Ric Burns, N.Y.C. Optimist
Not long ago, the documentary filmmaker Ric Burns appeared in the doorway of his Upper West Side office with a fresh wound over his forehead. “You may wonder why I have a two-inch gash on my head,” he said, bowing to display the damage. Burns—the director of “New York: A Documentary Film”—had had a run-in with a metal paper-towel holder, to the tune of seven stitches. “Geysers of blood,” he said, entering a shadowy editing booth. “I got a photo if you want.”
Burns, the younger brother of fellow-filmmaker Ken Burns, was in the midst of making other bloody cuts: editing two long-gestating new episodes of “New York,” set to air later this month on PBS. One of his editors, Parker Dixon, sat at a console, staring at an iMac screen. The two began to work, Burns thinking aloud, Dixon cuing up footage. “Ric puts pen to paper,” Dixon said. “And from there we just feel it forward.”
Burns nodded. “It’s a funny balance,” he said. “Sometimes you want to be seeing what you hear, but a whole lot of times you don’t.”
Fun, fizzy dispatches from the city and beyond
Burns has worked out of the same offices overlooking Broadway and Seventy-third Street since 1989, two years before he and a collaborator, James Sanders, began work on “New York.” The first seven episodes, fourteen hours in all, aired between 1999 and 2001, covering everything from Henry Hudson’s first sail up the harbor to the city’s near-bankruptcy in the nineteen-seventies. An eighth episode, “The Center of the World,” three hours long, appeared in 2003, telling the story of the development and construction of the Twin Towers. The two new episodes, “Shadows of the Past” and “The Future of Cities,” cover the past fifty years. As Dixon browsed through shots of Jack Maple (the police official who pioneered CompStat), Michael Bloomberg being sworn in as mayor, Superstorm Sandy walloping the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, footage of Times Square during COVID, and an interview with Eric Adams, Burns said that these were the trickiest installments he’s done. “It’s in the present,” he said. “It’s becoming history.”
How is it possible to make sense of a half century of booms and busts, rising and falling crime, skyrocketing inequality, terrorist attacks, waves of new immigrants, revolutionary technologies, divisive new politics, menacing new weather, protests, lockdowns, flowering countercultures, tragic and triumphant Knicks teams, and all the other elements of New York’s relentless change? “It’s staggering,” Burns said. “When it happens all around you in real time, you almost don’t realize it’s happening.”
The new episodes feature a Burnsian mix of carefully chosen images, lyrical voice-over, and cross-spectrum talking heads, including Bloomberg, the history scholar Kenneth T. Jackson, the feminist writer Carmen Boullosa, and the Times culture critic Wesley Morris. Check your doom loops at the door; Burns is a New York City optimist. “This is where the people are, it’s where the money is, it’s where the productivity is, it’s where the talent is, it’s where the creativity is,” he said. “People working hard at every conceivable kind of human enterprise.” For years, he has shot footage of pigeons swooping to and fro in the intersection below his office, known as Verdi Square. “I got a major thing for pigeons,” he said. “Pigeons are the New York animals, not rats.”
Editing is agony for Burns. He grimaced as Dixon skimmed through a segment about the twisty 2001 mayoral race which was being severely truncated. September 11th was a primary day in New York City. Until that morning, Bloomberg had trailed badly in the polls. After the planes hit, officials rescheduled the election. Bloomberg’s victory was arguably a bigger surprise than Zohran Mamdani’s win last year. One case that Burns makes implicitly in the new episodes is that Bloomberg, for all his administration’s faults and blind spots, will go down in history as the signal figure of early-twenty-first-century New York. “The only prior mayor who was a transformer like that was Fiorello LaGuardia,” Burns said. “And Bloomberg had the bigger challenge.”
Work on the new episodes began in earnest during the lockdown months of 2020, when the future of the city looked bleaker than it had at any time perhaps since the British imposed martial law, in 1776. But New York bounced back from COVID, as it had bounced back from Sandy, as it had bounced back from the Great Recession and the fiscal crisis. This resilience provides Burns with his great subject, and tracing its arcs has allowed him to connect the city’s past to its present. “Globalization arguably began when Henry Hudson rounded the corner of Coney Island, in 1609,” he said. “Fast-forward four hundred years, and here we are.” ♦