He may have abstained from alcohol in the past, but documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, known for public television classics like “The Civil War” and “The National Parks,” did hit the bottle a bit during the filming of his newest flick “Prohibition.”
“It was a professional responsibility,” he said, laughing, at a luncheon at the National Press Club on Monday. He also explained why he was a “teetotaler” in the past. “I’ve had to wear so many hats that we tend to work long days and I’ve always found that stopping for the drink when everybody else did was not conducive to continuing to work for much longer,” he said. “But I decided in the course of ‘Prohibition,’ just as a I did when I was making a film on the celibate religious sect the Shakers — I conceived with my co-producer on that film my first of four daughters — that it was important for me to balance out the tee-totaling aspects of so many of the individuals in our film that I felt compelled to drink, and drink significantly.”
Burns latest work debuted Sunday and goes beyond the gangsters and flappers associated with the era (though includes them too). The three-part six-hour-long doc details how a “huge, strange collection of people” came together in support of it, Democrats and Republicans, union members and industrialists, the Ku Klux Klan and NAACP. That bizarre coalition coupled with the political realities of the day — a brand new income tax and anti-German sentiment surrounding War War I (dachshunds were stoned, sauerkraut was renamed “Liberty Cabbage” and beer was very, very bad) made the 18th amendment a reality.
“We think the film is sexy and exciting and wonderful and dangerous and all of those things,” Burns gushed. “Though it is a deeper dive because you realize after awhile that the focus on Al Capone makes us forget that ordinary citizens…would have broken the law and that ordinary citizens, journalists, and filmmakers, and doctors, and lawyers, and lobbyists, and the guy on the corner and the guy around the corner were breaking the law.”
