LOS ANGELES – Though Ken Burns “couldn’t make ‘Fahrenheit 9/11′ to save my life,” he would defend to the death, or at least pretty rigorously, Michael Moore’s right to make the controversial film accusing the Bush administration of faking the case for a war against Iraq.

“I’ve been very disappointed, particularly in a free society, that we should even be talking about whether he has the right to make what people are calling propaganda,” the man behind “The Civil War,” “Jazz” and other historical documentaries told reporters last week during PBS’ portion of the annual fall TV preview. “He’s entitled to it. Jerry Falwell has got a documentary on the murders that Bill Clinton created, starting with Vince Foster. I mean, this is the history of our country, the ability to stand up and say, ‘I believe this guy is a (expletive).”‘

Burns was on hand to discuss his new four-hour film about Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight boxing champion (1908-14), due to premiere on PBS in January. But he touched on a wider range of topics and, befitting his latest subject, pulled no punches. He even declared PBS’ recent seven-part history of the blues “a mess” that he “just couldn’t get into.”

His criticism of Moore concerns tactics, not bias. “Is it preaching to the choir, or is it converting people?” he said. “That’s what I’m interested in. What we lack today, I think we are so dialectically preoccupied. Everything is either red state or blue state, Republican, Democrat, good, bad, in or out. And I want to talk to other people … bring everybody in.”

Notwithstanding an occasional lark like last year’s “Horatio’s Drive,” Burns’ films are far from apolitical. His great, overarching theme is the racial unease in America that is the legacy of slavery.

Burns said his interest in the subject “is borne so deep in my consciousness, it’s hard to think of it as something I took on as a kind of intellectual pursuit in adulthood. I can remember at a time when I was 9 or 10 years old, my mother was dying of cancer – which, as you can imagine, was terrifying and devastating for our family. And at the same time, the television set had dogs and fire hoses and Selma .

“And I remember sort of translating the anxiety about the cancer that was killing my family to the cancer that was killing my country.”

“It’s been very much a part of my emotional makeup.”

Burns said that time, study and exposure to black scholars such as Washington University professor Gerald Early, a key consultant on “Baseball,” “Jazz” and now “Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson,” have given him – and thus his company’s films – a more mature understanding of race in America.

“Jack Johnson wished to live his life nothing short of that of a free man, a dangerous, dangerous choice for an African-American in the first two decades of the 20th century,” Burns said. “At a time when a sideways glance at a white woman might cost you your life, Jack Johnson slept with and married whomever he wanted.

“Booker T. Washington and even W.E.B. DuBois were troubled by Johnson’s choices in life, that upset the apple cart of a lot of things that were going on. The film is filled with black commentary from the pulpit and from newspapers that is not uniform.

“We presuppose our own individuality, but when it comes to race, well, (we assume) everybody there thinks or acts the same. So I hope we’ve grown a little bit more and begun to tolerate that much more complexity, that much more undertone, as we pursue these themes. And I think “Jack Johnson’ is a deep as we’ve gotten.”

Burns’ next project, which also has racial elements, is now being edited for a planned 2006 telecast. Its subject is World War II. “I heard this horrible statistic that 40 percent of graduating high school seniors thought that we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the Second World War, and it just sort of gave me the chills,” he said.

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Ken Burns

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