HOT SPRINGS, Ark. (AP) – Ken Burns, creator of popular television series on the Civil War and baseball, says documentary film-making has come a long way since he started making them in New York about 30 years ago.

“It’s been a pretty amazing transformation, I think,” said Burns, 50. “I moved to New Hampshire 25 years ago because I knew that becoming a documentary filmmaker was taking a vow of anonymity and poverty.

“It didn’t happen, I’m very happy to say, but that was the climate,” he recalled.

Burns, of Walpole, attended the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival over the weekend for a screening of his latest film, “Horatio’s Drive: America’s First Road Trip.” The film tells the story of Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson, who made the first drive across America in an automobile in 1903.

After meeting and talking with members of the audience, Burns sat for an interview with the Hot Springs Sentinel-Record, talking about how things have changed since he entered the documentary field.

“I think what people have begun to understand is that documentaries don’t have to be those training-film, dreadfully boring things that they made you see in class, but something that could be equally as entertaining as a feature film,” he said. “There’s no reason that entertainment and the truth can’t go hand in hand.”

He said that filmmakers who created boring non-fiction films used the label documentary as “an excuse for not doing it well and not putting in the value, not caring about composition or caring about sound.”

“People were turned off by the crudeness of it,” he said.

Burns said that, in the process of satisfying his curiosity about what makes America tick, and putting the results on film, “I’ve become known as much as a historian as a filmmaker.”

“That’s a very interesting position to be in,” Burns said. “In some ways it makes the academics quite nervous because I’m such a rank amateur, which I freely admit. At the same time, I think it liberates history, popular history, from the tyranny of the academy.”

Academics, he said, have “been unconcerned with how they wrote, but more important, who was listening.”

The result, he said, was a “tremendous historical amnesia” in this country.

Now, Burns said, “you begin to sense that people are getting more and more curious about it. ‘Who are we? Where did we come from? What kind of people are we?’ And I think that’s had entirely to do with popular historians, amateur historians, who in various mediums have sort of wrestled history away from the academics who were turning it away from story, who were getting so self-involved in navel-gazing that they forgot that history is made up mostly of the world story.”

Burns said he’s working on projects on national parks, World War II and Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion boxer.

The filmmaker planned to be at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock on Monday to talk to classes and deliver a public lecture.

He said the Hot Springs festival and one at Telluride, Colo., are the only two he attends. He likes the community and family feeling at Telluride, he said, and the festival here also gives him that feeling.

“You know what it is? It’s a guileless festival,” Burns said. “There’s no attitude here.”

AP-ES-11-03-03 0742EST