The Daily Beast Podcast - You Don’t Know Everything About Muhammad Ali Just Yet

Episode Date: September 12, 2021

In this bonus episode of The New Abnormal, documentarian Ken Burns talks about his new film on Muhammad Ali: how making it has taught him so much more about the late boxer and why one of the greatest athletes of all time is more relevant than ever in “a post-Trumpian, COVID world that has Black Lives Matter.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of The New Abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special guest with director Ken Burns. You of course know him from many of his fantastic documentaries, including his one on Vietnam or his recent one on country music. And today he's going to talk to us all about his process, as well as his latest film on Muhammad Ali. Welcome to the new abnormal, Ken Burns.

I'm happy to be with you, Molly. Thank you. Ken, why this? Why now? Well, there's no now, Molly. You know, it's so interesting that people say that I, the great, good fortune and privilege to work for PBS, or work with PBS. The P stands for public. The S stands not for system, but for service. And that permits us to have, to take as long as we want to take with a particular project. Ten and a half years under the Vietnam War, nearly that time on national parks, long, many, many years on this one. So when you make a decision in 20, 13 to do something on on Muhammad Ali, you don't think, oh, we're going to be arriving in a post-Trumpian COVID world that has Black Lives Matter and, you know, Me Too and all of these things going on. But let me address that because Mark Twain is supposed to have said that history doesn't repeat itself, which, of course, it doesn't. History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And I've never made a film in which I promise you, our heads are, our noses are to the grindstone, our heads are down in our

work trying to just tell a good story. It's really hard to tell a good story. And then when we're done, it always rhymes with everything that's going on. And there's nothing in the intersection of Muhammad Ali, the greatest athlete of the 20th century, who intersected with the role of sports and in society and sports itself and black athletes and the idea of black masculinity and black manhood and civil rights and the variations of that and politics and war and faith and religion and Islam you know and they're all right now they're happening right now and so it i could do that with any film i've made um and and and remind people the extent that history doesn't repeat itself we're not condemned to to repeat what we don't remember but human nature doesn't change and so that

human nature superimposes itself on the stuff. And we see motifs. We see themes. We see recurring patterns. We see rhymes. Interesting. What are the recurring patterns that you see with Muhammad Ali? Well, I think in general in America, the recurring pattern is, of course, a question of freedom, you know. And there's an inherent tension there. You know, what I want, personal freedom and what we need, collective freedom, often at odds as we find with anti-masters and anti-vacciners and all of the cuckooness of that tension. And it, you know, reflects itself in the individual. So Muhammad Ali is about, and of course, race is a central theme of us and the U.S. You know, we're founded on the idea that all men are created equal, but the guy who wrote that owned hundreds of human beings and didn't see the

contradiction or the hypocrisy. And so, you know, this is a story about race. It's a story about freedom. It's really tough for a black person to escape the specific gravity if you happen to live in the United States of just things. It's about courage because he was willing to risk anything. And at the end of the day, it's about a four-letter word that the FCC allows me on PBS to use, but nobody wants to talk about, which is love. Muhammad Ali dies, the most beloved person on the planet. This is not out of sympathy because he has Parkinson's. This is out of the fact that he spoke for oppressed people. He spoke for people every where he got up when he was knocked down and kept going. He lost three and a half years of the prime of his boxing career

and nevertheless regain the championship and then regained it again. And he did it all with this just sense of humor and bravado and provocative actions and lots of mistakes. This is a hero's journey, not without flaws. Achilles at his heel and his hubris. But one that makes him a kind of apostle of love throughout the back half of his life. That is fascinating. So, Ken, what was unexpected that you learned while digging into Muhammad's life?

Everything. I'm really killing it on these questions. No, no, no. I'm serious. It's a really, really good question because the presumption is that a documentary is the expression of an already arrived at end. You know, we know this, you should know that. There'll be a test on Tuesday when, in fact, we'd rather share with you a process of discovery. I've got preconceptions. I've got baggage that I have. I've got memories of him. I'm old enough to remember when my dad told me that this very interesting fighter had won and we were disinterested in boxing. The gold at the 60 Olympics and then, of course,

the Liston Fight in 64 and everything else. We were against the war. He was against the war. We loved him. All of that sort of stuff. I met him once from a distance and we just had a wordless conversation. It's it's there, but you have to leave that behind. And then you want to dive in. You want it to be about boxing, but you also want it to be about his ongoing, not just frozen faith, but the ongoing spiritual journey that he has. You want to deal with his personal life, his birth and childhood in segregated Jim Crow, Louisville, Kentucky, and the ways in which that worked on him, what the death of Emmett Till, the mutilated, tortured body of Emmett Till, whose mother had the courage to leave the casket open and photographs were taken and appeared in Jet Magazine not too much older than young Cassius Clay,

as he was then called. And it just had a profound influence. His father's anger at being a painter, but he couldn't advance as a painter. So he ended up being a sign painter. But a loving mom and a neighborhood of middle class black families that made it safe, even though you couldn't go into the amusement park.

You had to watch through the chain link because it was for whites only. So out of this comes this guy who begins this process. We wanted to interrelate all that personal stuff, the four wives, the many children, the brother, the flirtation with the nation of Islam, the joining the nation of Islam, the abandonment of his teacher and friend and mentor Malcolm X, you know, all of the ways he diverged from the traditional civil rights movement and the way that he connected with it. You know, the spectacularness of his comeback, his fight with the U.S. government. It's all, it's just so interrelated. How did he diverge from the traditional civil rights movement? Well, the nation of Islam, it's a sect. It's not Islam. It's a kind of hybridized American version of what somebody, a messianic leader thought, and then the next messianic leader changed it. But it's got enough discipline that it offers him a set of answers to the unanswerable of being a black man, young man in America. And it is about separatism. It's about due for himself. So there's an amazing conversation with the sports journal.

Bud Collins in it in which he talks about how he admires George Wallace. And you're kind of like, what? This goes against the grain of everything that I believe. And here's my hero saying that. And in fact, he says, if they don't want you in your neighborhood, why should you go there? Now, this flies in the face of the Southern Christian Agrarian Civil Rights Movement that we've come to expect, that stands in in a superficial way for all of us. And it also plays into everyone's conceit that all black people think this way or all white people think this way or all this and that. And it just isn't the case. It's just, it's just, you know, crazy that it would be like that. And so I find it really interesting as his own notion of faith expands. He takes a courageous stand against the Vietnam

war, but it becomes much more ecumenical, much the same as where Malcolm X was before he was murdered by the nation of Islam after they'd excluded him. And the way Wallace Muhammad, who inherited the reins when his father, Elijah Muhammad, died, a much more kind of inclusive, closer to what mainstream Islam is about. And that's where Muhammad Ali probably already always was there in his heart. But it took a while for the organization that he had adhered himself to to actually begin to resemble his own inner belief. I mean, this is a fascinating story and it's not separated, of course, from the Vietnam War refusal. I mean, right, will you talk about that? Yeah, well, America saw this as a political thing, right? A black man says no. They don't see it

as a faith thing. But this young kid says, look, I would stand in front of a machine gun rather than go against my faith. And it's just, you just stunned at that. And we think of him, the young Clay and Ali is this voluble poetry spouting, you know, outrageous comments. And he is all that. But there are moments of clarity as well and wisdom. From an early age, he knows he's meant to do something. And as his daughter, Rashida says near the end of our film, pinching her fingers together, boxing was only this much. And so, you know, he could have been a simple carpenter. And we know what happened to simple carpenters in world history. It's just an amazing journey. And we've just tried to, you know, grab the tape and the we is not a pretentious royal we. This is co-directed by my oldest daughter,

Sarah Burns and her husband, David McMahon. We've collaborated on the Central Park 5 and Jackie Robinson and other projects. And it's equally theirs. They wrote the script. So therefore, it may be more. And I'm just flacking for them. Nice. Well, you're a good parent. Do you actually go into films with no real hypothesis of what you're going to say and just let it be all discovering? Is that part of your process? You know, when I was struggling making the Civil War series in the late 80s before it was released in 1990, I called Shelby Foot, and I told him a particular problem that I had and how I was doing thing.

And he just said to me, God is the greatest dramatist. And I hung up the phone, and I knew what he meant. You know, it's not just the, you can't make this stuff up. Like Abraham Lincoln wins the Civil War on a Friday, Lee surrenders to Grant, and the following week, he figures he's got, he's not as busy as he used to be and he can go to the theater. Like, it's that, but it's also more and then and then and then. And so when you approach an idea of doing a film, a comprehensive, but look, there are lots of great documentaries on Muhammad Ali. Some, many, many documentaries, and many of them are great. And they focus sometimes on a particular fight or a couple of fights or a particular few years in his life. they are fine. They're not, they don't fail in any way. It is just our want to try to do the soups and

soup and nuts that we've tried to do here. And so what you do is you kind of empty yourself of that preconception because you just stumble over it all the time. Because when you do a deep enough dive over as long a period of time as we've been privileged to have, you just discover endlessly, daily new things about him and interrelationships. And if you interview enough people, this young sports writers now, old men like Robert Lipside and Dave Kindred and Jerry Eisenberg or other activists of the period like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Nikki Giovanni, a poet as well. And other poets like Quincy Troop and Wolle Solinka and you've got David Remnick, a early biographer and Jonathan I, a more recent biographer. you've got two ex-wives still loving him for all the pain of the infidelity, two daughters, a brother, other people involved in the nation of Islam, people writing about the nation of Islam,

other journalists. I mean, you begin to say, you know, we have to be kind of the corallers, the conductors of the information. And you could presume, correctly, that making a film is a kind of additive thing. It is not. It's subtractive. We've got a four-part, eight-hour series. in which we've got hundreds of hours of material in which to use a Kentucky, the state of his birth, metaphor, we distill down. It's a subtractive process. Our cutting room floor is filled with good stuff. And you would go, why isn't this in, you idiot? And you'd say, well, you know, we had it in for three months back in 2020. And it just destabilized this. Or, yeah, isn't that great? Wish it could be it. You know, just like, you know, maybe your two-bedroom house doesn't need. six bathrooms. Maybe it needs only three. What do you think is the sort of lesson for now of his

story? There's a wonderful moment, Molly, at the end of film, where Howard Bryant is helping us dismount from who this man is. And we cut away from Howard Bryant, the great sports journalist, cutting away from him to a picture of a demonstration on the Brooklyn Bridge. And we consciously don't show you what the demonstration is about. It doesn't matter. But the film is zooming, the camera's zooming in on a young black woman who is participating in this demonstration, and she has a very simple black t-shirt on it. And all of, all it says in white letters is Muhammad Ali. What she needed to go to this protest, that's all she felt she needed, that there was enough, just in those two words, Muhammad Ali, there was enough about freedom, about courage, and about love to make the kind of statement she wanted.

So he is inspirational in the endth degree. He's the greatest athlete of the 20th century, and I can have a bar room argument of maybe all time. If Michelangelo was alive, maybe he'd go, David, okay, let me sculpt Muhammad Ali, one of the most gorgeous human beings ever. And he said, I'm pretty as a girl. You know, and he made a big fuss about how gorgeous he looked all the time just to shock and provoke. But he also instilled in people who have felt oppressed, a crowd the United States. States, but also around the world that he understood who they were. And that is a great thing. What was the protest for? I think it was a Black Lives Matter. And that is as contemporary as it gets. Yeah. But I think it's more the fact that this woman, whoever she is, felt that that said it all. And I just love the fact that this, I mean, the courage is really intense. He lost three and a half years at the height of his professional powers. And he knew and everyone knew that he'd get a cushy job in the Army, and he'd do USO shows, and he'd pretend spar with people, and he'd tell jokes, and that would be it.

But he wasn't going to do it. And he wasn't going to do it. And we now think of that we're having a big discussion about the role, I don't know why we're having a discussion about athletes speaking out, because clearly Kelly Loughler, who owned an NBA team, told some players to shut up and dribble. you know, she hadn't read the Constitution or the Bill of Rights recently, I guess, that she must have forgotten. It must have slipped her mind that you are able to say what you want to say. But none of them took the risks that he did.

You know, Carlos and Smith, who raised their fists at the 68 Olympics, disappeared, right? Their careers were over. Kurt Flood, a great baseball player, deserves to be in the Hall of Fame, challenged the plantation system, the reserve clause that kept all baseball players white as well as black in slavery. And it took two white, he disappeared, took two white guys, Messerschip and McNally, along with Marvin Miller, the baseball players guy to lose that plantation system, to break the reserve clause and have the free agency that baseball players have and enjoy today. And the game is 20 times better. And Colin Kaepernick hasn't worked for a long time, but he's got a Nike deal. Muhammad Ali had to dip into his wife

Kalila's college fund in order to just pay the bills in this wilderness period. I mean, it's pretty interesting who he is and the kind of steel. And you can see this early on from one-year-old banging pots and pans out of the kitchen cabinet to just this something in his eye as a kid in elementary school to, he picks up some boxing gloves. He has a couple of amateur bouts and he says, I'm going to be the greatest. And he was. So he was. So he. he just, he had something and everything about his style is unorthodox. And so, you know, some teachers were going to try to pound it out of him, fortunately got a great trainer in Angelo Dundee, who said, you know what? It's gone against all the books, but he's good. He's fast and he's quick.

So it's just a story that you can't make up. The laws of storytelling are the same for me and Steven Spielberg. I discussed this with him. I interviewed him in Washington. And we just sort of looked at each other in shock and amazement, but recognition that the, the laws of storytelling apply to us the same way, except he can make stuff up and I can't. And that's okay. That's okay. That's okay. But it's hard to tell a good story and it's why it takes so long to try to tell a good story. But you have in the end these great connections that something that's planted in episode one pays off in three or four or vice versa or something happens in four, which makes that question you've been carrying since episode one resolved in some way.

And I don't know what it is. It's just a kind of day-to-day process. And every film production is a million problems, but we don't see the word problem as pejorative. It's almost like the irritation that produces the pearl and the oyster. It's like you just have to deal with it and layer by imperceptible layers. Something happens over the course of these years. And something begins to emerge.

And you can at some point feel confident enough or brash enough or arrogant. enough or scared enough to say, okay, everybody else can take a look at it. I love that. Is there anybody you look at in present day life that you sometimes think I may be retired by the time this person's story is over? I wish I'd be able to tell this person's story. No, because, you know, I'm a storyteller, but I'm also a storyteller in history. And it's they're logically connected.

History is mostly made up of the word story plus high, which is a good way to begin story. And I need, we need, you know, 20, 25 years distance from it. The implication is, of course, Jesse, is that I might die before I get to tell a certain story. I'm working on seven or eight projects now. I'm 68 and I'm greedy, greedy for the creative thing that happens when you do this. And I've got four teams of people, Sarah Burns and David McMahon are one team, but there are three others, and I've worked with them long enough that I can delegate or trust that certain parts of the process. But the most important parts of the processes I get to participate in. And I just, you know, I want story after story. But I do feel uncomfortable. You know, Philip Graham,

who used to own the Washington Post, is the person who said, you know, journalism is the first rough draft of history. And it's a wonderful phrase. But no one ultimately turns in a first draft. And so what you want is for the passage of time to take place, for there to be triangulation among journalistic reportage, but also scholarly involvement in the ability to have the perspectives that that passage of time presents. I will give you a very quick example. We made a film on the Vietnam War. This is a different group. Lynn Novick was my co-director then, Sarah Botstein, the senior producer. and it came out in 2017.

If we'd made it 10 years after the fall of Saigon in 1985, America was in a recession. We're talking about Japan as ascendant. We were in a recession. You know, things weren't good. It would seem that Vietnam would be a ball and chain that we'd drag around forever. If we'd made it in 1995, 20 years afterwards, we were the sole superpower.

We were in the biggest peacetime economic expansion. It would seem that Vietnam was kind of a blip in our screen, a kind of shadow that we could ignore now. And then if you went to 2005, 30 years after, we're in both Afghanistan and Iraq. We sort of feel that the world is now post-9-11 quite a much more fragile space than it had been just 10 years before and that the lessons and the problems of Afghanistan and particularly Iraq seem to be about Vietnam. And if we'd waited, you know, So all I'm saying is that the farther away you get the ability to make kind of reasonable judgments storytelling wise, but also in the case of the work we do historically and do it within,

you know, reasonable scholarly toleration. They begrudgingly say, okay, popular history is one form. You gain a perspective. So, you know, would I like to do something on the last administration? you bet. To do something on COVID, you bet. We'd do something on January 6th, you bet. But we need to get far away from it in order. I mean, maybe it's no longer 25, 30 years. I took enormous amount of criticism in our jazz series, which came out in early 2001. And people say, you left this person out and you left person out. I just, well, just you tell me who in the last 30 years is the equal of Lewis Armstrong and Duke Gallington and Charlie Parker and Miles Davis and John Coltrane. He'd go, we don't know. We'll have to wait 30 years to find out. And I go, thank you. This is why they're not in there yet.

We just don't know on that last, the last lap that the last episode took. That makes a lot of sense. But it doesn't make anybody happy, you know. That may be true. That answer was very satisfying for me, though. Yeah, yeah, you know, but you know, it's funny because people come up to me about baseball and jazz and you left this out. And I'm always relieved. They go, yep, because that was that baseball series was 18. 18 and a half hours long. And you're not telling me that's so boring. I use it to go to sleep at night. They're telling me that 18 and a half hours wasn't enough. And that if I'd only do the 1959 World Series in which the Chicago white stockings won, I would be a much better filmmaker.

And you go, fine. That's great. I accept your criticism. We had it in and we took it out because it had too many notes. Thank you so much for joining us, Ken Burns. It's my pleasure. Thank you, Mully. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from The Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics and science. We'll help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you again on the next episode. Want more great listens?

Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at the Daily Beast.com. slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber. Subscribing is the best way to feed the beast and support all of your podcasts as we cover what might become the darkest timeline. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash membership slash podcast and sign up today.