You can't blame this on the current economic crisis, because Ken Burns has known for a year what only now is being made public: General Motors is ending its decades-long corporate sponsorship of Burns and his invaluable PBS documentaries.
GM spokeswoman Kelly Cusinato, while calling Burns "the gold standard of documentary filmmaking," has let it be known that this fall's latest Burns nonfiction epic, The National Parks: America's Best Idea, will be the last one benefiting from GM funding.
With GM asking for even more bailout money, that makes sense. Though the automaker financed only a third of Burns' productions, not including certain marketing and publicity costs, taxpayer dollars deserved for GM can be much better spent.
Besides, Burns has a deal with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting providing partial support for his documentaries through 2017, so all is not lost. Enough is lost, though, for Burns to need other corporate sponsors to maintain his current production and development pace -- and to need them in a chokingly tight economic climate.
It would be a sin if Burns couldn't find such a sponsor. Apple, Google, are you listening?
But Masterpiece Theatre, the flagship program of al PBS dramas, lost its ExxonMobil funding five years ago, and still hasn't found a proper substitute. If we cut the flow of funding to the man behind The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz and The War, then who, in the next decade, will make the great documentary on, say, Subprime Mortgages: America's Worst Idea?
Maybe taxpayers should be asked to fund Burns' Florentine Films directly, by checking off a box on a future federal fax form. Or get stimulus money from the government, to create jobs in the much-neglected documentary sector.
Gold, right now, is more valuable than ever. The gold standard of documentarians, you could -- and should -- say the same thing about him.