An interesting collection of errors, Barbara. I can imagine many people looking at this list and calling it "nitpicking." I would bet Ken Burns would. Many of them involve photographs that do not match up with the words of the script--but rather suggest a linkage. This is where scholarly rigor is important, and the difference between scholarly work and what Ken Burns does. Then again, he is not a scholar, and should not be judged by that standard. But he should be judged by what he is--a documentary filmmaker. The word "documentary" seems to me to be a word he interprets more liberally than others might. As witnessed by your list. I would like to propose an error that I think is a bigger one than many of these. You point out his error in "A True Story," having the speaker call him "Mister Clemens" instead of "Misto C______," as written in the text. An even bigger error is when the narrator of the film says that he wrote down her words, exactly as she spoke them. This is an example to me of his biggest errors: taking too much at face value. The subtitle of the story says "Repeated word for word as I heard it." And Burns buys that--the only problem is that it is not true, at all, as anyone who has examined the manuscript knows. He made substantial changes. One of the scholarly advisers for the film, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, notes that fact in "Was Huck Black?"--so surely Burns could have checked that. So what? Well, as others have noted, the sequence on "A True Story" was one of the centerpieces of the whole Burns film. He uses it to make some of his strongest points about race and about Twain. Obviously he spent much time on this sequence--but he gets a key fact very wrong. The implications of this are actually quite important. If Twain wrote this down verbatim, as he claimed, he becomes nearly invisible, the artist disappearing and a copyist emerging. Copying those words from a black speaker, word for word. All "a true story." But it isn't word for word, not at all, and not "a true story" in the way he is claiming. Surely the story and most of the words came from Mary Cord, but just as surely much of the shape of this and many of the words came from the artist Mark Twain. The difference is huge to a scholar or critic--and ought to be, if not as huge, at least important to a documentary filmmaker. Nitpicking? I guess that's a judgment call. Twain called his piece "A True Story." Ken Burns calls his film the same, I am sure. But neither is "repeated word for word, as I heard it." ----- Original Message ----- From: <[log in to unmask]> To: <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2002 7:45 PM Subject: Re: Nitpicking > John, > > The list of errors I've compiled thus far is at: > > http://www.twainquotes.com/burnsmistakes.html > > > Barb