Ken Burns Loves Statistics

November 27, 2006

The director of all things documentary is pushing his own limit – and the limit of TV watcher’s patience. His new doc is 14 hours long!

Ken Burns thought he was done with war movies after his series ''The Civil War.'' But he says two troubling statistics fueled the creation of ''The War,'' a 14-hour documentary about World War II.

''It was really a couple of statistics that got me,'' Burns said. ''One was that we're losing a thousand (World War II) veterans a day, and the other is that our children just don't know what's going on.''

Burns said he was astonished at the number of high school graduates who believe the United States fought with the Germans in World War II.

''That to me was terrifying, just stupefying,'' said Burns, who will show the first two-hour installment of The War to Dartmouth College on Dec. 1.

The series follows four American towns _ Waterbury, Conn., Mobile, Ala., Sacramento, Calif., and Luverne, Minn. _ through the war years, focusing both on the soldiers from the towns sent to war and the families and friends left behind. ''The point of view is from ordinary people, who do the fighting and who do the dying in all wars,'' Burns said.