From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

Welcome to the treatment, the home edition. I'm Elvis Mitchell.

It may seem like it's a long distance from the Brooklyn Bridge to Muhammad Ali,

but not as long as you might think, especially for my guest's documentary director, Ken Burns,

who's done both those documentaries in addition to a whole bunch of other films.

Muhammad Ali's is the newest four-part series for PBS.

Ken, thank you so much for doing this.

It's good to talk to you here.

It's my pleasure, Elvis.

Great to be with you.

One of the things, again, as I was watching Muhammad Ali's, I found myself thinking they could be a kind of a de facto sequel to your film, Unforgivable Blackness, the rise and fall of Jack Johnson, about 15 years ago.

Yeah, that came out in 2005, and, you know, there's a scene towards the end of that in which we learned that his life, Jack Johnson's life, was inspirational to Muhammad Ali,

and then in our third episode of Ali, we hear it from the reverse angle.

But this film on Ali is co-directed by my daughter Sarah Burns and her husband,

David McMahon, and we also collaborated on the Central Park Five and Jackie Robinson in this. And there's

something really interesting. Jack Johnson tried to achieve that level of freedom that Muhammad

Ali achieved. And both men did it. Jack Johnson just did it for himself. Muhammad Ali did it for

everyone. And so in a way, this is more in line with the Jackie Robinson story because Jackie

Robinson redefined black manhood and black masculinity in his generation, and then Muhammad

Ali took it the next stop. Both men were willing to pay the price of freedom,

exhibit the kind of courage, both inside the ring or on the diamond, that both had to do,

as well as experience a kind of courage or exhibit a kind of courage outside the ring, outside the diamond.

...