Now, I'm excited to have you here.
This is no small thing that you did.
You literally, I believe, changed the face of TV.
When you put on the Civil War documentary,
suddenly documentaries start springing up everywhere.
(guest laughs) You created a style
that I think a lot of people have borrowed from.
And in fact, your work is so popular
that you yourself have been parodied.
Yeah (chuckles). Is that true?
Yeah, you've done it here.
The "Tonight Show's" done it, everybody's done it.
And most recently, "The Simpsons" did it, it's--
That's a high honor, I believe.
It's a huge high honor.
I was humiliated by the fact,
that they didn't have me do the voice,
'cause I think they thought it was so hard.
So Flanders, his neighbors says
that prayer is the answer to everything.
So Homer's watching TV, TD comes on,
Ken Burns presents a film by Ken burns, about Ken Burns.
(audience laughs) And
I launch into this thing about how,
you know, I don't have enough money to cut my hair.
I've never actually seen a baseball game
and he's freaking out and he goes,
"Oh God, oh God, who has created two kinds of clam chowder,
"please let me find the remote."
And the heavens open up and the chorus comes in.
Right, right. There's the remote
and he switches to "The Monkey Olympics."
Right, right. (crowd laughing)
Homer loves "The Monkey Olympics," yeah.
Well, we were just honored,
to have worked ourself into the bloodstream of the country.
That's like, yeah.
The best thing is the editorial cartoons that we have.
Right. You know, hundreds of them.
And the best one, is this guy,
couples sitting on a couch, bleary eyed.
The TV set is blaring and the bubble over the TV says,
"Coming soon to PBS, OJ a 2,750 hour documentary."
And the bubble over the couple says,
"Ken Burns has to be stopped."
(Presenter laughs) (crowd laughs)
Must be nice,
you put that on your own refrigerator, right?
Oh yes and frame it big.
Now Civil War, Jazz baseball.
And now you're doing a documentary,
ostensibly about what you say is
the first road trip across America.
This guy named Horatio Nelson Jackson,
walks into a man's club in San Francisco.
He hears people saying
that the car will never replace the horse.
It's just a rich man's toy.
And he plants down 50 bucks and he says,
"I can drive across the country,
"in less than three months."
Something no one else has ever done before.
Although all the great automotive geniuses,
have tried and failed to do it.
Spectacularly, two days later, he buys a car,
hires a mechanic.
Two days after that, four days, after this impulsive wager.
He sets off, he's got his mechanic with him.
He buys a dog along the way, named Bud.
And they all three wear goggles.
And there's this image of Bud,
sitting up on what's essentially,
this glorified, riding lawnmower,
a love seat, no windshield, no top.
And Bud has got the goggles on,
bracing himself for every single bump in the road.
Because if he doesn't, he's gonna bounce off
like everything they carry along the way bounces off.
And what people don't appreciate, I don't think,
is that back then and we're talking about,
this is the early 1900's.
1903, exactly a 100 years ago.
And so, what people don't appreciate,
is that there's no interstate highway,
there's not even a lot of paved roads.
It's cow paths, it's wagon trails, there are no maps.
People send them in the wrong direction.
Some woman sends him 50 miles down some place, dead end.
"Where do I go down Marysville?"
"Down this road," dead end.
The family pours out of this farm there,
and they said, "No, you gotta go back."
He goes back 50 miles, meets the woman on the horse
and says, "Why'd you send me down there?"
She said, "Ma and pa had never seen a car before."
(crowd laughing)
She just wanted him to drive that way?
Just wanted them to see the thing.
And all the way through, But it's was also
the first murder of 1903.
(crowd laughing)
I think the amazing thing here is that
somewhere along the line,
the hard drive of all American males change,
'cause he asked for directions.
(laughs) Yeah.
As Lewis and Clark did 100 years before
and they got along fine.
But I think that moment,
when that woman sent him down, that that was it,
'cause from then on, men do not ask for directions.
(crowd laughing)
There's actually a funny, we have a picture here.
This is from the first family road trip,
which comes along.
It's in the film too, five years after Horatio
makes his spectacular, spectacular trip.
The Jacob Murdoch family, in 1908,
leave from Pasadena to New York.
And we got this great picture,
of the family sitting in the car.
With all the women folk in the back
and they're miserable.
Yeah, look at them, they're just.
(crowd laughing)
The reporters interview the guy,
and he says, "Well, you know, we,"
he never let anyone else drive,
he never stopped to ask for directions.
And you know, he always drove
more than anyone else wanted him to during the day.
And they went to him and he said,
"Yeah, you know a man doesn't like
"to see the sun going down on the horizon
"when he still has lots of miles behind it."
And the women are just, miserable.
Everything we've come to know now my question would be,
what's the first recorded instance,
'cause this happened in my family all the time.
Of a father reaching into the back
to try and hit a kid
while driving. (Ken laughing)
'Cause we had a big yellow, 1970 Pontiac station wagon
and they'd pack us all in.
And of course, I was one of six kids
and we were in the back starting fires and everything.
And my dad would be like, "Ah, ah"
and we'd be back there
and this big claw would be just missing us.
(crowd laughing)
I'm sure, it's up to you to find the first
historical record of that.
I mentioned earlier that your style,
which when it first came along,
in the Civil War documentary,
this is the first time I saw it,
was I think so revolutionary,
that it's been copied and I think most notably,
by the "E! True Hollywood Story."
(giggles) Yeah, right.
And I'm curious, did you ever have any idea,
when you were working on those early documentaries,
that you would one day bring to America,
really, the "E! True Hollywood Story?"
With the photographs zooming in and out,
and the tilting and the panning, no, no idea.
It's pretty amazing, 'cause you watch these things
and they're sort of formulas.
You can just plug everything into it.
They'll go Mick Jagger, something on Mick Jagger's,
but then sex and drugs got in the way.
And then they break for commercial,
but they tease what they're gonna do in the next section.
They have 20 minutes of commercial.
They come back, they tease where they've been.
And if they--
They recap, they spend most of the show recapping.
They recap and then they start you along the way.
And then they break for another commercial
and tease the thing.
So I figured, you could take that hour show,
reduce it to the information they give you,
and it's three or four minutes.
Sometimes they recap so much,
that they take you back further than when they...
And your show's over
and you've actually gone back in time.
(Ken and the audience laugh)
"We left off that Mick Jagger was born.
"No, no we got much further than that."
What I'm curious though,
is when you did the Civil War documentary,
you were using all these techniques,
but I thought that the techniques,
matched the gravity of what you were discussing.
You were saying, "The nobility
"of the thousands of that died in one hour at Shiloh.
"And now that's all being used for,
"you know, Screech had to make a decision," you know.
(Ken and the audience laugh)
"Would he leave Saved by the Bell
"or stick with Mr. Belding," and you know.
(Ken and the audience laugh)
But what have we done, what have we learned here?
We've learned nothing.
It's all your fault.
It is my fault.
Well, I'm a huge fan, "Horatio's Drive,
"America's first road trip,"
which is Great Premiers Monday, October 6th on PBS.
Please come back, very nice talking to you.
It's my pleasure. (audience cheering)
Ken Burns, and we wanna take a break, we'll be right back.