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Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns takes heat from Hispanics

LOS ANGELES | Perhaps it was his default personality: friendly, gracious, slightly meek, the kind that reminds you Ken Burns chose a career that was part filmmaker, part fundraiser.

Or perhaps it was being in a room packed with TV critics who had strewn his path with rose petals of praise these last 17 years, since his documentary “The Civil War” debuted on PBS.

Or maybe it was that almost none of us in the room was Latino.

Whatever the reason, Burns succeeded in deflecting criticism of his upcoming opus, “The War,” where — in the original cut sent to critics, at least — he had managed to produce 14 hours of film about the men who fought World War II for the United States without including a single significant voice of Hispanic origin.

The oversight had exploded in the press last year, led by University of Texas professor Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, who leads an oral history project to record the memories of Hispanic women and men who took part in the war. Burns at first stiffened, saying the film was done and ripping it up would make it hard to finish by its scheduled airdate this fall.

The Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility, an umbrella group of 14 Latino organizations, vowed to boycott Anheuser-Busch and Burns’ other corporate underwriters, and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus voted to back HACR.

Burns finally relented. And Thursday, doing that thing he does so well — spin stories that sound so wonderfully heartfelt, they must be true — the slightly built baseball and crossword fan made it sound like there was no controversy at all.

“There’s been a kind of a hot political battle,” Burns said. “We listened. We heard that. We produced some new material and included it at the end of three of the episodes.” There will be seven total, airing over two weeks starting Sept. 23.

“These are stories that are as powerful as anything in the film and as good as anything we produced in the film. So no, we feel it was our obligation to listen and to hear. I’ve been in the business, as you know, of telling stories that haven’t been told in American history for the last 30 years and have tried to do that.

“It was, of course, painful to us, on one level, that people would misinterpret what the film was about, but we didn’t have the luxury of abstracting this. These people (World War II veterans) are dying; 1,500 a day is now the statistic. It was important in a network, and for filmmakers who wish to be inclusive, to have heard this.

“I think we’ve found the right balance, had the right compromise, that permitted us not to alter our original vision and version of the film and at the same time honor what was legitimate about the concerns of a group of people who, for 500 years, have had their story untold in American history.”

It was such an earnest and generous response, it almost made you forget that when Burns made his baseball documentary 13 years ago, he had a Latino problem, too.

Earlier in the day Paula Kerger, PBS president, took more heat from critics over the handling of the situation, but she, too, escaped without serious, uh, burns. Kerger said “The War” will now be longer because no material will be cut to make way for the new stories about Latino vets.

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