#Country music ken burns narrator movie
#Country music ken burns narrator full

There’s rarely been a project that, when we’re taking a break or between sessions, he doesn’t regale us with stories of the people that our film is about, or experiences that he had in a national park, or stuff that he did during the Vietnam War. Very often, we’ll stop and have discussions about something in the text, or I’ll tell him some little historical piece of relevance that I’ve uncovered. I can see when a comma is coming, I can see when a period is coming and I have to dismount. The challenge of taking the reader through complex sentences, with lots of clauses and subclauses, is something I have an idiot savant’s talent to be able to do.

And then Ken’s really stand above and apart like a Ph.D. There are some of them I do because it’s like a master’s degree in a subject. There are a number of them I do for free, because I want to help the idea get currency. They do it because they really care about it. Peter Coyote: Nobody does a documentary to get rich. And more often than you could possibly believe, that first take is often terrific. We get about 95 percent of the way through editing, and then we say, “Time for Peter.” An episode might run an hour and 50 minutes. And we do not run the film while we’re recording. There’s a process: We would prefer that Peter not see the script and he prefers not to see the script. I would ask him for every project except those that are subject-wise African-American. Ken, is it project-specific when you choose to use Peter? I don’t know in what year it was that I did The West, but that began my relationship with Ken. That may have been one of the first documentaries that really synced totally with my politics and my ideas.

#Country music ken burns narrator movie

Then I did a great movie for Alex Gibney, comparing American labor practices to Japanese labor practices. and Jagged Edge and Outrageous Fortune, I did a lot of ads - General Motors, Chevy, Cadillac, Tylenol, New York Life. I got my first Screen Actors Guild card in 1979, and by 1980 I was making five-digit money. I walked it around to every ad agency in San Francisco and I started getting work for ads. I wasn’t an actor at that time, so I made a comedic CD of myself talking in about 15 different accents, telling people how unreliable and unhirable this guy Peter Coyote was.

Peter Coyote: I was broke after ten years in the counterculture and I needed a way to make some money. Peter, how did you get into the narration game? Vulture spoke with both men about Coyote’s unequaled voice, their unique recording process, and how they handle political disagreements.

These days, he’s also an ordained Zen Buddhist priest.Ĭoyote has lent his voice to a plethora of ads and documentaries over the decades, but his decades-long relationship with Burns is something special. “Men and women who were broken by lies the government was telling.” As a young man, he was invited into Kennedy’s White House after staging a protest against nuclear testing during the Cuban missile crisis, threw himself headlong into a decade of drugs, Hell’s Angels, and commune living, narrowly escaped being drafted to Vietnam by pretending to be a cold-blooded marauder, helped run the California State Arts Council for eight years, and then decided to become an actor. “I saw grown-ups weeping in my living room,” he says. Growing up as a secular Jew with communist relatives during the McCarthy era, Coyote was an early convert to political activism and the counterculture. the Extra Terrestrial - but the man himself has lived a Zelig-like life. Generations of kids first met Coyote as the embodiment of authority - he played Keys, the head scientist in E.T.

#Country music ken burns narrator full

What would a Ken Burns documentary be without its measured, authoritative narration? In The West, The National Parks, Prohibition, The Dust Bowl, The Roosevelts, The Vietnam War, The Mayo Clinic, and now Country Music, actor Peter Coyote delivers hours of often dense, complex text - full of facts, figures, quotes, and grand unifying ideas - in a manner that Burns refers to as “God’s stenographer.” His calm, cowboy-around-a-campfire timbre is basically the voice of America, at least within the orbit of PBS.