By Kevin Baker 10/09/12 6:50pm

Shrinking Brain

Photo illo: Ed Johnson

After Botching Central Park Five Case, City Goes After Filmmakers Who Told the Tale

It’s not every day that you pick up the newspaper and read that three of your friends have been subpoenaed—assuming, that is, that you don’t work for an international bank, the mafia, or the New York State Assembly.

The friends in question are the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, his daughter, the author and filmmaker Sarah Burns, and Sarah’s husband, David McMahon, who has worked with Ken for the last 14 years. I first met and worked with them all when I consulted on the updated version of Ken Burns’s Baseball series and wrote a new chapter for the accompanying book.

The subpoena involves a new documentary the three of them are making called The Central Park Five, an adaptation of the book Sarah Burns published earlier this year, The Central Park Five: Chronicle of a City Wilding, which revisits the brutal rape of Trisha Meili, the 28-year-old investment banker who would be known ever after as “the Central Park jogger.” Read More

By Daisy Prince 5/24/11 11:42pm

Shindigger

Shindigger: New York’s Literary Lion Turns 100!

On a damp evening in May, the great and the gray trooped up the marble stairs of one of New York City’s most hallowed institutions, the New York Public Library, for its centennial celebration. A smorgasbord of talent had been hired to showcase the library’s varied nature, including an outdoor electric harpist, the Abyssinian Baptist Read More

By Em Whitney 2/13/09 5:14pm

Events Roundup: February 13, 2009

1 p.m. to 7 p.m. Maya Hayuk’s "Sexy Gazebo: Believing Is Believing," an ongoing show through March 15, opens today at Cinders on 103 Havemeyer Street. "Sexy Gazebo" features abstractions and figurative drawings, also highlighted gazebo installation.

6 p.m. Documentarian Ken Burns celebrates Lincoln’s 200th birthday with a discussion of his Civil War series Read More

By Joseph Hooper 10/14/02 12:00am

All Rise: Cocksure Marsalis Redeems Himself as Pasticheur

Consider the odd case of Wynton Marsalis, artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, Pulitzer Prize–winner and Ken Burns poster child, who over the past decade has consolidated his position as the official face of jazz at about the same rate that he’s been disappearing as an influential stylistic force within the inner sanctum of Read More

12:00am

A Jazz Odds ‘n’ Sods

When my grandmother, a Southerner inordinately fond of family stories about the gracious old plantation days, confessed a grudging admiration for the first few episodes of the PBS Jazz series, I knew that Ken Burns had done something seriously right. Within the world of the jazz cognoscenti, the idea that black Americans were largely responsible Read More

By William Berlind 1/15/01 12:00am

Burns’ Jazz Doesn’t Swing

As almost everyone in New York knows by now , Jazz , a 10-part, 19-hour documentary that began airing on PBS station WNET-TV on Jan. 8, is the latest opus by nonfiction filmmaker Ken Burns. As almost everyone here also knows, titles can be deceiving. And though Mr. Burns may have been the man behind Read More

By Molly Haskell 1/17/00 12:00am

Two Pushy Ladies Burning Up Television

I recently received an invitation to a television and video festival in Biarritz, Switzerland, and was casting about for an interesting hour of television–”something you feel passionate about”–to present at a panel with critics from four other countries. I’d just worked up an appetite for the trip–balmy weather in January, an excursion to Bilbao, Spain–and Read More