Bar Harbor Times
Ken Burns Fills Criterion! New Documentary Tells Acadia's History
By Nan Lincoln, Bar Harbor Times Reporter
August 13, 2009
BAR HARBOR (Aug 7, 09): The lines of eager people waiting to get into the Criterion Theatre Wednesday night extended down Cottage Street, around the corner, down lower Rodick to West and around that corner for another block. And no, it wasn’t a new Batman movie, or Spider man or even Harry Potter film they were all enduring the long wait for. It was — brace yourselves now — a sneak preview of a PBS series; Ken Burns' new documentary “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.”
True, Burns and his longtime writer, Dayton Duncan, were going to personally present the hour-long segment of the 12-hour series to the Criterion audience, but who knew a documentary filmmaker and his writer were such rock stars?
Well amongst the PBS crowd they certainly are and they proved it by filling the seats of the 900-plus seat theater for the first show and practically refilling them for the second show, even though that one was screened sans Burns and Duncan.
Both Burns and Duncan introduced the film, first explaining how film clips are an anathema to any filmmaker, who, like any artist, prefer their work seen as a whole rather than in pieces.
"So we're going to lock the doors and show the whole 12 hours," Burns joked, receiving an encouraging applause from the audience to do just that.
They also talked about the 10 year process of making this documentary — Duncan's idea— which Burns says took him all of 10 seconds to okay.
It was interesting to note the very different styles of speaking of the two men who have been best friends and collaborators on many, if not all, of the PBS documentaries Burns has directed.
Burns speaks of grand visions, and philosophical concepts such as how visiting beautifully preserved places such as Acadia and other national parks can be so transforming it actually, "changes your molecules."
Duncan is a much more straight forward, down-to-earth and humorous speaker, saying that his most transformative moment in the process of making the film was being named honorary Park Rangers by the Park Service at a ceremony in Washington, D.C.
"I wore that wonderful flat-brimmed hat for weeks at home," he said. "Until my wife finally asked, 'Are you going to be wearing the hat to bed tonight?' So I stopped. But now when she sees me a little down, or out of sorts she'll say, 'Maybe you need to put on your ranger hat for a bit.'"
Watching the dynamic between the two men clearly shows that Burns' real genius is knowing what his strengths are — being able to transfer his grand visions and bold concepts to the small canvas of a TV screen without losing it's power or entertainment value, and finding people like Duncan who do the same with words, translating those visions into a clear, concise and compelling narrative.
That genius was on full display in the clips they showed Wednesday night which included an introduction to the whole 12-hour series and a segment on Teddy Roosevelt who apparently had his own molecules changed when he transformed himself from a "great white hunter" to an impassioned advocate for the preservation of America's wildlife and wilderness.
In the clip we saw, Roosevelt had to be dissuaded from "helping" park rangers thin out the mountain lion population in the newly formed Yosemite National Park and had to settle for killing and skinning a mouse.
But the most exciting and pertinent excerpt for this audience was the segment they showed the creation of Acadia National Park. Not only was this fascinating and important information historically, it was also personally important for me and my other family members who attended the screening. As descendants of Charles William Eliot, the president of Harvard who got the ball rolling on preserving the beauty of Mount Desert Island by establishing the first privately endowed national park, we were all hoping Burns would get the story right — and he did.
Burns began Acadia's story with C.W. Eliot's son Charles, a young landscape architect from Boston, who summered in Northeast Harbor, and was concerned that all the beautiful areas and vistas of MDI were being bought up by the wealthy summer people and therefore removed from public access. He was the one who first suggested establishing a park here, and likely would have dedicated many years of his life to realize that dream.
But, the film correctly explains, young Charles was stricken by meningitis and died at age 38, before he could put his plan into action. It was his grieving, elderly father who picked up the banner and eventually recruited George Dorr to carry it forward.
Dorr, the documentary makes clear, not only carried that banner, but he devoted the rest of his long life and his considerable fortune to the establishment of Acadia National Park, convincing John D. Rockefeller, Jr. to come on board as well.
In a final delightful anecdote, the film recounts how after Dorr died he had his ashes spread by a small airplane over Bar Harbor and his beloved park.
"And it is said that one socially prominent Bar Harbor lady serving tea on her lawn of her cottage that afternoon, noticed an ash drift down from the sky and into her cup," film narrator Peter Coyote relates. "'Oh my,' she remarked. 'It's Mr. Dorr.'"
Asked at the end of the screening how many of the images and how much information they gathered for the documentary ended up on the cutting room floor, Duncan replied that it wasn't so much the photos or historical information that was so hard to leave out, but the many, many wonderful personal stories.
"Anyone who wants to hear those stories is welcomed to join me at the top of Cadillac Mountain at sunrise tomorrow," he said. "And I'll tell them all."
I have a strong feeling he really was there, Thursday morning at the crack of dawn, and I like to think that there were some audience members who were not such lay-a-beds as I and heard those stories and will perhaps, one day pass them on to the rest of us.
Until then the PBS series "The National Parks: America's Best Idea" is scheduled to begin, Sunday, Sept. 27.
