Ellen Gray | Ken Burns battled making 'War,' but now he's at peace

That's the story, at least, that filmmaker Ken Burns is telling on his promotional tour for "The War," his World War II opus premiering on PBS Sept. 23.

Given the mist of nostalgia that's settled over "The Greatest Generation," "The War" has been dogged by a surprising amount of controversy.

PBS executives have worried about how the ever-more-prudish FCC would regard some of the language - a total of three F-bombs in 14 1/2 hours - while Hispanic groups, upset when they learned that none of the film's interviewees was Hispanic, protested, and eventually got PBS and Burns to agree to include them in some fashion.

How exactly that's being done still isn't clear - the additions weren't part of the excerpts PBS has so far provided to reporters. The film's structure, which looks at how the war affected people in four American towns - Sacramento, Calif; Waterbury, Conn; Mobile, Ala.; and Luverne, Minn. - uses relatively few people to represent the many who fought.

"We don't really alter the structure," Burns said in an interview Wednesday afternoon at WHYY (Channel 12). He acknowledged, though, that it's been "relaxed."

"I think it's been a really good and interesting compromise now, in retrospect. We're not altering the structure of the film, we're just adding scenes, stories," he said.

"Since I'm in the story business, I feel a little like Brer Rabbit, who's been thrown into the briar patch - I'm getting what I want, I'm getting more stories," Burns said. "The stories we're getting . . . are fantastic and equal to anything in our film. So I sort of feel like we've risen above . . . the politics" of the situation.

But it's the politics that clearly continue to irk Burns, who noted that he'd told "Hispanic stories in ["The West"] to the exclusion of the old familiar bromides of the gunslingers," that "I've been dealing with African-American stories from the get-go," and that "The War" 's singling out of Japanese-Americans had to do with the very different way they were treated during the war. ("Americans who were interned, put in camps, and then asked to serve as cannon fodder.")

Beyond that, "The people that are in our film are not their nationality, not their country of origin, not their ethnicity, not their religion, not their sex, not their race, but human beings. Not just Americans, but human beings," Burns said.

One of the film's newly added Hispanic interviewees, he said, makes that point well.

"The guy said, 'We got in there, and the guys from Texas weren't very happy that we were there, but very soon we became close and we were like a mini-United Nations. We were all together on this.' And so even he is sort of saying that these divisions evaporate, and that's what we were after."*

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