been to Colonial Williamsburg and Yorktown and Jamestown and Richmond, coinciding with the moment that Patrick Henry said,“ Give me liberty or give me death,” 250 years later. We had 3,600 people at the Altria Theater in Richmond. We had 6,000 people on the governor ' s lawn at Williamsburg under a threat of rain and a drizzle who stayed to watch clips from the film. And so, I think there ' s a real pent-up exuberance for knowing the story. Our tour is essentially across the whole country. People in Honolulu and Fairbanks, Alaska, have as much interest in it as somebody in Boston or Albany or Charleston or Williamsburg. It may be more present for them, but the story of the American Revolution is our story, and we plan to bring it to as many markets as we can from now until November and then, actually, beyond our broadcast and streaming, we ' re going to be working on this and talking about it right up to July 4, 2026, and beyond. Because, of course, it won ' t be until 2033 that it will be the 250th anniversary of the Treaty of Paris and the final cessation and the last British troops leave New York and Charleston and Savannah.
Stanmeyer: What happens at these talks?
Burns: We show a few clips everywhere that are exactly the same. But of course, in Albany, we’ re going to be emphasizing the Battle of Saratoga and, of course, Henry Knox ' s trip. Everywhere we go, not just the former 13 colonies, but anywhere we go in the country, we ' ll be sharing clips that I think will be of interest and add dimension and complications of familiar characters like Washington, and also introduce you to literally dozens and dozens of people that probably you ' ve never heard of. They are read by people like Meryl Streep, Laura Linney, Claire Danes, Tom Hanks, Morgan Freeman, Samuel L. Jackson, Sir Kenneth Brown, Alan Damian Lewis, Liev Schreiber, Paul Giamatti, Josh Brolin, and many others.
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Stanmeyer: I understand that you’ ve been thinking about doing this film for a while.
Burns: We’ ve been working on it for nine years and six months. It ' ll be nearly ten years when we broadcast. I made a film 35 years ago that was broadcast on the Civil War, and I sort of said,“ No more wars.” Then I was irresistibly drawn to the fact that lots of kids thought we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the Second World War and committed to a nearly ten-year project on the history of the Second World War called The War, which came out in 2007. As we ' re finishing that in 2006, I said we ' re doing Vietnam next. Ten and a half years later, in the fall of 2017, we brought out our history of the Vietnam War. A year and a half before it was done, as we were locking the various episodes in December of 2015, I said we ' re doing the Revolution. I was looking for stories that are spectacular mirrors of who we are. I realized that as daunting as it is to tell a story without photographs, without newsreels of a war, it was nevertheless a challenge that I wanted to undertake.
LIGHT | SPA C E | H OME
LIGHT | SPA C E | H OME
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Holiday August July 2025 2023 BERKSHIRE MAGAZINE // 95