When Ted Turner asked me in late 1994 to make COLD WAR, it was easy to agree. He wanted to tell a universal, not a partisan, story and to do justice to the experience, reasoning, motives and actions of both the protagonist great powers involved, the USA and the USSR, and of other countries also. And he and I both wanted to tell the story simply and directly, without gloss or spin, in visual images of record and through the memories and testimony of eyewitnesses to history. This was the technique of The World at War, a history of World War II, which I made in the 70s, of which Ted was a fan. The first critical decision was to present COLD WAR as a story.
Television history is popular history, and that means narrative history.
The trick is to keep a clear narrative going and resist the temptation to stray all over the place. We have avoided, mostly, thematic episodes which span the entire period of forty-five years and instead arranged our subject matter so that each film, which is intended to stand up on its own, follows on from last week's episode and leads on to the next. Thus, we hope to keep you on the edge of your viewing seats, hungry for more, over a six-month span. To make a series this big, you need a team. Martin Smith, series producer, has driven it through to completion and held it all together.