Ken Burns loves to talk about America. In the more than thirty years the filmmaker has produced for PBS, he has covered such intimate portraits as the Brooklyn Bridge and Thomas Jefferson to such broad topics as the Civil War. His newest documentary will take viewers to the plains, where they will explore farmlands ravaged by the Dust Bowl and earn a unique window inside some of the viewpoints of those who lived through the event.
The Dust Bowl is a timely project, an idea made clear at a press junket for the upcoming documentary, when Burns himself noted four of the people interviewed for the PBS project had already been lost to “the merciless passage of time.” Initially, Burns used PBS commercials, old school newspaper advertising, and even visits to nursing homes to find candidates willing to talk among the many, now elderly, Dust Bowl survivors. Time was a precious commodity for those chats, and Burns went to painstaking efforts to make sure he could get those he interviewed to open up and preserve their stories on camera. According to Deadline, the process worked: The Dust Bowl will air on PBS on November 18 and 19 in an in-depth two-episode series.
Initially, Burns became excited about the topic via writer Tim Egan, who wrote The Worst Hard Time, a title about the Dust Bowl plight and many of John Steinbeck’s “Okies,” who immigrated after losing everything to the dust. Egan stayed on board for The Dust Bowl, a story written by Dayton Duncan that will talk not only about the tragedy of a disaster that was potentially preventable, but also about the people living during a time when the Depression was raging and dust covered the sun.
