WGBH Station; WGBH Forum Network; National Parks: America's Best Idea

Welcome everyone. I'm John Abbott president of WGBH. And we are very excited for this day. It's been many months in the making and we're so excited about this project and I'm just thrilled that we could put this program together and have you with us. We're here to celebrate Ken Burns new six part documentary series The National Parks America's best idea which debuts on WGBH 2 on Sunday September 27 and runs through Friday October 2nd. I can't think of a better way to celebrate this series and then the one with the people responsible for the stewardship of our region's natural resources. All of you were thrilled at the composition of our audience today. We have representatives from the National Park Service state and local agencies and some of the most dedicated conservation groups in the country. We salute and support your work and we know that Ken's series will re-inspired Americans about the natural environment that we all share. In being green is also a double duty. Priority In fact our new studios are lead certified. We were the first public

broadcaster in the country to build studios and be so certified. We're delighted that some of our longtime friends who helped make this possible are also here this afternoon. Many members of the WGBH family the national parks not only is a staggeringly beautiful film but a powerful history of the individuals who fought to preserve these special places for the enjoyment of all Americans not just the privileged few. Ken Burns is a long time friend and supporter of WGBH and we're delighted that he and co-producer Dayton Duncan are here to tell you firsthand about their latest masterpiece. I want to thank because a dot.com supported by the National Trust for Historic Preservation for sponsoring this event. Ken has been making documentary films for more than 25 years and indeed he's documentary filmmaking some household name. In 1981 he produced and directed the Academy Award nominated Brooklyn Bridge. In 1990 he captured the attention of the entire nation with his epic

series the Civil War. The New York Times called him quote them. Most accomplished documentary filmmaker of his generation unquote. And we couldn't agree more. Kevin went on to tackle subjects that fundamentally define who we are as Americans. Baseball jazz the West to name just a few. I mean the way he's earned every major broadcasting award Emmys Peabody's Dupont Columbia awards. He's not only a great talent. He draws on great talent. Dayton Duncan is an award winning writer and documentary filmmaker who has collaborated with Ken on many films including the Civil War baseball jazz and the West. Damon also has another side of his career politics and public service. He served as chair of the American Heritage Rivers Advisory Committee and is a director of the National Park Foundation. Today he sits on the boards of the Student Conservation Association and the National Conservation system foundation. Ken in Dayton have outdone themselves as I'm sure you'll see in just a few minutes and that's saying a lot with this latest work.

That so many Americans are anticipating all around the country I was with Ken in Dayton at the press tour that we have PBS conducts in January in July looking forward to programs ahead and can showcased some portions of national parks here in Dayton for that critics. And it was a rather solemn a critic's affair up until cannon and Dayton took the stage and shared their clips and you could just feel the entire room. Lean in and get excited about another story from Canandaigua. After the presentation a fan preview preview we're going to short Q&A so please remember your questions please. Please join me now in welcoming Ken Burns and Dave. And thank you John. Yes.

This is our first time here in your mothership and this is a really special treat for us as well we've been on the road for most of the last year trying to share the glories of the national parks throughout our system but also throughout the rest of the country and to under-served populations that don't yet have a sense of ownership of the national parks. The writer and novelist Carson McCullers once talked about the we of me. And it's particularly appropriate when you're dealing with filmmaking because it is such a gloriously collaborative effort. So whenever anyone gives the appellation a film by Ken Burns please know that I am the lucky substitute for a number of other people in this case in this film Dayton Duncan who is equal in every way in authorship of this film. As Me. We also experience that same sure sort of kinship in the organizations that are represented here and I know there are lots of conservation organizations but there are two groups that I want to just cite.

First of all the first is the MP s. Most people think that it stands for the National Park System. It isn't. It's the National Park Service and also PBS which most people think is the national broadband Public Broadcasting System. It is not. It is the Public Broadcasting Service and there are many people here who in this community are responsible and understand in their bones what the word service means and I can't imagine us making this film. Over the last 10 years six years of shooting if we had not enjoyed the special relationship we've had with PBS and the National Park Service and we are so entirely grateful not only to you but obviously to the other conservation groups that are around this project began ten years ago. Out of Dayton's great and personal passion for the national parks which he brought to me and

we agreed almost instantaneously to devote this last decade to trying to come to terms not with a a travelogue or a nature film but it entirely different kind of film on the national parks. We were at the time producing a film on Mark Twain and had the great good fortune to interview the novelist Russell Banks in his home in the Adirondacks and we were speaking about Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain's greatest work and perhaps the most seminal work in all of American literature. And banks sort of stopped us in our triad tracks in the middle of this interview by suggesting that this Huckleberry Finn The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was our Iliad and Odyssey. And he quickly had knowledge that the most of us share the same European traditions as those who produce the Iliad and The Odyssey. That we Americans on this new land in this new continent we're grappling with two themes that Twain alone among writers and philosophers and politicians of the 19th century understood and was willing even to deal with. No one else I dealt with.

And these twin themes were race and space. I don't mean in outer space I mean the physical space of the United States for the first time a human populations had this great democratic possibilities of movement within that continent. We of course understand race it's been the underlying theme of nearly all of films we made. We were created under a creed all men are created equal and yet the man who wrote those words own more than 100 human beings when he wrote them and set in motion an American narrative that has not only been the deviled by a question of race but ennobled by it. And so in films like the Civil War and Baseball in jazz in Jack Johnson in Thomas Jefferson and Mark Twain just to name a handful we have grappled every single time out with the question of race. And it is different. It is no less different in this film on the national parks as well. But we also had the opportunity in particularly in the films that Dayton and I have been able to make together over the last 20 years to explore the sense of how much the physicality of the United States reflects

who we are. And in films on the West on Lewis and Clark's journey on Mark Twain again and a humorous look at the first cross-country automobile trip we've tried to engage both the mythology and the reality of the physical space of this beautiful continent. But our interest has reached its apotheosis in this project. We are not doing a travelogue or a nature film. We are doing a history of the U. National parks for the first time in human experience land was set aside not for kings or noblemen or the very rich as all land had been disposed up to that point in history. But for everybody and for all time we invented it. It's an utterly American idea and could only have come out of American impulses and so we set about over the last decade trying to tell a story about ideas and individuals most responsible for it. And though most people as we told them what we are working them on working on would say oh Teddy Roosevelt and we would not ever say heads and say yes he's a fantastic character

takes up a good deal of our second of six episodes. The story that we tell is a bottom up story. It is not just filled with Thomas Jefferson's white man but it is a story that is black and brown and red and yellow and female and relatively unknown. As well as white and male and famous and we were stunned at the incredible stories that we were able to come across in the course of just asking a simple question. How did this beautiful place come about. What is it that was permitted this place to be saved you know human beings and particularly Americans our acquisitive and extractive some would say rapacious that they look at a river and think Damn they look at a stand of trees and think board feet. They look at a canyon and wonder what mineral wealth can be extracted from it and it took a great deal of courage. And that conflict implied by that courage is echoed throughout our series to say no to stop and say that these precious places need to be saved before we run out of them. And our series is an attempt to just gather together

as many of us stories as we can tell. And treated just as we understand the history of the United States evolving that rather narrow idea of Thomas Jeffersons into a much broader and more magnificent tapestry that we to try to understand the national park idea starting off saving spectacular scenery grew over time into a very complicated and utterly reflective institution that speaks directly to who we are. That is as we like to say the Declaration of Independence applied to the landscape. Now I know you've made plans for the rest of the day but you have to understand one thing is that filmmakers hate to show clips we've been working on this thing for 10 years. It's six parts it's 12 hours and I've just directed the folks at WGBH to lock the doors. You'll be out at about 2:30 this morning if we don't do any bathroom breaks or have any meals. No we're going to show you

a set of clips that we think will just give you a little taste of what it is and we hope because those of you are so committed not only to public broadcasting but to this amazing phenomenon of our National Park Service that you will become foot soldiers alerting your friends to see this series when it is broadcast in full later on and to tell you about what you're going to watch. And we look forward to coming back and answering some questions. And I'd like to introduce not only the author of this enterprise that we have me but the person who is most qualified to speak on the history of the National Parks of any person I know on this planet who also happens to be my best friend. Dayton Duncan thank you. New again. Thank you John for inviting us here. It's the first time in a month that can and I know we live less than a mile away from each other in Walpole and I am sure I've actually seen each

other so we thank you for for providing us with that opportunity. And I just want to echo what Kent said. Without As a writer without public television I would have to write scenes that have every seven and a half minutes would have to come to some sort of false cliffhanger to keep you watching for the next two minutes while there are commercials for products that I don't even know what it is that they're selling. I don't know what those two bathtubs are about. But but it's more interesting than what I've been watching so far. But public television you don't have to do that we can make the scenes as long as we want we don't have executives telling us what can and can't be in our films and that can only happen on public television. For those of you who are supporters of GBH and public television both Ken and I thank you. And earlier this spring we had one of the great surprises and great honors of our life when the acting

director of the National Park Service at the headquarters in Washington made Ken and me honorary Park Rangers and we even have the hat. And my wife Diane asked me two weeks later what it was that I thought that I wouldn't be wearing it to bed. It's that big of an honor for us but I do want to all the people who are here from the National Park Service. Most of your superintendents were just Rangers so we but we salute you. We're going to show six clips for you lessen the bilby about one fourteenth of our entire film. And the first clip is the introduction to the whole series. It basically lays the. It sets the stage in one sense in that it shows you one set of characters which are the places themselves and each of those places that you'll see in what we call the treasure house of superlatives will reappear throughout the film and you'll get to know them by their name and then

you'll get to meet the real heroes of our story and meet some of them in the clips today but the real heroes ours of our story are the human beings who came in contact with those places and set about to convince their government that they should be preserved forever. Then we're going to jump from that which is the start of the first episode clear across time and across an episode and land you in our third episode. It's now in the 1900s our film begins in the 1850s but time I'm going to show you the second episode of The second clip from our third episode. They are now in the midst of creating a thing called the National Park Service which for those of you don't know for about almost 50 years national parks were administered to the handful that existed by the U.S. Army. It wasn't until 916 that the National Park Service was created so we'd have an agency of government solely devoted

to protecting these special places. All the parks at this point as we entered the third you know early into the third episode are in the west because that's where public domain land it was Congress if they could be convinced and it was never easy to create a national park simply had to say this is federal land now is no longer eligible for homesteading mining and logging. That was what would be required. And what I'm going to what we're going to show you today are two elements of dealing with the first park east of the Mississippi which is. Well you'll you'll figure that out as we go along. Then we're going to show you the third clip which will be also from that episode which takes us very far away from here to the one of the remote corners of the continent. But as you will see one of the reasons that we want to show that here today is that one of the.

If you give me one of the reviewed figures of this great city Brad Washburn now deceased is this one of the stars of it and in honor of him. I'm sure. OK. Then we will return to the story of the first park east of the Mississippi so that you get to find out whether in fact it gets made a park or not. I know the suspense would have been unbearable if we not done that it would be our fourth clip. I fit this in from our fifth episode by now there is a national park service of the charismatic first director by the name of Steven Mather a New Englander connections to New England family so he was born in California has started this agency in an honor of our fellow rangers we want to show a clip called Ask a Ranger.

See even Matty just need to know was the first director of the National Park Service Horace Albright will become the second director of the National Park Service. And then finally we want to show really short. Clip that is representative of something that we learned in making this film which is wow we had lots of people before our cameras 50 interviews that we conducted telling us helping us understand the history of the National Parks experts in the field writers. What we learned is that everyone ultimately had as I'm sure many of you who have been to a national park have a very personal story that the connection that Americans have to these places ultimately is less about science less about history less about just general beauty but about a moment or a series of moments that were transformative to those people and to you and are we realize in our interviewing that we need to get out of the way sometimes and

just let people tell us those stories. And then in the making of the film itself to populate our narrative storytelling with those and so the last clip will show us one brief one of those by a fellow park ranger. He's not honorary he's the real deal and somebody that we think is you know be one of the stars of the park service and of our film when it is broadcast on September 27. With that if we can just turn the lights down and we'll start up. And then when it's over. Can I come back and take some questions from you. Thank you so much for coming. We don't. Have a big crew it's usually three or four or five of us at most out in any particular shoot and it's you know a camera man and an assistant and a sound man and one or two of us producers and that's it. And we work really long hours in order to get some of the cinematography we have to get up at 3am and

drive down and carry the heavy equipment out to some prom and toy to hope that the clouds break it at sunrise or sunset and stay up late for sunsets and so in this production we have you know shot grizzly bears from this far away week seems just spectacular natural scenery and the most beautiful light ever. We've been in 60 below zero and broiled in Death Valley we've had every explain making this film and we've had experiences that those of us who had the privilege of being out on the road a sort of sense of kinship with each other that is common to the national parks there's a sort of paradox there when you when you go into a place as one of the people historical figures and I film stars it makes you feel your atomic and significance you're dwarfed by this vast geological timeline that you're working at same time that makes you bigger. John Muir the great nature Prophet said that in order to go in to know oneself you had to go out there

to go. I mean wow. And we know this you know in our daily lives when we see an egoless who is diminished by their self-regard so to we actually expand when we feel are in significance we are humbled by the majesty. Of. His handiwork. Nature and I think everyone that we focused on in the film had some transformative experience. Everyone we put a camera in front of to talk to about helping us understand those historical figures had themselves these transforming experience. And we ourselves as filmmakers at almost every step had our molecules re-arrange my spending on parts and it is. Our Just supreme desire there's some who says what do you want people to get out of this film. I remember after the Civil War a few years afterwards I was walking across the lawn of the visitor's center at Gettysburg and the superintendent picked out a suit down and picked up a popsicle wrapper and said with a big twinkle in his eye it's all your fault.

Because his attendance had gone 200 300 percent and stayed that way for several years. I hope every superintendent has his mad at us because they don't know what to do with all the Americans. That's a good. Democratic problem to have. Then we'll figure it out will get more money and will do whatever it takes to absorb those people but the worst thing that can happen and democracy is that Americans wouldn't go that they would cheat their children of the possibility of feeling this identification with our country which is like nothing else when we sing My Country Tis of me. We're not talking about metropolitan skyscrapers or trade statistics we're talking about the land and this is the only way which you can look at and see it as it was when John Moore saw hotter than 50 years ago. Or see it as it was 6000 years ago when the ancestors of the native peoples that were annoyed often displaced from these beautiful places saw and there's nothing else. We're in a helicopter with a mount on the belly that sort of

points forward a little bit and so you can kind of direct the oath that you didn't hear the question was in the Acadia shots as we went along the sea shore with where we had a boat or plane or you know it turns out it's a helicopter. But I was I was about to yield to Dayton but then I had I have to tell you this experience you know many people will travel to Denali and spend an entire week there and never see McKinley. The whole week and sure enough when we arrive five hour drive from Anchorage to the entrance another four hours almost to down the 90 mile dirt road to wonder lake. We set up at the end of the day and it was locked in and we set up this sort of at what we call the active faith timelapse. And so we set it going in the set by mosquitoes and other bugs and eating cheese and hot pepper sandwiches. We stood there for two hours and 45 minutes and all of a sudden it just

pulled the curtain for a second. And and and there. She it was and it was one of those great for today's things that we just couldn't believe was happening to us. But I want to date I mean the larger question you ask is is really important and involves I think the extraordinary amount of generalship despite our 10 year working six years of shooting of this thing necessary to make that happen. We had two years to the production schedule of this from the outset because we understood that we wanted you know if you're kind of trying to say here it is. Acadia but became Acadia National Park and here are some people who fall in love with. And you kind of want it to show itself off at its best as well. And so although there are a lot of parks we wanted to go to they're widely dispersed. We wanted to be in some of them and more than one season as you could see with Yellowstone in the winter

as well as three or four other times. And that takes time and we didn't want to be captive to. We get one four day period in this park and you know God is our lighting director and he doesn't take orders or she doesn't take orders from us you know and so we wanted to have a chance to if we were scum in a particular day time that we can come back you can plan a trip to Yosemite Valley and know that the weather's going to be good. But nonetheless you've got to plan to go there. You've got to get airline tickets you've got to get the sim a doctor for this and cinematographer you have a place to stay so forth so. So we did that and sometimes we didn't have any good luck and you don't see any of that footage. But but the greatest the greatest gift we gave to this project was the extra years so we could go back and we gave the IT and at the very end by husbanding our resources we realized that we

could afford to go back to some places and do these wildly expensive helicopter shoots to get the aerials which are for us were not the bread and butter of our storytelling but add you know a whole extra dimension and then the other thing is working with the park service you'd call up that park and say you know we're trying to make a film of what we're doing going to the Everglades I assumed well it will be a good time to go down there it's not so hot. My children would be on vacation and I could bring them with me an earthing and then I learned from the people that Everglades is the that is right at the very end of their dry season and you wouldn't be able to see the alligators and the Bluebirds might be gone and so forth and so if you want to do that you should come in February and so that's true of a lot of the parks if you're interested in what we're doing. We we feel that the question is what in this 10 years work really surprised us in anything. You know we never make films about

subjects we know completely about. You know that's homework what we're interested in doing is sharing with you our process of discovery. So in every instance. This project particularly it was just flabbergasting. It might be if you're shooting in these live places just the just the way these special saved sacred places exert themselves on you and tug at you and change you as a human being. Being present to them sometimes it's just the startling discovery of just how naturally diverse the story is that it is a bottom up as well as top down story in that that's what we are. What we discovered that there were so many different characters that we had no idea about. Sometimes it's the archival discovery of you we have a database of nearly 12000 images which we've given to the park service that we've discovered not

only in their places but all across the country and indeed in some cases the world of images of the national parks that they didn't even have that are 10 years research and they're wonderful. And I'm talking about still photographs of this we've found out where you know we found people's home movies. We were surprised constantly by. I see Dana was saying how personal people's recollections were that those like Shelton who could help us in another section of our film and why we interviewed him. Tell us about the African-American Buffalo Soldiers that celebrated Calvary men who were the first protectors of Yosemite could also be this amazing spokesman who's sort of the conscience of the film. And those were surprises that that here you were needing to get from point A to point B with this very intelligent park ranger who interprets Buffalo Soldiers in Yosemite and suddenly he turns out to have been been able to express himself so well and so beautifully that he's in every episode. And we hadn't counted on that we just assume he'd be in this

narrow bandwidth of episode 2. And it turns out he has a presence like this one. So it was startlingly beautiful that has transcends the story we're telling and as Dana said you know we just want to get Be smart enough to shut up and get out of the way and let people tell it but the data tells the story in a later episode of his family vacations in the parks. Other people William Cronon who has that literate comment at the end of the introduction talking about the. The men city and the intimacy of time which is sort of what the whole thing is about then relates it in a personal way. I would not do what I am doing now meaning be a historian. Had he not gone out with his family which would gut the old Kodachrome shots from the 100 50s and 60s of his family on vacation you know with their noses all buttoned up with the with the you know sunscreen and the dad in the cap and everybody

looking just like every other family there. And this is where he became a historian. These are the surprises infinite surprise I'm sure that one said my biggest surprise was probably about six years into the project a project in which my job required me to go to all 58 of national parks by the time it was over. Many of them numerous times. My biggest surprise I kept looking over my shoulder that you know some buddy was going to come and put an adult hand on my shoulder and say that's enough to you know go to the city. You know or work or would say and your being women this is a big mistake you're being paid to do this. We made a mistake you know us. The question is and this is most of the films we've done are about subjects that people know something about at least and that this is one in which most people you assume don't know anything they may have an experience with the national parks but the very complicated biography.

You know I had a discussion the other day with some students and they were trying to parse the difference between feature films and documentaries as if they were totally different things. And I was trying to tell them that the laws of storytelling are exactly the same the Aristotelian poetics you know you're mad to read poetics in high school. It's the same it's always the same when somebody says how is your day dear. You don't say I back slowly down the driveway avoiding the garbage can at the curb pulled up to the stop sign at the corner put my blinker on and turned right and you never do that unless you then have an accident. How do you make that turn. By that the laws are the same and so I think that each film has a million different problems and I don't want to say that word problems in a pejorative sense. There are moments to overcome and and questions to solve and then we just take it a day at a time and just figure

out how to tell good stories. As you can imagine it's different if you're shooting at civil war battle sites in the East Coast mostly to to do a shoot then it is to make a film that starts at the gates of the Arctic and goes to the Dry Tortugas from Hawaii volcanoes to Acadia and all the places in between but in the end the relationship to material to storytelling is exactly the same thing it's animated by people. I remember I interviewed Bill Moyers for the New York Times and he once said to me that every landscape is a portrait. Because it's human beings talking to one another. And so maybe I just had the great pleasure to introduce a new film that will be out a few years at a film festival called The Last Station about the last days of Leo Tolstoy's life and it was Tolstoy who said that art is the transfer of emotion from one person to another. So in that is ultimately a goal of just trying to pick up a bunch of stuff forget about art they're so loaded but just a bunch of stuff and move it over to you. It's essentially the same kind of process. You know the circumstances are different in each film but in

some ways it's exactly the same exactly the same. The question of the army is such an important one and it goes back to the very story of how you know we made this film you tell people who work on the national parks and they go oh Teddy Roosevelt you say yeah. And he's an important part. But just a part of our second of six episodes. The National Park Service comes in in the middle of our third of six episodes and it begs the question who's taking care of these parks and what happened as the parks were set aside. One of the chief features of the legislation is that the guy proposing it always have to convince the rest of the Congress that this was worthless land that's what they refer to Yosemite and else on his worthless land. And so you create a park. And what was so good is that there be no money necessary to do it but after a while they realize well maybe there might be some money necessary to do it and then you are inviting poachers and vandals and tourists who do their damage and sheep herders who want to graze in the meadows of Yosemite and loggers who want to cut the trees there

and you need some sort of agency and early on after Congress and in one fit of pique about the notion that land was being says side for everybody and not just being distributed to two miners and loggers and some such stripped away the appropriations. Philip Sheridan you know no Indian No you know the only good Indian is a dead Indian Philip Sheridan came to the rescue and sent dispatched troops into Yellowstone and Sequoyah and. Yosemite and in Sequoia Yosemite those troops were African-American in the first decade of the 20th century African-Americans were being lynched at a greater rate than any time in our history and yet in the city National Park and Sequoia National Park they were telling people presumably mostly white people what they could and could not do. And as Shelton says in another part of this film that makes for a very interesting day.

And the amazing story of that and so what you begin to see is that there's so much that we take for granted that there have always been there they have and that they will always will be there they won't unless we take care of them that there's always been agency to protect them there hasn't been and LEDs. We begin to realize the fragility of the idea and the structures and we even know just from eight years of of political neglect what can accumulate eight to nine billion dollars worth of maintenance that could happen now to take care of to bring the parks up to snuff and we would all hope that. They be going forward and not going backwards so yeah the early protectors is a huge part of our film and not just the Buffalo Soldiers but you'll you'll find a wonderful collection of people who sort of fill the vacuum. Before you could work up the bureaucratic courage to create the National Park Service in 1016 your question is about

talking with Brad about the differences between when he was making a film and today. Well great. One of the greatest honors of my life next to being an honorary park ranger was to was my wife Diane and I writing with Brad and barb on the 90 mile road that goes into Denali National Park and of course you know hearing the her tale of her being her ascent of Mount McKinley and hundreds of tales that he had. And I just the reason I say that is that one of the things that he always harped about was when they were doing their mountaineering you know about the clothes that they wore the equipment they had versus you know what people take now I mean he just couldn't he could never get over that. He you know he did a lot of stuff for different

organizations that could take him up in a big airplane and he'd take some of those marvelous black and white photographs you know from the open door of a big airplane might be the U.S. Army airplane or might be some other scientific group. And he was a pioneer in doing that. And to a certain extent we sometimes did that on a bunch smaller scale where we weren't the shoot General Price as he often was representing when he did that and the other difference that I'll be the first to admit is that you know we're Willis's compared to book him. And and Barbara terms of what you know what they went through to do their do their do their stuff. You know he he was the old school and. You know nothing was too tough or too hard no problem was too big. He'd find a solution to it and and get it done with this great spirit

that you still. You still can see. In that interview that we did with him I'm going to answer the first rather than looking into the question is about how how do we in our concern to reach more Americans. Try to get beyond what is traditionally been the base of support of the national parks which is predominantly white middle class upper middle class and how do how does our How can our film be part of that. We were very fortunate at the very start of this one not quite the very start but back in 2000 and for to meet the people of the Evelyn and Walter Hawes Jr. Fund who are concerned about that very issue as the National Park Service itself is tremendously concerned. If you know increasingly diverse American population with larger and larger numbers of people feeling for a variety of reasons that they don't

have any ownership stake in the national parks if that continues then the future of the parks is in peril. And so this is an essential question for the future of the national parks. We did not set out didactically to try to solve that. What we found with the help of the grant that we got from the HA's fund you know to help boost bolster our research. What we found is that those stories are there from the very beginning of the African-American Buffalo Soldiers of a guy named George masa a Japanese immigrant whose photographs and dedication helped create Great Smoky Mountains National Park of George Melendez Wright a pioneering biologist in the Park Service who directed started this long lonely struggle that was carried on by other people after his premature death to redirect National Park Service policies to let nature be nature. Don't feed the bears any more. Don't

don't have enclosures for the bison. Don't kill the predators those kind that began with a guy named George Melendez. Right. Cierra OBOT a great painter in Yosemite. Lancelot Jones the son of a former slave who's essential to the preservation of Biscayne National Park. We found stories from the you know embedded in the history of the national parks that says that not only are these parks. Nor do they belong to everyone regardless of their station in life their race or their ethnicity or their gender. From the very beginning of the park idea people from every walk of life every race every ethnicity have been involved in the story. It's just that in the telling of those stories you know for one reason or another many of these of not had the light shined on them and to the extent that our light helps shine that light so that young

students in an inner city African-Americans can see the buffalo soldiers who are the first protectors of this great place someone who looks like them that is helpful. When they can see Shelton Johnson the most articulate person in our film who you know is self-evidently African-American that is helpful one. You know if you're a Hispanic kid and you see the story of the savior of wildlife as he is called by someone in our film by the name of George to lead us right. All of that is helpful and with a grant from the hoss fund. There are other outreach efforts going on on a not precedented scale. Shelton is going to a lot of cities and doing tours in advance of our film. My guess is his speaking schedule be pretty booked after October 2nd our film is aired all across the US Park Service system through a grant that the Haas Fund

gave to the National Park Foundation different park sale of maritime here. This area has been doing programs this summer with kids from the Boys and Girls Club right. In Bandelier National Monument kids who are Hispanic kids are going there up in Denali Native kids are doing projects with the park. All you know is part of this outreach grant our film is being translated into Spanish we've got a lot of other side small films that are going on to teaching things so we feel we hope that our our film will be the campfire around which is greater. Number of people gather amid a lot of great organizations from the park service to public television stations will hope moving forward. That's

preaching sorry. There's not much more to say. You mention 58 national parks that's how many there are but there are three hundred ninety one units of the National Park Service our film doesn't even attempt to do a story on all of those 58 national national parks you do see an image from each one of them was one of our insistences or conceits. I think the larger question that date and we do acknowledge dozens of the other elements units of the National Park Service in this film so it's very very representative though it's not encyclopedic. It's not a telephone book nor would you care to watch or read one. But you bring up a larger question which is always something that besets public television and I imagine also the National Park Service that we tend to also preach to the converted. And then I think as Dayton has

a new radio with this project in the great good fortune we had in the grant from the hoss Jr. Fund that we've always tried. And for the most part been successful in our professional lives reaching a much larger constituency than the normal choir that the ratings for these are are much more and we're hoping as David says that this is the first shot across the bow of what will be an upcoming centennial celebration of the Park Service seven years from now in 2016 there's already a large movement afoot in committees led by Sandra Day O'Connor that is looking into this celebration to help retire that Maine's backlog in a kind of partnership of government and foundations and private individuals and corporations. We also know that. And I think too often you know just as we understand that television doesn't use but a fraction of its brain and betrayed the initial promise and that public television represents and always this and that that happens on a shoestring budget to produce some of the finest programming that we have you know with one foot you know slightly in the marketplace and

the other proudly and decidedly out there we nonetheless have an obligation to continually try to enlarge our audience and it's one of the reasons why David and I have been on the road for more. Most of the last year trying to reach out and say that it isn't just a group like this in which we probably could have counted on most of you already watching the series had you not come here this afternoon we hope that you'll be there for that much more committed. But we've actually gone out into communities as David suggested African-American Hispanic-American. I've been with Shelton and you know with a bunch of fourth graders in Hialeah Florida who you know 80 of them who just looked up at him and the first question is how do I become a park ranger. Because we could show them heroes that looked and sounded like them is a huge huge part of this stuff and so we're we've been working really really hard and I think that this is something that has to be understood as symbiotic and symbiotic actually implies a responsibility that your question is excellent but it also we we require your help.

Obviously you support public television. Obviously you care about it. But now we need to see what we can do to bring more people I mean. Let me end on one just tiny addict that I've told a lot of times but but it's a few years after the Civil War series came out. I was walking across the lawn of the visitor's center at Gettysburg National Battlefield with the superintendent. And as we were walking across he bent down and he picked up a popsicle wrapper and he waved it in my face and he said with a twinkle in his eye it's all your fault. His attendance had gone up since the Civil War series 200 or 300 percent and it stayed there for a few years and he was both smiling but acknowledging the great problem of democracy. And for most of the 50s 60s 70s 80s and early 90s the attendance at National Parks was skyrocketing and we were talking about the worries of being loved to death. Well now it's sort of leveled over a bit and some places decline not this year it's up a little bit but we're in an existential moment. You know if

that's a tension between being and doing the virtual world that so many of us and particularly our children live in is neither. And the national parks offer a kind of responded a kind of place for restoration. And it's our obligation to try to get as many people as possible because in the end having worked for 10 years on this story what we want more than anything else is every superintendent sort of waving a popsicle wrapper at us and saying what do we do. Because that's a hell of a good problem to have in a democracy and a hell of a good problem for the parks to have too many constituents. Thank you AA Are you a writer. Nobody Lawrence's eloquent Thank you. But I think we obviously have in this audience so many stewards

of some of America's great natural resources stewards for the public's common sharing so that issue of stewardship. Of course it is abundantly apparent every time we have a fortune have to have can and don't here because they talk about projects that don't take three weeks to do. They don't take three years to do. It can take as many as 10 years to do. And I just want to say you can tell in the answers to their questions to your good questions that they're really we're blessed not just with these two remarkable filmmakers but the fact that they for themselves and through public television and their supporters they really know how to take on a big subject and afford themselves the time to do it masterfully. And those of you who've been in this room before when we've talked about films for public television that is that that that arc of that time that stewardship that care can speaks of it so eloquently. But it is really something that we hope the filmmakers who

present on PBS and on WGBH really are afforded the time to do it and no one really looks after a topic that they care about for years and years and years like Kan and his partner Dane. Please join me in thanking them once again.