`THE WEST' GIVES US A LONG RIDE BY KEITH MARDER.

Byline: Daily News Television Writer

``The West'' is a textbook television marathon starting Sunday on a PBS station near you - KCET (Channel 28).

The scenery is beautiful, and the long-winded story follows people through their trek to the West using diaries, letters, autobiographical accounts, vintage photos and newsreel footage as it tells the tale of the Gold Rush, the birth of California as a state and Los Angeles as a city.

Chronologically, the story spans from the 1500s to 1914, but it feels much longer.

It is the ultimate in the branding of Ken Burns, the executive producer, as the master of the documentary. But Stephen Ives, director and co-producer, did all the work; he picked the clips and sound bites over five years and jammed it into 12-1/2 hours that will air over eight nights (Sunday through Thursday and Sept. 22-24, at 8 p.m., repeating at 9:30 p.m. except for the final installment, scheduled for 8 and repeating at 10).

What they came away with is a series not as good as ``The Civil War,'' but better than ``Baseball.''

``We keep doing the same film over and over again,'' Burns said during a summer press conference. ``It's a kind of emotional archeology about who we are as a people. And that's how we see ourselves.''

They are documentarians with a seemingly endless budget from sources such as General Motors and the National Endowment of the Humanities. In a time of fiscal belt-tightening around PBS, Burns seems to have the luxury to put together projects that exude realism.

``We fortunately work in the network that insists that we do not aim at the lowest common denominator, that we aim high, that we trust our audience to care about these things, that in fact there's no communication in this world except among equals,'' Burns said.

He went on to talk about his underwriters ``that are sympathetic to, not the kind of something that's so simplistic that it may be sort of instantly gratifying but doesn't delve into these complicated questions. And for all those reasons we're before you today as part of the public television family and today, as amateur historians grappling with one of the central and defining aspects of American life, which is the West, the tragedies and the promise of it.

``And it takes time to tell the story.''

``This is a huge, huge territory, the western studies,'' said Burns, whose brother also unveiled a project on the region recently. ``It is the sort of Amy Fisher of documentary films, you know? Everybody and his brother, including mine, has done something on the West. And, while there is overlap - Rick focused on the Western Plains Indians - we've really set our stakes much higher.''

The West, as described by the longo-mentary, is everything west of the Mississippi River, north of the Rio Grande, south of the Northern Plains, and east of the Pacific Ocean.

Maybe such a big area does take a long time to explain.

The West, Burns explains, is the direction all people look to, especially Americans of European descent. They came West. That is the original impulse.

Sure, that may all sound a bit poetic for real life, but remember this is a ``Ken Burns'' film as presented by Stephen Ives.

There's no doubt that the story-telling styles are nearly identical.

``I think one of the things that Ken has taught me is that you don't want to assume at the outset that you know what your subject is about,'' Ives said. ``Ken was a mentor to this project and to me as a filmmaker. I got into documentary filmmaking because I admired his work, and I found it intriguing.''

Ives contends that he has put his own stamp on ``The West,'' including the haunting American Indian musical score.

``I think we've done a lot of interesting things with old newsreel material. We've done some things with some complex optical sequences with our maps and things so that we pushed outside of the envelope. And, we've done some experimentation in this series that I think is interesting. It distinguishes it in some way.''

However, in all of that time, there was no mention of the modern West that we live in today, nothing on how the West has been portrayed on television and in movies.

Still American Indian N. Scott Momaday, a historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, considers this work the most accurate about his people.

``I've seen a number of films about the Indian,'' he said. ``And it seems to me that we have made great strides in the direction of accuracy. Nothing has come as close as this film does.''

Even though there is reality in the aforementioned budgetary crisis in public television, we have not heard the last of Burns.

``Money is always difficult,'' Burns said. ``But I think that there are so many stories. I mean, I know what I'm doing between now and the end of the millennium, and I've got a thousand other stories to tell. I'm very excited. I don't think we'll run out. And I think that where there's a will there's a way. I know that's true with Steve.''

Wow, a thousand more stories. Do the math. That's between 12,000 and 20,000 hours of television.

Voice-over marathon

The best part of a documentary like ``The West'' is to try to pick out who are the people lending their voices to historical figures. Peter Coyote is the narrator, but there are 56 other actors whose voices you hear during the 12-1/2-hour PBS series.

Here are a few of them. See how many you can find: Hector Elizondo, Adam Arkin, Phillip Bosco, Matthew Broderick, Tantoo Cardinal, Keith Carradine, John Cullum, Blythe Danner, Ossie Davis, Hector Elizondo, Julie Harris, Derek Jacobi, John Lithgow, Amy Madigan, Mary Stuart Masterson, Russell Means, Arthur Miller, Esai Morales, George Plimpton, Robert Prosky, Pamela Reed, Jason Robards, Gary Sinise, Jimmy Smits, Terry Waite, Eli Wallach, Fred Ward, B.D. Wong.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos, Box

Photo: (1) Triumphant railroad men, with engines fr om the Central Pacific and Union Pacific, celebrate the historic ``Meeting of the Rails'' on May 10, 1869, in Promontory Point, Utah, part of ``The West,'' an eight-part PBS documentary executive produced by Ken Burns and directed by Stephen Ives.

(2) President Theodore Roosevelt, a fan of the West, at Bridal Veil Falls in Yosemite National Park.

Box: Voice-over marathan (See text)