Alum Peter Coyote Narrates PBS Documentary 'The Roosevelts'

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE -- Without reading a word of the script or watching the video in advance, the Bay Area actor and voice-over artist long associated with filmmaker Ken Burns steps into the studio and brings the images and narrative to mesmerizing vocal life. “He’s extraordinary,” said Burns, whose partnership with Coyote continues Sunday, when the first chapter of a seven-part “intimate history” of “The Roosevelts” airs at 8pm on PBS. “A great deal of the power of our films comes from the authority his voice brings to the proceedings.” An English major at Iowa’s Grinnell College who came west to study Creative Writing at San Francisco State, Coyote published his first book, “Sleeping Where I Fall,” in 1998. It’s a vivid, searchingly honest accounting of his life in the counterculture, by turns quixotic, ecstatic, convulsive, self-critical — he calls himself “obstinately opinionated” and admits to “an indulgent streak in my character” — and mordantly funny.