Most important documentarian you’ve never heard of: Novick
Burns’ partner major force in ‘Vietnam War’
There is a distinctive style to a Ken Burns documentary — the camera's smooth movement over blackand-white photographs, an interview subject whose eyes seem to be gazing beyond the camera into the past, the lilt of a fiddle or the blare of a trumpet. But no matter how famous an auteur gets — and Burns has been America's best-known documentarian for almost 30 years — no director makes a movie entirely on his own.
"The Vietnam War," which premiered on PBS on Sept. 17, is a Ken Burns documentary, but he couldn't have made the film without his longtime co-director, Lynn Novick. And Novick isn't just Burns' partner on "The Vietnam War." She's the person most responsible for making "The Vietnam War" the epic story of two nations, not just one.
Burns has long worked with multiple teams; these different squads of writers and producers mean that he can sometimes release as many as two ambitious films in a single year. Among these collaborators, Novick stands out.
She is one of the few people who have shared directing credit with Burns more than once, collaborating with him on "Frank Lloyd Wright," "Prohibition," "The Tenth Inning" (an update to "Baseball"), "The War," and now "The Vietnam War." Novick, not Burns, now conducts most of the interviews for the films they make together. And the movies that result are a product of a unique alchemy: Novick's penchant for obsessive research blended with Burns' eye for narrative arc.
Despite her essential role in the movies they've directed together, Novick's work has garnered far less attention. As I worked on this series, watching Novick put the finishing touches on the final episode of "The Vietnam War" in a New York editing bay; seeing her field piercing questions from American and Vietnamese veterans at events promoting the film; and engaging in long conversations about how she and Burns made this ambitious, technically complex film, the disparity between Burns' star power and Novick's relative obscurity became more glaring — and more frustrating. Even people eager to credit Novick tend to get distracted by Burns' celebrity: A rare 2011 profile of her, headlined "A Steady Presence Out of the Limelight," devoted almost 400 words to discussing Burns' high profile relative to Novick's before getting around to Novick's life and career.
But "The Vietnam War" is fundamentally defined by Novick's insight and insistence that the movie had to tell the stories of the people of Vietnam, both North and South, as well as of Americans. And the time she spent there representing the filmmaking duo prepared Novick, and Ken Burns' Florentine Films, for something new: a Lynn Novick movie, coming in late 2018 or early 2019 — without Burns as co-director.
Novick describes herself as "a little bit lost" after graduating from Yale University in 1983. Her academic focus offered accidental preparation for the career she ulti- mately found. As an American studies major, she explored the history of photography and the process of popularizing history.
Novick took a job at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, where she accessioned and catalogued materials, worked on a show about Eleanor Roosevelt and organized her own small exhibit about 19th-century child photography.