On the Front With PBS

Little rivers of rain and assorted grit lap up against the entrance to Third Street Sound,the sound-mixing studio in Hollywood where KCET-TV Channel 28’s Blaine Baggett is overseeing post-production on his new series, “The Great War.” The drenching January morning is about as perfect an accompaniment as Los Angeles can provide to what’s happening within.

The nine-minute segment that executive producer Baggett, another producer and a studio technician are laboring over is part of the eight-hour, $5-million series about World War I and its aftermath, which can be seen tonight through Wednesday on PBS. The series is a co-production of KCET and the BBC in association with the Imperial War Museum in London.

The timing is fitting. Monday is Veterans Day--what used to be Armistice Day, commemorating Nov. 11, 1918, when guns ceased firing in the international conflict. Armistice lasted but a generation. World War I, which had begun in 1914, segued into World War II, and the series’ theme is contained in the full title--”The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century.”

Using a metaphor akin to his last PBS series, “The Astronomers” (1991), Baggett likens the First World War to the “big bang [of] the most violent century in recorded history.”

Unlike separate CBS and BBC series in the ‘60s, which dealt with the military and political history of the conflict, “Great War” has a more layered take. It focuses on social and cultural history and on people--artists and poets, many of them soldiers; women whose faces and hands turned so yellow from working in Britain’s munitions factories they were called “canaries”; ordinary folk who would do a fictional miniseries proud. The overarching events are also here--the Armenian genocide by Turks, the sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania, the Russian Revolution.

In the darkened studio, archival footage of battle and of a tank stuck high in midair moves across a 10-foot-by-12-foot screen, mingled with contemporary shots--puddles of yellow mud, of rain hitting dead leaves--as well as paintings and still-photo close-ups of tense, weary faces.

“This is where it’s all coming together,” Baggett says. (Then KCET’s director of public affairs and feature documentaries, he became vice president for program development, scheduling and acquisition in September.) “We’ve gone from rough cuts where we had put our own voices in it, and we’ve started to edit. Instead of my voice, it might be Jeremy Irons. The actual scoring of the music is done here. . . . It’s now getting very, very close to precisely what you’ll see on the air.

“This is the heart of the series. Episode 4. ‘Slaughter.’ And this is what the war is about--how people are being basically wasted. . . . We’re 46 to 47 minutes into it. We’ve gone through the two big battles. One by the French at Verdun. One by the British--the Somme. [Generals] think they’ve gotten it right and know how to fight the battles. Instead of new tactics, they go ahead and use old tactics again in the middle of the rain. And half a million people are casualties as a result. At Passchendaele . . . in Belgium.”

As tape of “War’s” sobering images continues to unwind, narrator Salome Jens points out that 1917 was “the wettest summer and autumn in years. Airplanes could not fly. Tanks could not move. And soldiers--with their hopes for victory--drowned in mud.” Her voice is a somber resonant alto.

Then comes historian Jay Winter, co-writer with Baggett of the series and its companion book. Winter, an American who has spent most of his adult life teaching at Cambridge, stares straight into the camera, his understated tone adding poignancy to the words: “Men caught in the mud could be found a day or two later, lower down and with their minds gone.”

Baggett and producer-director Isaac Mizrahi had already decided to have the sound of heavy rain placed over Winter’s words. The haunting, melodic strains of composer Mason Daring’s music, which arrived earlier in the week, are put in as well.

“Nice,” Mizrahi says.

An unseen Irons gives voice to Siegfried Sassoon, who hunted foxes before fighting Germans and becoming one of Britain’s best-known poets: “Mud and rain and wretchedness and blood, Why should jolly soldier-boys complain? God made these before the roofless Flood--Mud and rain.”

Rupert Graves speaks as Paul Nash, an artist who had been sent to the front, painted war’s harsh colors and described what he saw: “The rain drives on, the stinking mud becomes more evilly yellow . . . the black dying trees ooze and sweat and the shells never cease.”

“Don’t you wish we still wrote like that?” Baggett whispers.

As the episode fades, he decides that the music will end a beat or two ahead of the final cut of a cemetery.

“I know you don’t like silence,” Baggett tells Mizrahi, who laughingly agrees, “but . . .” So silence it is.

It is late October 1994, and Baggett is on a high. Over lunch at a restaurant in Los Feliz, he talks about his 2 1/2 weeks in London, St. Petersburg and Moscow. Production has just begun.

The first week was spent at the Imperial War Museum, which has “the biggest collection of World War I material in the world,” doing film and photographic research, poring over computers, bringing pictures up, deciding where in the series they might fit.

Series producer Carl Byker, then finishing his PBS series “Human Quest,” and a film crew joined Baggett for the trip to Russia. At the end, there was an unscheduled stop in Moscow for more film research, but St. Petersburg was the centerpiece. “Have you been to St. Petersburg? Extraordinary.”

Production shoots began at the czar’s Winter Palace.

“We were there at sunrise. The sun glinted off the palace. Thirty minutes later, the clouds came in. An hour later, we got a snowstorm,” Baggett notes with delight. Such range would be useful. “The palace is enormous. It seems as though it would reach from Congress to the White House.”

What at first was the series pilot became Episode 5--”Mutiny”--when armies and nations were near breaking point.

“You go from the internal mutiny of shellshock, when the mind and the body just refused to go into war anymore,” he says. “Mutiny of the French army when half refused to fight. . . . And then the biggest mutiny in history, the Russian Revolution.

“I never do the first show first,” Baggett explains, “and I don’t do the last show first, because you find out in the middle what you really ought to say in the beginning.”

There also was a practical consideration. They did not want to experience the Russian winter.

Quite by accident, Baggett had found his subject in 1991. He wanted to do a series on class in America. His parents grew up on dirt farms in the South. His father was a warehouse worker who became a traffic distributor for a canner; his mother worked a Teletype. Baggett found a “most hilarious” book called “Class” by Paul Fussell, “an Anglophile who thought everything that’s English is great and anything that isn’t is not.”

That led Baggett to a very different Fussell book, “The Great War and Modern Memory”--about “how much the war has influenced our literature.”

“I read this book and said, ‘This is unbelievable--the experiences these people had in the trenches,’ ” he recalls. “. . . I came to understand that the whole understanding of the war by historians has changed. It’s moved from being a military and political perspective on events to a social understanding of the war--not what happened to the general but to the private, to women [and] children.”

It was a war to which Baggett had little connection. Raised in Mississippi, he went on school trips to Civil War battlefields like Shiloh. His father--18 in 1945 at the end of World War II--desperately wanted to fight but was deferred because of a bad ear. Blaine, who graduated from high school in 1969, went to Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss., and majored in literature--his deferment from Vietnam. Later, he served in the Peace Corps in Liberia and witnessed a nation that had “turned on itself in tribal strife and civil war.”

“Not that I wanted to go to Vietnam,” Baggett explains in a later interview at KCET, “but . . . my father--he missed out on his war, and I missed out on my war . . . the experience of the war. . . . Otto Dix [a German painter] says in the series, ‘I had to see it all with my own eyes . . . to experience [it].’ War is a major theme in the consciousness of my life.”

Of course, the Civil War was already done by Ken Burns, who made a leap to fame with his 11-hour landmark PBS series in 1990.

“I knew the Civil War,” Baggett says. “Television production for me is a chance to continue learning. So I take the journey first and then share it with others.” Just as he had done with other PBS series--”Spaceflight” in 1985 and “Secret Intelligence” in 1989.

Once his interest was piqued, Baggett contacted Ronald Schaeffer, a professor of history at Cal State Northridge, whose book “America in the Great War” had just been published. Schaeffer and others told Baggett that the world’s leading historian on that war was Winter.

In July 1992, Baggett met Winter at the opening of Historial de la Grande Guerre, an international museum Winter helped found near the River Somme in France. Winter had already written three books on the war. He and other historians gave the series the heft it needed with the National Endowment for the Humanities, the first funder.

The BBC joined the project in April 1994. Other funders were the Corp. for Public Broadcasting, PBS and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation.

From the start, Baggett wanted a woman to narrate for PBS. He found her in Jens when he heard her at KCET doing narrations for the public affairs series “Life & Times.” Baggett believed that a woman’s voice would set his series apart from the old BBC series with Michael Redgrave--also called “The Great War”--and because “the war had as much do with women [as men].”

Meanwhile, Baggett pored over books to find the individual stories of people whose lives intersected the war in both usual and unusual ways. He discovered a wealth of characters: Silver Parrish, a young American who ended up fighting Bolsheviks in northern Russia in a place called Archangel even after the war had officially ended; Princess Evelyn Blucher, English by birth, German by marriage, who depicts the cold and hunger in Germany toward the end of the war; Kande Kamara, a colonial from Africa who went to fight for the French and after the war returned to his tribe disillusioned with both sides: “The Germans called us boots. . . . [They] underestimated us, disgraced and dishonored us.”

There will inevitably be comparisons between “Civil War” and “Great War.” They’re about war, after all. Both use actors’ voices to reveal the thoughts originally expressed in diaries and letters; both use photos and chapter titles within each episode.

Baggett resists comparisons to Burns’ work. Only the use of chapter titles, he notes, “was a trick that I picked up.”

“Obviously the Burns brothers [Ken and Ric, a producer-writer on “Civil War”] rode the first wave of the new historiography from this political, military view from the top to the view of people as a whole,” he says. “And particularly with people in the lower places, how you get to them is through the diaries, through the letters. To use a Southern California metaphor, they caught the first wave of that and surfed it magnificently, brilliantly.

“What I would say is that we made a very conscious effort not to do it in the same style. It’s visually different. It’s the use of characters. When we introduce a character, we stay with the character for a good long time.”

There’s a key difference between Burns and Baggett. An independent filmmaker, Burns goes to every production shoot (except on “The West,” when Stephen Ives was the director). Baggett, as a station executive, has other responsibilities. Like a general choosing his battles, he can’t be everywhere. So he assigned each of the hours to other producers.

The look of the film, Baggett notes, came more from the producing staff.

“They pushed the envelope further than probably I alone would push it,” he says.

And one of the ways they did so was through what Baggett and his producers call layering--a technique that, in producer Byker’s estimation, takes the documentary form “another step,” and that is to “almost make it into a movie--a movie without actors.”

He describes the sequence of the sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-boat: “How would you bring that to life? The Lusitania sank. There’s no footage of it. How can you make people feel what it must have been like?”

The filmmakers went to Long Beach and shot aboard the Queen Mary.

“What you see is the bridge where the captain is, and the wheels are spinning,” Byker says. “We did helicopter shots of the ocean . . . Then you go into the bar, you meet the character [Margaret Rhonnda] through a photograph.”

To simulate the sinking, Byker explains, cinematographer Mitch Wilson got some very fast tracking shots on the deck. Byker remembered that he had shot a bubbling waterfall in Europe.

“So I took that waterfall and layered that over the shots of the deck, and layered in some shots of sunlight he had shot,” he says. “Helen Mirren plays Margaret Rhonnda [with] this fabulous voice. She was a passenger on the ship who survived. And she’s telling her story.

“I think when I was trying to explain to Blaine why these production sequences were such a good thing, right when we were starting to shoot the series, I saw a review of another documentary series, and the first paragraph said, ‘Imagine if Ken Burns went to Nashville. Then you can realize what this show on country music is about.’ And I said to Blaine, ‘I’m not going to spend two years on this series and then read a review which says, ‘Imagine if Ken Burns did “The Great War.” ’ “

In his five-year journey with “The Great War”--longer, he quips, than the conflict itself--Baggett learned how World War I shaped “not just the rest of the century but the attitudes of people in this century.” He anticipates that viewers might discover that too.

As the series points out, the war marked “the first use of chemical weapons, the first mass bombardment of civilians from the sky, the century’s first genocide.”

“I thought cynicism and distrust of government was born in the Vietnam generation,” Baggett says. “. . . I’ve known this was the most violent century . . . but I thought that was simply because we had deadlier technology. People were massacred [previously] but not whole huge populations. I’ve learned from Jay [Winter] that the experience of total war made the unthinkable thinkable for the first time.” *

* “The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century” airs from 9 to 11 p.m. tonight through Wednesday on KCET-TV Channel 28.