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blaseblasphemener
Joined: 01 Jun 2006
Location: There's a voice, keeps on calling me, down the road, that's where I'll always be
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 Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2008 5:42 pm Post subject: The Interesting American |
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Good article. Will have to watch for this:
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The unkown American
GAYLE MACDONALD
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
March 13, 2008 at 3:54 AM EDT
Historian David McCullough finds it egregious that John Adams's face is not chiselled on Mount Rushmore along with America's other founding fathers - Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
But the acclaimed author hopes a new HBO miniseries named John Adams (based on McCullough's Pulitzer Prize winning book) is finally going to set the record straight on the New England farmer who was robbed of a granite bust but is still one of the primary shapers of America's independence.
"His face isn't on Mount Rushmore. There is no memorial to him in Washington," says McCullough, referring to his hero, the second president of the United States. "And that is disgraceful because ... except for Washington, there was no more important American in the whole revolutionary era than John Adams.
"Everybody knew his name but nobody really knows what he did," adds McCullough, whose historical novels include 1776, Truman (another Pulitzer winner) and The Path Between the Seas. "Adams was in before the rest of them. And he never failed to answer the call of his country, to serve all the way through no matter the inconvenience or the risks to his life."
HBO's seven-part series, executive-produced by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman, stars Oscar nominees Paul Giamatti, as the brilliant revolutionary, and Laura Linney as Adams's beloved wife, Abigail. Toronto's Sarah Polley also stars, as daughter Abigail "Nabby" Adams.
Giamatti, who readily admits he was anxious about portraying such a complex character, agrees Adams has been woefully underestimated by the American public.
This is a man, Giamatti adds, who played a pivotal role in the shaping of U.S. policy, helped foster a revolution and coaxed Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence.
"I truly felt that I got to play a Shakespearian character. He combines all the elements of a Hamlet and in the end he's like King Lear," says the Yale English and Drama grad whose films include American Splendor, Sideways and Cinderella Man.
"He was an enormously intelligent, compassionate guy. He had a huge capacity to take everything and examine it. Try to understand it. And break everything down. He was just a huge character to play. But he didn't live in an ivory tower, ever," asserts the actor in a conference call along with McCullough, who was approached by Hanks more than five years ago to bring his book to the screen.
"When I first met to discuss the possibility with Tom Hanks, I realized after an hour and a half that this was a man who really wanted to do the right kind of job," says McCullough. "When you turn your work over to someone, you're really putting your faith in their interpretation of your text. And he never, ever let me down. And the people at HBO, what they invested in this - aside from the enormous amount of money - was a desire to do something intelligent about the founding time of our country. And they did that. They never cheapened it, or compromised.
"What is so important about Adams is that he was an intensely human being. He was like a character out of Dickens," says McCullough. "If he walked into a room, you'd know exactly who he was. If you cut him with a knife, he would bleed red blood. He was passionate and funny. He was brilliant and learned. And he was brave. But his courage was the courage of his convictions. Paul conveys all of that. But Paul also manages to convey that people during Adams's time didn't know how it was going to turn out any more than we do in our time."
The series taps into the birth of the American republic and its first 50 years. Directed by Tom Hooper and written by Kirk Ellis, it also stars Stephen Dillane as Adams's lifelong rival and friend Jefferson.
HBO spent heavily to make the period drama as authentic as possible with sets and costumes. They wrote a script that stayed true to the thousands of letters that John and Abigail sent to one another. And, more important for both McCullough and Giamatti, they made the actors speak the way people would have in the 1700s.
"The language alone is fascinating. And it was something that I just couldn't believe someone was willing to put on television," says Giamatti, who lives with his wife and son in New York's Brooklyn Heights neighbourhood. "To have people speaking at this high level, with this amount of intelligence, was incredibly exciting to me. I kept praying after I took the job, 'God, I hope they don't chicken out and start rewriting it, and try to dumb it down.' They allowed these characters to be as intelligent as they actually were.
"I've certainly never done this particular period of history, and I have never played a politician like this before. Under Adams's [formal] surface was a lot of neuroses and anxiety - things I thought would be interesting to dramatize. Few actors have been given the opportunity play a character like this. I get to run the gamut of emotions - highs, lows, depressed, exultant. You didn't have to tell him about the common man. He was one of them."
McCullough believes audiences will be impressed by how true the series is to the reality of the revolutionary times. "Viewers will see the scars that a hard life left on people - people with dirt under their fingernails and bad teeth, people coping with the awful scourge of smallpox. They will see that when someone is tarred and feathered that that wasn't some sort of high-school prank. It was a form of torture, that people died from. And I think that they will understand that we are the beneficiaries of a very resilient kind of human spirit. Not just the spirit that would inspire someone to fight for freedom and to endure what the struggle entailed. But people who knew that life itself was a struggle."
McCullough adds that it was a rare gift to have all of the Adams correspondence. "Neither John or Abigail was capable of writing a dull letter or a short one. And as a consequence, we don't have to speculate very much about what they thought. Now, in our time, we are leaving nothing of that kind of record, despite all the photographs and the recordings, and so forth. Future historians and biographers are going to have a hard time writing about us. Nobody in public life is ever going to dare keep a diary ever again, I don't think."
The historian speculates that Adams fell in the shadows behind the likes of Washington and Jefferson because he was a one-term president. "We don't celebrate one-term presidents, we Americans," he says. "I don't know why that is. I guess we don't like losers. And one-term presidents are nearly always presidents who lost when they ran again. Unless you're killed in office in your first term, you're pretty well forgotten. Also, Adams was a nominal member of the Federalist Party and the Federalist Party became extinct. So there was no advantage, as a fundraising device, to have an annual Adams dinner to raise money for the Federalist Party."
Both Giamatti and McCullough also believe Adams would have had no patience for politics today. "He thought the party system could destroy politics ... and was concerned people might start thinking more about the fortunes of their party than the fortunes of the United States of America. And of course that never happened," the historian scoffs. "This miniseries is about the character of a man, the courage of his convictions, his honesty and his devotion, not just to his wife and to his home, but to his country. I don't think that theme can be spoken or amplified often enough, and particularly, I feel now, in this election year."
The HBO miniseries John Adams premieres in Canada on Sunday at 9 p.m. on The Movie Network and 8 p.m. (PT) on Movie Central.
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2008 8:03 pm Post subject: |
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John Adams always believed he was the most underrated and neglected of the revolutionary leaders. He knew, as he told his friend Benjamin Rush in 1790, that his role in the Revolution would never be properly recognized. The essence of the Revolution, he moaned, "will be that Dr. Franklin's electrical rod smote the earth and out sprung General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod--and thence forward these two conducted all the policy, negotiation, legislatures and war."
His colleagues scarcely knew what to do with him. They knew he was smart and dedicated, but his behavior often caused them to shake their heads and roll their eyes. Adams was uncommonly vain, said Jefferson during the peace negotiations in Paris in 1783, and he seemed to hate everyone. "He hates Franklin, he hates John Jay, he hates the French, he hates the English." But Jefferson conceded that Adams had integrity. "At any rate," he told his friend Madison, "honesty may be extracted even from poisonous weeds." But no one summed up Adams's character better than Franklin, who famously described him as a man who "means well for his Country, is always an honest Man, often a Wise One, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses." (Gordon S. Wood, "Revolutionary Characters" p 175-77)
The bio the article talks about is excellent. |
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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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| Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2008 8:35 pm Post subject: |
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| Ooh, this looks good. I don't know how I'm going to get to watch it but I'm excited. |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2008 8:39 pm Post subject: |
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The man passed up the chance to right the Declaration of Independence, and gave it to his young protegee.
I have no idea why he thought it wouldn't be that important of a document. |
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2008 11:58 pm Post subject: |
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| I have no idea why he thought it wouldn't be that important of a document. |
I'm happy to oblige 
Although he had served on the committee that drew up the Declaration of Independence, people were by the 1790s beginning to pay more attention to Jefferson's role in writing the first draft. Besides, Adams always considered the Declaration merely a document derived from the May 10 and May 15, 1776, congressional resolutions, for which he had been most responsible. The resolutions advised the colonies to adopt new governments "where no government sufficient to the exigencies of their affairs have been hitherto estatblished, " and went on to declare "that the exercise of every kind of authority under the...Crown should be totally suppressed," and to call for the exertion of "all the powers of government...under the authority of the people of the colonies." When some hesitant colleagues called the last resolution "a Machine for the fabrication of Independence," Adams jubilantly retorted that "it was independence itself." Yet as he ruefully recalled in 1805, these May resolutions were "then little known" and were "now forgotten, by all but...a very few." (p 176) |
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2008 12:00 am Post subject: |
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| I hope they include the scene where he was swimming in the Potamac and a lady journalist sat on his clothes until he agreed to give her an interview. (Or was that John Quincy Adams?) |
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