INTEL REPORT--Ken Burns has no patience for the people who pick apart his documentaries without having ever watched them. He’s talking about the eggheads, the “third- and fourth-rate academics,” the journalist sitting across from him in a French-American bistro in Manhattan, whom he accuses — falsely, I can report, since that journalist is me — of having prepared by Googling “controversy.”
Nor does he have patience for the notion that his films try too hard to be all things to all Americans — a criticism for which he has a decidedly un-PBS rejoinder: “Fuck. That.” He continues, “So that’s a criticism of Steven Spielberg and Mark Twain and anybody else who says, ‘I’m an American, and I’ve got a big story to tell.’ The criticism comes from the far, far left and the far, far right, which I am thrilled to have.”
