Roy Olmstead, one of the Puget Sound’s largest ever bootlegger (Courtesy HistoryLink.org and The Seattle Daily Times)

Filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s latest project, Prohibition, takes on the history of the Eighteenth Amendment and social problems related to alcohol abuse in the 19th century.

The three-part, five-and-a-half-hour documentary series airing on PBS, also features Seattle.

One of the stories follows Roy Olmstead, a Puget Sound police lieutenant who did some bootlegging on the side.

“He basically got caught, he was fired from the police force, and became the biggest bootlegger in the Puget Sound,” co-director Lynn Novick told 97.3 KIRO FM’s Ross and Burbank Show.

Listen to Ken Burns & Lynn Novick discuss “Prohibition”

Novick said he was a very smart guy with a strong sense of morality. He was convinced they didn’t need to resort to violence to grow his business. He had the mayor, Edwin “Doc” Brown, and the whole Seattle Police Department behind him.

“He walked down the street and everyone knew what he was doing and nobody minded,” Novick said.

While Olmstead’s experience doesn’t sound too bad, Burns said alcohol abuse was a huge problem at the time.

“The romanticism that we impose on the past is exactly that and always falls. Human nature is always the same; people are as sophisticated, as susceptible, as smart, as stupid, as conservative, as liberal as they’ve ever been,” he said.

In fact, Burns said the average person in the 19th century drank three to six times more than the average person today.

Prohibition dives into all the issues leading up to and related to the dry years.

“The film is about single issue campaigns that metastasize, about the demonization of recent immigrants, about a whole group of people who feel they’ve lost control of their country and want to take it back, and unfunded Congressional mandates,” said Burns.

The three-part series airs October 2 – 4 on most PBS stations, including Seattle’s KCTS.

Burns and Novick have been collaborating since the 1990s on such landmark documentaries as “Baseball”, “Jazz”, and “The War.”

By Stephanie Klein, MyNorthwest.com Editor

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Ken Burns’ next project for PBS: Vietnam War