’s become a household name for the rivetingly real whose story he tells through his films.

In the years that followed, he released a plethora of documentary films such as The Civil War (1990); biography (2000); The War (2007); Baseball (1994 – 2010); and The Vietnam Wars (2017). Ken Burns films cover a wide range of subjects: media, arts and letters, sports, politics, wars, music, literature and much more. His production company was reported by the New Yorker to have titles planned for 2030.

Burns walked down the aisle with Amy Stechler in 1982. They started a family soon after and had two daughters, Sarah and Lily, the second of the same name. After their separation in 1993, Ken married Julie Deborah Brown ten years later. Together they gave birth to Ken’s third and fourth daughters, Olivia and Willa Burns.

His Vietnam War documentaries

This 10-part documentary series is arguably his most prolific work to date. The documentarian presented this series on PBS on September 17, 2017. For this series, he collaborated with renowned author and historian Geoffrey Ward and actor Peter Coyote. Geoffrey wrote the screenplay while Coyote narrated the film.

One of the reasons this series was so successful was Ken Burns’ decision to tell the story of the Vietnam War through the eyes of the everyday man who lived through it. He avoided Vietnam War heroes like John McCain, Henry Kissinger and John Kerry. For the story, Ken instead decided to locate and interview 79 ordinary witnesses. These included ordinary American soldiers who were for and against the war, as well as North and South Vietnamese fighters.

The project took over 10 years to film as it required immense research. During the research, Ken Burns and his team had to sift through more than 24,000 images and approximately 1,500 hours of wartime video footage from this period.

To make this a standout project, Ken teamed up with friend and fellow producer Lynn Novick who had co-produced some of his previous documentaries with him. The entire project gobbled up a budget of