ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, September 14, 1996 TAG: 9609180061
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-2 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES
SOURCE: JENNIFER BOWLES ASSOCIATED PRESS
Driving on a dirt road through rolling prairie hills in Montana, 76 miles between towns, Ken Burns was struck by the vastness that is the West.
``This was a county bigger than the state of Rhode Island, with people living so far apart from each other,'' the documentary filmmaker recalls.
``I just remember being so stunned by the immensity that it called up the ultimate human questions: Why are we here, who are we, what is our purpose on this Earth?''
Anyone who knows the West - its cascading Rockies, grand canyons, towering forests, forbidding deserts and spiritual mesas - appreciates its majestic beauty and rugged austerity.
That dichotomy and the sheer determination it took to settle the land is brought to life in Burns' latest project, ``The West,'' a sweeping eight-part, 121/2-hour historical series airing on PBS.
It begins Sunday at 8 p.m. (on WBRA-Channel 15) with 90-minute installments continuing through Thursday. It resumes in the same time slot Sept. 22 and 23, with a two-hour finale Sept. 24.
Yes, it's long. But it's worth it.
Burns, known for his critically acclaimed ``Civil War'' and ``Baseball'' documentaries, was too busy to carry this series on his own shoulders. While maintaining the role of executive producer and creative consultant, he handed over the producing and directing chores to the capable hands of Stephen Ives. Ives was Burns' consulting producer on ``Baseball.''
``The West'' is a fascinating collage not just of gunslingers, outlaws and Indians, but of those settlers whose stories have traditionally been ignored: The Chinese and Mexican miners who faced discrimination during California's Gold Rush, the blacks who went west to escape the South and the Mormons who saw it as a place to build a religious community.
``They went to the most God-forbidding place on Earth - a salt lake! You can't drink it!'' says Burns, referring to Salt Lake City, Utah. ``And they settled there and they thrived. What a great story! That is as American as you can get. I was blown away.''
Narrated by actor Peter Coyote, ``The West'' is much like Burns' other documentaries that have woven together newsreels, archival photographs, original footage and context provided by historians, authors and cultural consultants. Most notable is N. Scott Momaday, a Kiowa Indian and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, whose storytelling abilities are unequaled.
Spanning from 1500 to 1914 and covering 2 million square miles west of the Mississippi River, the series includes events and people most of us are aware of: Custer's Last Stand, the Oregon Trail, Buffalo Bill Cody, Theodore Roosevelt, Sitting Bull, Brigham Young and Samuel Clemens (a k a Mark Twain).
But most impressive is the storytelling of lesser-known people and their real-life struggles.
There's the pregnant Mormon woman in a polygamist marriage who fled authorities after the practice was deemed illegal and took refuge in a sort-of Mormon underground railroad for two years until she could be reunited with her husband.
And Pap Singleton, an ex-slave from Tennessee who became a ``Black Moses,'' leading his people to the ``promised land'' of Kansas.
``We were committed to telling the West that rejected the old version of the pioneers and wasn't going to go to new history that was all anti-white and pro-Indian,'' Burn says.
``We wanted something that was a balance, a truer story of the West that was about real people, living complicated and in some ways contradictory lives.''
Digging up these people's lives took Ives and a slew of consultant five years of sifting through archives, diaries and letters they wrote to relatives.
``The Mormons are an historian's dream,'' Ives says. ``It seems like every Mormon wrote a diary.''
Some stories were found in the morgues of newspapers, including that of Chung Sun, a Chinese immigrant who came to Southern California in 1871 with dreams of building a tea plantation.
Instead, he found fervent discrimination and ended up in the midst of a race riot in Los Angeles (perhaps its very first) that left 23 Chinese hanged, stabbed or shot to death.
Beaten and robbed of his savings, Chung Sun found a job digging ditches and laying a gas line for $1.50 in Watsonville. After Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, he couldn't land another job.
Before setting sail for home, he detailed his experiences in letters to a California newspaper.
Finding the stories is one thing, finding art to go with it was sometimes difficult.
Chung Sun's picture, for example, was never taken. So the filmmakers, taking dramatic license, found an old photograph from that period of a Chinese man in San Francisco.
``It is a picture that could very easily have been him. You have to substitute something and use dramatic license to make his words come alive,'' Burns said.
While Burns and Ives toiled in the editing room piecing the pictures and the stories together, they credit their cast of actors - among them Jimmy Smits, Matthew Broderick, Keith Carridine, Amy Madigan and Mary Stuart Masterson - for giving life to the historical characters with their voices.
``It's often what really gives it humanity and gives it emotion and makes it truly work,'' Burns says.
LENGTH: Long : 103 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. Ken Burns was inspired by the vastness of the West.by CNB2. Gen. George Armstrong Custer's 1874 expedition to the Black Hills
will be among the accounts presented in ``The West,'' an eight-part
PBS series, beginning Sunday at 8 p.m. on WBRA-Channel 15.