Moviegoers Wowed By Burns Film On National Parks

After spending 12 hours in a darkened theatre, you'd figure movie goers might be well, a little fuzzy.

"Not a bit,"  said James Doyle, a public affairs specialist from the Intermountain Region office in Denver. "That was just astounding."

Doyle was one of more than 100 employees of the National Park Service, NPS partners, concessioners and staff from public television stations around the country who spent the past weekend at the National Conservation Training Center near Shepherdstown previewing the latest  production from Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan: The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.

The 12-hour, six-part documentary series, directed by Burns and co-produced with his longtime colleague, Dayton Duncan, who also wrote the script, is the story of an idea as uniquely American as the Declaration of Independence and just as radical – that the most special places in the nation should be preserved, not for royalty or the rich, but for everyone. As such, it follows in the tradition of Burns’s exploration of other American inventions, such as baseball and jazz.

Burns and Duncan, with the assistance of the NPS and the National Park Foundation, rounded up the audience.

“We wanted as many people in and associated with the Park Service and this film to see it,” Burns said. Great films are only great if people see them, he added.

Director Bomar said the film was shown in six parts, as it will be presented in the fall of 2009. In between sessions, film watchers broke up into discussion groups to talk about the film as well as ways it could be promoted and used as an educational tool to connect people with parks.

Filmed over the course of more than six years in some of nature’s most spectacular locales — from Acadia to Yosemite, Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon, the Everglades of Florida to the Gates of the Arctic in Alaska — the documentary is nonetheless a story of people from every conceivable background — rich and poor; famous and unknown; soldiers and scientists; natives and newcomers; idealists, artists and entrepreneurs; people who were willing to devote themselves to saving some precious portion of the land they loved, and in doing so reminded their fellow citizens of the full meaning of democracy. It is a story of struggle and conflict, high ideals and crass opportunism, stirring adventure and enduring inspiration — set against breathtaking backdrops.

“Just as many of the lands that make up today’s national parks were the spiritual homes for the indigenous tribes who lived there, they had a profound and often spiritual impact on the settlers who first saw them and on the visionaries who fought tirelessly to preserve them as the common property of the American people,” said Ken Burns. “They saw in them a visual, tangible representation of God’s majesty. Our film celebrates the beauty of these parks and the vision and foresight of the men and women who made sure that this land would be preserved.”