Ric Burns Steeplechase Films Logo text Chronicling the life of New York City over 400-plus years has been a decades-spanning process for filmmaker Ric Burns, and he’s nowhere near finished.
PBS announced Thursday that it will debut two new episodes of Burns’ New York: A Documentary Film on Sept. 21 and 22. They’ll be the ninth and 10th episodes of the project, which first aired in 1999 and whose most recent episode, focused primarily on the World Trade Center, aired in 2003, two years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The new additions are called “Shadows of the Past” and “The Future of Cities” and will primarily explore the way the city has changed in the 25 years since 9/11 — while also digging back into New York’s history to examine how it recovered from near-bankruptcy in the mid-1970s and regained its place in “the vanguard of world cities,” as PBS puts it.
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Robert Sean Leonard narrates the two episodes, taking over that role from the late David Ogden Stiers. The film features interviews with former New York mayors David Dinkins (conducted before his death in 2020), Michael Bloomberg, Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams along with journalists, academics and urbanists.
“New York in the 21st century has been the most challenging quarter century in the city’s history. Which is incredible to say, because it’s been through a lot,” Burns told The Hollywood Reporter.
Burns directed “Shadows of the Past” and “The Future of Cities” and co-wrote them with James Sanders (as was the case with all prevoius episodes of New York). Burns talked with THR about working on the new episodes for more than a decade and what’s changed (and hasn’t changed) about his filmmaking process in the years since New York: A Documentary Film first aired.
What was it that made you want to revisit this project 20-plus years after the last episode aired?
The last 25 years have been a stunning continuation of a story of capitalism and democracy and globalization as never before. Those are the three great pieces of uranium in the city’s engine. It begins as a commercial place, not as a religious colony. It becomes a home to people from all over the world because there are no ideological restraints coming here. You want to make a buck, here’s the place to come. But then the globalization that began 400 years ago with Henry Hudson, the Dutch, the English — that process, which New York has arguably been at the center of for 400-plus years, has kind of gone on steroids over the last 50 years as processes of globalization have really accelerated enormously. New York remains diverse beyond belief. It’s the most diverse single place in the world, with hundreds of languages spoken in the schools. So we really wanted to track New York’s fate and destiny in the 21st century, and these global existential challenges: 9/11, the fiscal crisis, Superstorm Sandy, and then the pandemic.
A barber works on the Brooklyn Bridge in May 2020 during the COVID pandemic, as seen in ‘New York: A Documentary’ film. Denis Fraevich When did you actually start work on these two episodes?
The first interview we did was with Mayor Bloomberg in his last week in office [in 2013], and it was extraordinary to be able to begin that way. He is notoriously not the most relaxed person, but he was relaxed in a way that he might not otherwise have been. The end of those three terms was really an amazing point in the city’s history. And it’s typical that we take a long time. We do it the old-fashioned, slow way, so now here it is 13 years later.
The joy of being able to chronicle cities in general, but New York in particular, has been moving to tears for James, for me, for all our colleagues. What’s amazing is that everybody on our team remains on our team. We have the same cinematographer, Buddy Squires, the same composer in Brian Keane, the same people. I think there’s a thing about people who know this city, love this city, track this city, and we’ve been blessed to be able to have them with us through this amazing period of challenge and huge resilience.
The first new episode, “Shadows of the Past,” covers some of the same late 20th century time periods as the seventh and eighth episodes in the early 2000s. What’s different here that you’re tackling versus what was in the earlier episodes?
As we picked up the story of the 21st century, which was happening [around] us, it became clearer and clearer that we had to go back to the 20th century to understand the forces and the events and the pressures that were coming to bear in the 21st century. There’s no way to understand the 21st century without going back and understanding that period of challenge in the 1970s and ’80s. Talk about the best of times and worst of times. I moved to New York at the worst moment, 1975 — the time of “Ford to City: Drop Dead” — and what we had never really tracked were things like how did New York get out of that? New York was barely back up on its feet when 9/11 happened. The crime rate in 1990 had been 2,245 homicides that year. By 1996, there were 600. What had happened was the city began to really emerge and reinvent itself in a way that had tremendous import for the 21st century.
Take things like immigration. We talked a lot about immigration in the earlier acts, but we didn’t talk about the fact that the Johnson-Reed Act shut the golden door, just locked it, in 1924. The number of people coming through New York went from a million-plus at its high point in 1907 to 150,000 a year for 40 years. Wow. Immigration is a huge story in the 21st century in so many ways. We wanted to go back and make sure that we understood and that people understood the background to that and the way in which the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 reopened the golden door. People began, not immediately, but they began coming back into New York. It wasn’t just that the 20th century was the end of a story. The late 20th century was obviously the beginning of another churning set of chapters in the city’s history, and we had to go back there and really do our homework again and see what we had missed or what we hadn’t emphasized sufficiently.
You mentioned that you have basically your same crew back and that you like doing things the old-fashioned way, but over the course of the time you’ve been making this, have the tools you use or just the approach you take changed with evolving filmmaking technology?
The tools are just incredible. We hung on to film, 16-millimeter film, right down through the end of the 1990s, and it was in the middle of the first 10 hours of this film that we changed over to digital. I love 16-millimeter film. I love the glow and the luminosity of it. Digital has long since caught up with that in all the important ways, visually and sumptuously. And it’s very difficult to imagine tracking and chronicling the city in the third decade of the 21st century without doing it on an Avid or some other incredible tool, and to be able to use multiple editors.
But the essence of what we’re trying to do is continue to tell the story, and New York is nothing but a story. I don’t mean it’s like “eight million stories.” I mean it’s one remarkable story from the moment it hits the ground running.
Does the fact that historical archives are much more digitized than they were when you started this make the job easier? And is there anything lost in the transition from physical to digital archives?
The facility with which these collections are accessible — we can get something from anywhere. We can go online and it can be in the film like that. There is something about the material quality of the original records — the different colors to photographs and the shading of documents. Perhaps it’s simply an amateur archivist’s kind of nostalgia for a time when you would go into the New York Historical and film inside their collection. That doesn’t happen as much anymore because the collections are available online from almost everywhere. I think that the democratization of access to these materials is crucial, and I think it also makes it, in good ways. a challenge for anyone who wants to make a film [using them] to really triple down on how you can use these resources.
It’s incredible how much is available, which is itself a challenge. How do you boil it down? How do you find it? Where do you find the best version of a piece of archival film footage or archival still? Having said that, it’s what my big brother Ken got me started in quite some time ago. It’s using images and stories to put together the story of a place that’s important in people’s lives, and in some fundamental way, that hasn’t changed.
Obviously, cities are living organisms. Could you see yourself wanting to do another chapter in five or 10 years? Or next year?
In a heartbeat. Obviously the story continues. I remember when I got here in the ’70s, bursting into tears one night, up here on the Upper West Side, because I could hear at two in the morning the background roar of New York, which in the springtime with the windows open, you can hear for the first time. After a winter with the windows down, to think of all these people, this extraordinary human, collective being, and you know that story is going to go on.
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