Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with our main man up in Canada-land, Anton Sirius. Now, Anton for some reason decided to hold this wonderful interview he did with Ken Burns about his documentary on Jack Johnson since talking with Burns at the Toronto Film Festival. I know nothing about Johnson, but after reading this interview and hearing how he was the template for Ali and every other boxer you thought were original... well, this has got to be quite a character. The film has recently aired on PBS, so if you missed it keep an eye out for re-runs... Oh, and Samuel L. Jackson AND Keith David both appear... or at least their voices do. That's a pair that needs to be put together in a film. Anyway, enjoy the interview, squirts!
Me: I’m here with Ken Burns, director of Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. First question: the thing that struck me initially on seeing Unforgivable Blackness is that, while it’s not a difference in subject matter for you, it is a different approach, focusing on just one individual as opposed to say, the history of boxing in America. Why did you make that choice?
KB: Well the thread that led back to the conception of the movie had to do with race, which I don’t think anyone can help but deal with if you’re dealing with American history. It’s there in the Civil War, it’s there in baseball, it’s there in jazz of course, it’s there in Mark Twain, it’s there in Thomas Jefferson, other films I’ve done, but it’s... I don’t want to say abstract, but it’s generalized. And here you have a situation where you have someone who’s specific, and in a way he’s the sequel to the Civil War film wrapped up in one man - what if a black man decided to live out his life as nothing short of a free man, in the two decades that were the most challenging for African-Americans at any time after Emancipation? That is to say, more people lynched than at any other time, Jim Crow more entrenched, and no movement.
So it becomes, instead of taking the general and finding specific examples, we took a particular example and reached up and out to the general. I wasn’t interested in boxing, the way I was in baseball. I’m interested in Jack Johnson. Because this story is working on a lot of layers. First it’s a story of athletic achievement. He’s a handsome, sexy, attractive specimen, and it’s a great story of a champion. It’s also about race, which is America’s bugaboo. It’s also about sex, and when it’s sex between a black man and a white woman, it gets exponentially more complicated. And in the end, it’s about freedom. This guy decided to just live his life the way he wanted to live it. I mean he’d read the Constitution, so he decided, “OK, this is my thing.” And it turns out, he was also the first modern media superstar.
He’s like a hip hop gangsta, you know? He’s in the face of the culture. He’s wearing his bling. He’s got his gold teeth, he’s got his necklaces, he’s got his diamond pin, he’s got his cane, he’s dressed in the most fashionable clothes, he’s got his entourage… and this is hundred years ago. He’s the first person who’s doing it. He’s widely photographed, he’s in the news all the time… it’s an amazingly modern story, and it echoes with OJ and Muhammed Ali and Kobe, and all the hip hop culture. I mean, how can you not be drawn to his biography? I’ve actually made many more biographies than the ‘short hand’ topics with which I’m associated, but to me his story is just firing on all cylinders.
Me: It’s interesting you call him the first gangsta.
KB: That’s with an ‘a’, not an ‘er’.
Me: Of course. That applies even up here in Canada. But I knew a bit about him before the movie, obviously no one knew *this* much about him until now, but specifically what resonated with me were the echoes of Johnson in the other great black heavyweight champions: Ali, who you show in the film saying “That’s my story”, Joe Louis, who was deliberately the anti-Jack Johnson… through Liston and Tyson, the ‘brutes’, Johnson was in so many ways the template for them all.
KB: Can we talk about that? I’m glad you said that. He is indeed, whether you are reacting against, or towards, or taking an aspect of it. Nobody, with the exception of Ali, has had the fullness and richness of spirit to in some ways live up to that template, and in some ways transcend it. Everybody else is taking a portion of it. Joe Louis was the anti-Jack Johnson. And you’ve got the thuggery that’s attended it. And then you’ve got some complicated and very interesting people, the Fraziers and the Foremans, who are still sort of pale shadows, and then you have an Ali, and they really seem to be kissin’ cousins.
There’s a gut thing that happens when you’re working on a project, and I’ve never, with maybe with the exception of the Civil War, felt the kinds of things I did when we were finishing this one.
Me: That does shine through too.
KB: The music helps. Wynton [Marsalis], what we did… normally we never score anything. This is not scored. We usually work with found historical pieces, and that’s what we did here. But a lot of them were written by Wynton, and then he’d come in at different junctures and make them better, and then at the end he made them even better, without missing the hits that we had already had in the editing. So it wasn’t like turning it over to John Williams at the end of the rough cut and saying, OK…
Me: Go to town.
KB: (hums a bit of the Raiders theme). He was there, it was organic. And man, everyone comes out and goes, “Wow, the music was really great”. Blue Note’s put out an album.
Me: I would hope so!
KB: We have a book out… people have seen it and gone… I dunno, it’s very exciting, it’s thrilling to share it with an audience.
Me: How often do you get to see your work up on the big screen?
KB: Well, I premiere my films at Telluride every year, and then they basically go on their way… but the enthusiasm was so great here, people said “Send it to Toronto and New York”, which both accepted it enthusiastically. I’m a filmmaker. I shoot on film, and up until the last project I finish on film, and that’s what I am. I like showing them. I do a lot of things on an ad hoc basis with a big, dark room, and a big screen, and a bunch of people, rather than a small screen with 1.8 people.
Me: That’s been my experience until now with your films of course, at home on television. But now seeing this on the big screen it blew me away how cinematic it was.
KB: Yes! I’m a filmmaker, not a historian. And I think television has that way of interposing, “Well, here’s another Ken Burns thing.” I love this. I love being able to share this with an audience. But I’m never going to trade, for a couple of important reasons. One, is the bread and butter one. These are expensive, time-consuming, labor-intensive works, and the sources of funding I’ve developed, the people and institutions that are willing to fund them, require that they be put on public television. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, General Motors is a corporate underwriter… none of these people have influence over content. They all just expect it to be on PBS almost the second it’s done, and that’s where my money comes from. That’s OK. The more important thing is, when 50 million people see Baseball, that’s a lot of people. That would be a $500 million box office, if that film was in cinemas now. It’s apples and oranges because it’s not going to happen, but you know what I’m saying. It’s a huge amount of people, and you’re preaching not to a choir.
The great thing about a film festival is you see it big, and cinematic, but the people who are there, even though they’re widely divergent, they’re essentially intellectually, soulfully a more homogeneous crowd. But I can go to a town in Utah, and somebody will go, “Oh, he made the Civil War!” or “Oh, he made Baseball” or “When are you going to do this” or “How come you left out that?” and I get these great conversations everywhere around.
Me: I was talking about that with a friend of mine, and we were discussing how this film, the Jack Johnson story, might be the perfect story for you in the sense that with your other films, the more you know about the subject going in the more criticisms you might have due to content issues. Why did you not focus on Tris Speaker enough, why so much Louis Armstrong, whatever, whereas with Jack Johnson it’s essentially a tabula rasa. Nobody knew the story, so nobody can nit-pick.
KB: That’s exactly right. Let me tell you this great story. I was in Racine, Wisconsin, and I was making a film on Frank Lloyd Wright and I was going through this wonderful Wright building on this tour, and one of the rooms had been remade into a gym. And there was one lone guy on a stationary bike pedaling furiously. And I just walked by on this tour, and the guy looks up and says, “My brother hates you.” And I look at him for a second, and I think to myself, “There’s no brother.” And I go, “Baseball, huh?” And he goes, “Yeah, how’d you know?” And I thought about where we were, and I said “Harmon Killebrew.” And he goes, “Yeah!”
Another one: I was walking with my then-fiance in New York a year ago, and it was a spring day on a fairly dark block in the Village, and you never necessarily notice people that pass by if you’re in a conversation, y’know? Anyway someone passed by, the only person that passed by on the entire block, and we got about 100 yards away, and I had to retroactively remember that we’d even passed somebody, because suddenly out of the darkness behind us I hear “What about motherfucking Mingus??!!!??” And my wife stiffened, and I had to go, “It’s OK, he’s not coming back.”
But that was great to me, it’s so great to me. Because one, he hadn’t seen the episode where we said Mingus was the greatest composer after Thelonius Monk and Duke Ellington in jazz. And it was a great scene, unbelievable. But that you can make an 18-hour film on baseball or jazz, and people are telling you what you left out! Eighteen hours! What it is, it’s the insecurity of knowledge. Jazz is so challenged in the United States. It used to be so big, and now it’s so small. If you’re a jazz fan, and you’re sitting there watching it with your girlfriend or your wife or your colleague, you have to say, “Well, he forgot so-and-so… well, he didn’t do this.” And my job is not to be the encyclopedia, the telephone book. My job is to say to that rest of America that you don’t need the advanced degree that these jazzerati say you do, in order to love it. So here’s the pantheon. You want to know? Here’s the top 35 people and the arc of their chronology. So my disservice to jazz, to follow the train of thought of the jazzerati, was to double and in some cases triple the sales of jazz music. For which I have received no fee.
But it’s very funny that way. Even with this film, I have people say, “Why didn’t you use the Miles Davis music?”
Me: That’s the friend I was talking with, who brought that up at the Q & A.
KB: But it’s not of the period. And you’re trying to create an historical moment. And if you’re going to go into the future, as we did, you really only have one shot at it, and that’s the Ali moment, ‘the ghost in the house’. When [George] Plimpton said that, I was like, “Oh my god, that’s the end of our film.” I just knew it. He said that, and that was it, that’s the last chapter of the film.
Me: It was great that you were able to use him, not just because you’ve worked with him in the past, but also because he was in When We Were Kings.
KB: He knows what he’s talking about. We got him on a pretty bad day, I don’t think he was doing so well, and it’s always been first person voices for me, and we love him so much. He was great in Baseball on camera, and the voices in Jazz, and God, he might even be in Brooklyn Bridge. Anyway, he’s wonderful, and he just had an off day. He was sort of disheveled, and I think he’d just woken up, or he’d just drunk too much the night before, and he was just kind of out of it. But he had that one thing, that one moment. And people say, “Oh, it’s too bad you couldn’t get more of him”, and I say no. That one thing was it.
My very first film was on the Brooklyn Bridge. And I decided that… the paperback edition of After the Fall by Arthur Miller had a picture of the Bridge on it, so I should go interview Arthur Miller. I was so naïve. So finally after a year of putting me off, he finally said, “OK, come up to…” the farm in Connecticut. So I’m driving up there, and I buy the play. Nothing in there about the Brooklyn Bridge. So now I’m getting petrified, Arthur Miller’s like six-four. I walk in the door, and he goes, “You know I don’t know a goddamned thing about the Brooklyn Bridge.” And I’m just floored. And he sees my panic, and he says, “It’s alright. Just go outside, we’ll shoot it outside.” Now, we’re used to setting up for two hours, getting a beautiful shot, then sitting someone down. But it’s the fall, and the light’s dying, so he says, “Let’s shoot it now.” So I’m sitting on an apple crate facing him, and he looks at me and goes, “You see, the city is fundamentally a practical utilitarian invention. And all of a sudden, you see this steel poetry sticking there, and it’s a shock. I mean he could have built another Manhattan Bridge, but he didn’t. He really aspired to do something gorgeous. So it makes you think that maybe you too could add something that would last, and be beautiful.”
I don’t know what question I asked him.
And we’d used like 125 feet in 60 mm, which is like three minutes, and he said, ‘That’s enough” and he walks away.
He has one of the greatest voices, and I’ve used him as a voice in every film, and he’d been so tolerant, I interviewed him for Mark Twain and he was wonderful. But there, he gave me my marching orders. And I told people, and they were so embarrassed, and I said, “That quote is going to be the last word in the first film I ever make, ever sign my name to.” And it is. It’s just this statement of principle, like Charles Foster Kane nailing it up back in the idealistic day. It’s a great quote! I still don’t know how… it was just, boom!
Me: Back to Jack Johnson. If there were a Jack Johnson obsessive out there, just from your own process of going through the editing, what’s the one thing they’d bitch about that you left out?
KB: Besides the Miles Davis music? (Grinning)
Me: Yeah, just about Jack and his story, and opposed to everything around his story.
KB: That’s a good question. It’s pretty thorough right now… I guess if there was a real obsessive, they’d want more on the conspiratorial story, on whether the fight with Jess Willard was thrown or not. Because when I meet people who claim to know, they always want to talk about whether it was thrown. “That was thrown, you know.” Well, actually, we have enough evidence to believe that it wasn’t. And Jess Willard made the best point – “If it was thrown, I wish he’d thrown it sooner.”
Me: 26 rounds in 105 degree heat…
KB: If you’re going to throw a fight, and you’re out of shape as Jack Johnson relatively was, and you’re old as Jack Johnson relatively was, I think you could go down in the eighth through the fifteenth rounds. But twenty-six means you really wanted to win this fight, and he beat you. You ran out of gas, and he didn’t. But my film on Huey Long, the other one that did the festival circuit fifteen, twenty years ago, same sort of thing. Because there was a big conspiracy, whether it was really this guy, or if he was acting alone, or whether Roosevelt sent him down or the syndicate or some such thing, and of course it’s usually the simplest answer. So that’s what I think they’d want, opening up the post-Willard thing into an elaborate conspiracy.
Me: It’s interesting how you handled that versus the Black Sox, in Baseball, and Joe Jackson. Because that’s a controversy that’s never going to die.
KB: Oh yeah.
Me: My own personal opinion is that Joe was involved.
KB: Oh, absolutely. I’m absolutely sure. You know, if you think about your own life, we take historical moments and invest them with metaphor and mythology, and we forget it’s people that are just like you and I who would be in that situation. “Yeah, I could really use the money… no, I really want to play the game.” And so you could find yourself caught up, as presidents and others do when they make mistakes, halfway in between. And we always want everybody to be so firm and clear, and we’re always disappointed in our media age when our heroes aren’t perfect. But who ever said a hero was perfect? The Greeks have been telling us about heroes for thousands of years. And the very interesting thing about them, what makes the heroism complete, is not the absence of weakness, but the inevitable negotiation between someone’s strength and their weakness. This is why Achilles has a heel, you know? Because we’re trying to see what you’re going to do with what you’ve been given, and the thing that makes you your own worst enemy.
Good work, man. That Arthur Miller story is killer!
