It's hard not to want to become Ken Burns at times. I'm interested in being a Ken Burns who reaches that 17-year-old who goes to the multiplex just to see a good story well-told. And if there's history in it, all the better.
Many of you might already recognize me as the guy in the question-mark suits appearing in the late night TV commercials and on the cover of educational books and CDs.
There was a time when the FCC tried to require a certain amount of television and media to be educational, a certain amount to be newsworthy and a certain amount of it to be public access.
Creating a clear and engaging video explanation of a complex concept is a great way to demonstrate mastery and to help others understand and love the subject, too.
I saw 'The 39 Clues' as a potential vehicle for doing some education in a fun way - to take some of these amazing stories from history, dust them off and make them alive.
My philosophy as a filmmaker is to inform and entertain at the same time. And when I went away from documentaries into miniseries like 'Roots,' I did the reverse. Instead of just entertaining, I want to inform at the same time.
I've always felt that kids are a lot smarter than we've given them credit for, but we've never given them a chance to figure things out as they're watching television.
Television could perform a great service in mass education, but there's no indication its sponsors have anything like this on their minds.
I always liked film as a teaching tool - a way of getting exposed to ideas that had never been presented to me. It just wasn't on the list of career options where I grew up.
I'm very much in support of the free press, but the free press ought to be educational and informative. And I believe they have fallen down recently on that.
As a parent with young children, I would always find little things that bothered me when I was reading bedtime stories or watching shows or listening to children's music. I couldn't find any stories, games or television shows that were fun and exciting while also being morally instructive and patriotic.
I've been reading a lot of books on history, and watching a lot of educational TV. Wikipedia too, even though it is not reliable.
I'm 100% proud of the TV work I achieved. The work I did on shows on insects and Great White sharks... stuff that's in school curriculums in England. Now they are showing up on Discovery Channel.
I do not want to make teaching films. If I did, I would create a separate organization. It is not higher education that interests me so much as general mass education.
I always liked show biz and got to make a few training films at Boeing. Soon after, I got the idea of a science show geared toward kids, around ages 8 through 12.
There's no other way to learn about it, except through documentaries. I encourage documentarians to continue telling stories about World War II. I think documentaries are the greatest way to educate an entire generation that doesn't often look back to learn anything about the history that provided a safe haven for so many of us today. Documentaries are the first line of education, and the second line of education is dramatization, such as The Pacific.
'Sesame Street' is awesome - not only because they teach, edify and entertain kids but because they savvily make it possible to do so with parental engagement, because the show is loaded with references for Mom and Dad.
I wish I could tell you that the Children's Television Workshop and Sesame Street were thanks to my genius, but it really was a lucky break.
These days there's so much technology and ways you can learn. There are videos and CD roms.
Educational television should be absolutely forbidden. It can only lead to unreasonable disappointment when your child discovers that the letters of the alphabet do not leap up out of books and dance around with royal-blue chickens.
Documentaries are the first line of education, and the second line of education is dramatization, such as 'The Pacific'.
And part of my vision is to do dynamic videos for kids.
If you care about a subject, there's a podcast for it.
I like the 'Science Channel,' the 'Discovery Channel,' I like 'Discovery Times,' which is a fabulous hybrid of the 'New York Times' and 'Discovery Channel.' Maybe I'm just an old man, but I like to watch that stuff.
I read in the newspapers they are going to have 30 minutes of intellectual stuff on television every Monday from 7:30 to 8. to educate America. They couldn't educate America if they started at 6:30.
