Ken Burns Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

The Television Academy will honor Sean Penn with the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award and induct six new legends into its Hall of Fame in November.

Ken Burns‘ two-part, four-hour documentary Leonardo da Vinci is set to air on November 18-19 from 8-10 p.m. ET on PBS. The project, co-directed with Sarah Burns and Dave McMahon, is Burns’ first non-American subject.

Peacock has unveiled the trailer for In The Know, an adult animation series which combines stop-motion animation and live-action interviews, from Zach Woods (Silicon Valley, The Office), Mike Judge (Beavis and Butt-Head, Silicon Valley) and Brandon Gardner.

What’s going on with NPR’s third most popular host? “In The Know” combines puppetry, stop-motion animation, and live-action interviews. The series may be unique in its execution, but the celebrity interviewee segments harken back to traditional talk shows.

Sophia Scorziello editor Ken Burns has made a statement after a photo surfaced of the documentary filmmaker with Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas and billionaire David Koch. While Koch has funded one of Burns’ documentaries, Burns maintains that he and the Supreme Court Justice have no connections or relationship.

The WGA East and the Editors Guild, IATSE Local 700, have won a major victory in their joint effort to unionize producers and editorial employees at Story Syndicate, the Brooklyn-based documentary powerhouse behind such nonfiction features and series as Harry and Meghan and Unknown for Netflix, Fauci for PBS and I’ll Be Gone in the Dark and Last Call for HBO.

Addie Morfoot Contributor On the brink of turning 70, Ken Burns will release his very first film, “Working in Rural New England,” which he made as an undergraduate at Hampshire College. The 28-minute docu will be released July 25 on UNUM, Burn’s American history digital platform on PBS. About Old Sturbridge Village, an outdoor history museum in Massachusetts that re-creates life in rural New England from 1790 through the 1830s, the docu was commissioned by the museum in 1973.

Addie Morfoot Contributor The Better Angels Society, the Library of Congress, and the Crimson Lion/Lavine Family Foundation have selected six finalists for the fifth annual Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film. Notably, veteran filmmaker Sam Pollard received two of the six noms.  The award, established in 2019, recognizes late-stage documentaries that use original research and a compelling narrative to tell stories that bring American history to life through archival materials. The six projects that were selected are: Barak Goodman’s “Buckley,” Nicole London’s “The Disappearance of Miss. Scott,” Sam Pollard’s “The Harvest,” Peter Yost and Michael Rohatyn’s “Drop Dead City – New York on the Brink in 1975,” Sam Pollard and Ben Shapiro’s “Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes,” and Jason Cohn’s “Modernism Inc.: The Eliot Noyes Design Story.”

Filmmakers and executives, creatives of music, theater and art remembered Tom Luddy as friend and mentor, tastemaker and cultural force who deployed an astonishingly vast network to nurture talent and bring people and projects together over decades.

EXCLUSIVE: Emmy-winning filmmaker Erika Dilday is joining Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon as co-director and co-producer of the upcoming documentary film Emancipation to Exodus (working title). It’s a long-term commitment – the film about a critical period in the African American experience isn’t expected to air on PBS until 2027.

Axios confirmed to Vanity Fair that Montgomery is no longer with the company but did not elaborate. The news website is based in Arlington, Virginia. It was launched in 2017 by former Politico journalists Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz.Perhaps he should have considered being a journalist, not an activist or propagandist.The email sent from the Florida Department of Education Press Office billed the upcoming DeSantis-hosted event as “exposing the diversity equity and inclusion scam in higher education.” DeSantis has previously called his state “where woke goes to die.” A recent ban of more than 80 titles in Martin County schools that included works by Jodi Picoult, James Patterson and Toni Morrison went into effect earlier this month.

EXCLUSIVE: Winning Time executive producer Rodney Barnes has boarded HBO’s limited series project, set to star Mahershala Ali as boxing legend Jack Johnson. Barnes, who is under an overall deal with HBO, will serve as writer and executive producer on the Untitled Jack Johnson limited series (fka Unruly), bringing a brand new take on adapting the PBS documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, produced and directed by Ken Burns, and its companion book by Geoffrey C. Ward.

Ken Burns, Steve McQueen, Helena Bonham Carter Holocaust Docs To Feature On BBC

Ken Burns was hard at work on a four-part docuseries about Muhammad Ali, to debut in 2021, the news was greeted with much anticipation: one of the film world’s greats on the Greatest. The only hint of criticism came from some who thought Ali’s life was already well-trod territory. But four years later — in the wake of a racial reckoning in America that had the film industry, like so many others, reevaluating its commitment to diversity — the docu community had become considerably less welcoming of the project. With public chatter about a lack of representation and opportunity for people of color reaching a peak, a coalition of 140 documentary filmmakers sent an open letter to PBS in March 2021, slamming the choice of Burns to helm what was being positioned as the definitive doc on Ali.

In his treatment and manipulation of Venezuelan migrants as “political pawns,” Ken Burns sees similarities in the actions of Florida governor Ron DeSantis and those of Hitler in Nazi Germany. “This is coming straight out of the authoritarian playbook,” Burns said. Joining CNN’s John Berman Thursday morning to discuss his new documentary “The U.S.

Amy Stechler, the Emmy-nominated filmmaker of PBS’s The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo (2005) and the ex-wife and early collaborator of documentarian Ken Burns, died Friday, Aug. 26, at her home in  Walpole, N.H. She was 67.

David McCullough, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning historian whose biographies gave character and compelling narratives to figures and moments that make up the fabric of the American experience, has died. He was 89.

EXCLUSIVE: Six finalists were announced today for the richest prize in documentary film—the 4th Annual Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film.

Todd Spangler NY Digital EditorMasterClass, the celebrity-driven online learning subscription service with big-name Hollywood talent partners, has cut its headcount by 20%. CEO David Rogier cited “the worsening macroeconomic environment” for the cutbacks.The layoffs by San Francisco-based MasterClass, which previously had about 600 employees, affected all the company’s teams.“Today is a sad day @masterclass,” Rogier tweeted Wednesday.

FX/Hulu’s big play for Emmy glory in this incredibly crowded season is an adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s excellent 2003 book “Under the Banner of Heaven,” a historical analysis of the history of Mormonism in this country framed alongside a dissection of a brutal murder case from 1984 in the state of Utah. While the book had the context of the history of the origin of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints and how it got twisted into the mindset of the fundamentalist sect of Mormonism that pushed Ron and Dan Lafferty to commit brutal murder, the show feels at the beginning like it wants badly to be more “True Detective” and less Ken Burns, improving in the third and fourth episodes as it becomes more about a broken community than a specific murder.

© (photo credit: Daniel J. White/PBS) Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns filming interviews for "The Roosevelts" in 2014. For his next historical deep dive, famed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns is exploring America’s relationship to the Holocaust.

Todd Spangler NY Digital EditorLen Amato, a 13-year veteran of HBO, joined MasterClass as chief content officer at the company that sells subscriptions to celebrity-led online courses.In the new role, Amato will head up MasterClass’ content organization and help lead content innovation, strategy and development of class launches. He reports to David Rogier, founder and CEO of MasterClass.Amato formerly served as president of HBO Films, Miniseries and Cinemax before he departed in late 2020.

AMHERST, Mass.

Every Tuesday, discriminating viewers are confronted with a flurry of choices: new releases on disc and on demand, vintage and original movies on any number of streaming platforms, catalog titles making a splash on Blu-ray or 4K. This biweekly column sifts through all of those choices to pluck out the movies most worth your time, no matter how you’re watching.

Every Tuesday, discriminating viewers are confronted with a flurry of choices: new releases on disc and on demand, vintage and original movies on any number of streaming platforms, catalog titles making a splash on Blu-ray or 4K. This biweekly column sifts through all of those choices to pluck out the movies most worth your time, no matter how you’re watching.

movies, documentaries and other entertainment vehicles made about Muhammad Ali, it would seem that — much like the former heavyweight champion at the end of his 1971 fight against Joe Frazier — there’s not much left to offer that's fresh.Will Smith played Ali.

Muhammad Ali called himself the greatest, and filmmaker Ken Burns, director of the upcoming PBS documentary series about the boxing champion, “global icon and inspiration,” is not one to disagree.

LOS ANGELES -- PBS has fallen short on some aspects of diversity and is taking steps toward comprehensive change to be overseen by a new executive hired for the task, CEO and President Paula Kerger said.While the measures took into account allegations that PBS favors white male filmmaker Ken Burns (“The Civil War,” “Baseball”) and slights viewers of color, Kerger said, they emerged from a deeper reappraisal prompted by the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.“I think

previous response denying the criticism laid against PBS “did not fully appreciate” the situation, but, through conversations with filmmakers and internally at PBS, she eventually grew to realize “that there are areas where we’re not as strong as we could be.”PBS recently came under fire for allotting a disproportionate amount of its airtime and funding to programs from Ken Burns.

Chris Willman Music WriterThe Academy of Country Music, one of the few orgs that puts on two awards shows every year, has named the recipients of non-competitive honors that will be given out in August in a ceremony that traditionally serves as the adjunct to the ACM Awards in April. Honorees at the 14th annual “ACM Honors” ceremony at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium Aug.

Continuing their attempts to chronicle every foundational moment or figure in American history, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s exhaustive six-hour documentary, “Hemingway,” traces the historical formation of the titular author.

Even if you are meant to be the one interviewing Ric and Ken Burns, it will inevitably end up as a back-and-forth between the two brothers. Something Dante wrote reminds them of a passage from Ecclesiastes, and then come Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Eugene O'Neill, and the lyrics from a B-side Beatles track, at which point they have traversed about seven centuries and three continents away from the original question, whatever it was.

Kendra Wilkinson dished on the drama between her, Holly Madison and Bridget Marquardt, all of whom were Hugh Hefner's girlfriends on the mid-aughts reality TV show."On camera, you saw us together and it was the trio. Off camera, we would just disappear into our own little world," she said.

Ken Burns on Wednesday dropped by The Late Show where he offered hope for the future to Stephen Colbert and viewers through the documentarian's unique lens of history. While promoting his upcoming project,Hemingway, a three-part docuseries about the legendary author, Burns explained why Americans need to keep current events in perspective.

Directors Ken Burns and Lynn Novick are promising a “nuanced” portrait of Ernest Hemingway in their three-part, six-hour documentary on the Nobel Prize-winning author coming to PBS in April.

coronavirus stories with ideas for others, Owens said.“The thing about this story is that it really does touch every part of our lives,” he said. “It's not that we're looking to just do stories about the pandemic.