Seattle rates an exclusive sneak peek at Ken Burns' new film about WWII

Jazz. The Civil War. Baseball. Lewis & Clark.

There's a Ken Burns documentary for almost every quintessentially American topic.

And although his next project captures a global event — World War II — the award-winning filmmaker has explored the tale through American perspectives.

He chose four American towns "and just followed their sons into hell," said Burns, who has been working on "The War" for nearly seven years. The seven-part, 14-hour series will be broadcast on PBS in September 2007.

That's still a year away.

But Burns will step out of the editing room to give Seattle a peek at his work-in-progress on Friday at Paramount Theatre.

"It'll be one of the first times that any human beings have seen any section of the film," said Burns, speaking by phone from his office in New Hampshire. "It's the story of the American experience of the Second World War as told from the bottom-up perspective. Here, you'll know the ordinary folks."

A special engagement

This is no multicity tour, and Burns said he has never talked so formally about a documentary that hasn't been broadcast.

But Seattleites have proven to be some of Burns' most supportive fans, and the Paramount stop is his way of connecting with them.

"I'm very excited to come back," Burns said. "Seattle has responded in greater numbers to my films than almost any other city in the country. I think that speaks to the curiosity of the people there."

When "The Civil War" aired in September 1990, Seattle's strong viewership helped make the series the highest-rated public-television documentary in history, according to PBS.

Putting together "The War"

"We're almost done," he said of the new project, which he described as "the first real comprehensive treatment of the Second World War in a generation."

The goal was to create an entire portrait of World War II through the experiences of individuals. In typical Burns fashion, the filmmaker not only tracks the men into war, but also keeps in touch with the women who stayed home with the kids.

For "The War," Burns focuses on four towns — Sacramento, Calif.; Mobile, Ala.; Waterbury, Conn.; and Luverne, Minn. He chose geographically representative places and focused on the people's stories, including those of Japanese Americans and African Americans.

Memories and music

As a preamble, Burns and his team returned to the Library of Congress to dig into the past.

"We plumbed the archives from Washington, D.C., to London to Berlin to Tokyo to Moscow," Burns said. "It features the commentary of more than 40 survivors of the war, most of them in their late 70s and early 80s."

They've also been working on the mixes of the soundtrack. The voices of Tom Hanks, Samuel L. Jackson, Josh Lucas and others bring to life diaries and newspaper accounts from the period.

The musical track contains sound effects that rang true for select groups of veterans and those at West Point who've heard it. Wynton Marsalis composed several original tunes for "The War," and Norah Jones sings "American Anthem."

"It's almost as good as the 'Battle Hymn of the Republic,' " Burns said of the Gene Scheer song that he heard on the radio while driving home from his father's funeral a few years ago. "I burst into tears."

A "War" that resonates

In "The War," Ken Burns uses an American lens to tackle a universal topic.

"I think that in some ways, though this film 'The War' ... is absolutely apolitical, it nonetheless resonates with all wars. Though it is about the Second World War absolutely and specifically, we wished to explode the myth of 'the good war.'

"No war is good and, in fact, this is the greatest cataclysm in history. It resonates back to the Peloponnesian Wars and right up to this war in Iraq."

Next up: National parks

Burns is already working on his next project, too. He's in the editing room with " a massive history of the national parks," which has brought his team up to Washington state "many, many times," he said. "We've obviously been filming in your area."

"It's not a travelogue," Burns said. "It's not pretty pictures of wildlife. It's the history of the individuals and ideas that made this seemingly simple idea happen. Wallace Stegner said that the national parks are America's best idea. It was the first time in history that anybody had ever set aside land for the benefit of everyone for all time, and not just for the privilege of a few — and the entire world has copied us."

His philosophy on films

The filmmaker seems as comfortable wrapping up a piece about war as he is working on one about national parks. Just how diverse are Ken Burns' interests?

"Aha! It's like the lottery that you see ... a million little balls bounce around. I sort of have lots of ideas and they're in my head, and one of them just pops in my heart and you just have to do it. And I've been fortunate enough working with public television that I can make the films that I envision that I want to do and not be apologizing for some outside entity that ruined a film by making me change a writer or something.

"Another way to put it is, if you don't like any of my films, it's all my fault — and that's the way I always want it to be," he said.

"I wanted to make films since I was 10 or 11 years old," said Burns, now 53. He started in high school, studied film in college and founded his film company 30 years ago this year.

"The animating question for me in all my work is just the question who are we — and that same kind of curiosity about what makes us tick, that we can't possibly know where we're going unless we know where we've been."

Judy Chia Hui Hsu: 206-464-3315 or jhsu@seattletimes.com