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A letter from filmmaker Ken Burns...
For the past 30 years I’ve had the great privilege of creating films for PBS. With your financial support, I’ve taken viewers on a journey through some of our country’s most important stories, including The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz and The War, among others. So when Patricia Miller, KNPB’s Interim President & CEO, asked me to write to you today, I was delighted to have this chance to thank you personally for all that you’ve done for KNPB Public Broadcasting.
I’m grateful to contribute my work to the vast and amazing collective known as public television. Next up is my new film, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. The film follows the stories of extraordinary individuals who devoted their lives to establishing the parks and thereby preserving the wonderful natural places we now enjoy.
You’ll meet William Gladstone Steel, who, as young boy from Kansas, unwrapped the newspaper used to hold his lunch one day and read about a vast lake out West. He went on to dedicate the next 31 years of his life to saving Crater Lake.
And Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, a woman who lived with the Florida swamplands at her back yard—who led the fight to save the Everglades from a relentless tide of development and commercial exploitation.
You’ll get to know the brilliant biologist George Melendez Wright, who created the first system-wide evaluation of wildlife back in the 1920s before his life was cut tragically short. He’s revered in national parks circles as a pioneer and savior of wildlife.
That’s just a glimpse of this new six-part series that KNPB will premiere in September. I invite you to tune in, and I’d also like to ask you for a special contribution to KNPB of $25, $50 or $100.
Your support helps finance future projects—programs that will air in 2010, 2011, and beyond. These include a tenth inning of Baseball that will bring us up to date on our national pastime, as well as a film on Prohibition, and another on the Roosevelts. And your support will also help KNPB bring you stellar series like Nature, Nova, American Experience and Masterpiece Theater as well as their own upcoming productions on the Reno National Championship Air Races and Forgotten Mourners, an exploration into the grieving process of children, filmed in your community.
I promise to do my part to bring the stories of our country’s great history to life, and I hope you’ll be right there with me.
Sincerely,
Ken Burns