LIBERTY! The American Revolution is a production of KTCA, Twin Cities Public Television in association with Middlemarch Films. Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer are the producers/directors of LIBERTY! Catherine Allan is the executive producer; Ronald Blumer is the writer; Sharon Sachs and Joshua Waletsky are the editors; Tom Hurwitz is the director of photography. Gerald Richman is the executive in charge.
Middlemarch was first approached about the project by LIBERTY! Executive Producer Catherine Allan.
ELLEN: Catherine came to us and
suggested a series on the American Revolution. It seemed like an interesting
challenge. The Revolution was one of the last big American history subjects
that hadn't been covered by television.
MUFFIE: It posed an interesting
problem: How do you make a long series about a period of time that pre-dates
photography? We'd grappled with this dilemma in connection with other projects,
and had previously come up with the idea of using actors to read first
person accounts from the period. LIBERTY! was our first chance to actually
try out this technique.
ELLEN: This was something that [LIBERTY!
writer] Ron Blumer especially wanted to do---use the words of the people
of the time. He thought it would give the story an unvarnished appeal.
People are always looking back and putting their own interpretation on
history. It's almost impossible not to. But there's so much to be gained
by simply presenting the accounts as they were written---the documents
and letters, the newspaper articles and military accounts.
MUFFIE: For a long time people have
been making films with people reading the words of a person over photographs,
but there were problems doing the same thing here with paintings from the
period.
ELLEN: For one thing, ordinary people
in the 18th century couldn't afford to have their portraits done, which
meant we would be limited in the sorts of stories we could effectively
tell.
MUFFIE: We felt [having the actors on-camera] lent a huge value added to the reading. It's not just their voices, but the way they can use their face.
ELLEN: But it's a very difficult
thing to do. You don't have another actor to respond to. It's not a scene,
you're not playing something with a give and take. You come onto the set,
you sit down, there are lights in your face, and the camera is pointing
at you. Someone calls, "Action!" and the poor actor is thinking, What am
I going to do?
MUFFIE: It's a situation where you
have nothing to rely on but the words and what's inside of you. I liken
it to being able to pull off a Shakespearean soliloquy.
Readings were done at a number of
shoots in a New York studio. Middlemarch was required to do some historical
coaching as well as directing.
ELLEN: We auditioned possibly a
thousand people for the various roles. We were lucky to be living in New
York and to be casting from an extraordinary pool of stage actors.
MUFFIE: When it came to casting George Washington, we had a real problem. Washington was such an icon. Everyone knows what he looks like....actually they know a much older George Washington....the one from the dollar bill and the Gilbert Stuart portrait. It is very hard to play an icon on camera. So in the end, we decided to keep Washington as a voiceover. He is played by a wonderful actor, Stephen Lang. And luckily George Washington is a character for whom we have a wealth of portraits. He was an icon in his own time.
MUFFIE: Each actor was given a background
paper, telling who they were, where they were from, how old they were---as
much background as we could give them about a character.
ELLEN: And each actor had to say
lines that were from different situations in their characters' lives. They
had to jump from one year to another, one situation to another, unrelated
one. So we had to do set-ups for each reading. This is where you are, this
is the date, this is why you are writing to John Hancock, this is your
problem.
Battle scenes and military encampments
were recreated for the film by a group of Revolutionary era re-enactors,
the Brigade of the American Revolution An impressive array of scholars
provided commentary on the period for the series.
ELLEN: The re-enactors are an extraordinary
group of people. It's not just the specific battles that they research,
but the way people lived. Uniforms and costumes are meticulously researched.
It has to be the right kind of thread, the right kind of design . . .
MUFFIE: They maintain a pristine
camp. When they arrive at a campsite, Brigade members have a certain number
of hours before everything that's not 18th century must be stowed away.
The cars go away, the coolers go, the coke cans . . .
ELLEN: It's a real blessing to a
filmmaker to have such a large group of people looking out for the authenticity
of your subject.
MUFFIE: You just can't hire extras
in those numbers and have them be so careful about doing the proper thing.
MUFFIE: And the scholars were marvelous,
both in front of the camera and behind.
ELLEN: They take such risks. Especially
those that go in front of the camera and say things that they might want
to take back in a year's time. Their reputation is on the line.
MUFFIE: These questions are so alive
to them. They almost speak as if it happened yesterday. We felt that especially
with the British scholars . . . a sense that they were still arguing the
issues. I think the whole American Revolution is still a little bit of
a thorn in the side. Not all English, of course, but some . . .
ELLEN: I think of Jeremy Black [one
of the British scholars], saying, The British, at that time, thought this
or that about the colonists. And telling us, with real emotion, "And they
were right!"
After several years of working on
the project, and creating 6 hours of film, the subject of the American
Revolution remains fresh to Middlemarch
MUFFIE: I feel like we've only scratched
the surface. We've done history 101 and 102. There's a huge amount left
to tell.
ELLEN: What's exciting to me is
how alive the subject is to this day. You can't pick up a newspaper without
seeing some direct reference to a constitutional question, or a political
concern that stems right from [the period of the American Revolution].
As scholar Bernard Bailyn said, it's what our politics are about---local
government versus federal, issues of power and how its used and abused.
MUFFIE: When we started this project,
the American Revolution was, really, a subject that I didn't know very
well. I remember the buzz words from 5th grade history---Valley Forge and
Benedict Arnold and all the others. One thing that has meant a lot to me
in the process of doing this series is that it's given me a new appreciation
for the founders of this country. They'd always been these remote historical
figures. But to realize that they were human, that they made mistakes,
they had personalities, that they could, in a sense, be ordinary and yet
accomplish things so extra-ordinary . . .
ELLEN: It's a very cheerful thing
to think about, really. That these people were human beings and not that
different from us.
Ron and Catherine
LIBERTY! The American Revolution was written by Ron Blumer, who has worked with Middlemarch on a number of projects, including Empire of Reason.
Catherine Allan, Executive Producer for LIBERTY!, shepherded the project through six years of development and production.
Gerry Richman, Executive-in-charge of National Productions at KTCA, first suggested the idea of a series on the American Revolution.
CATHERINE: When Gerry suggested
the series, I looked for a scholar to help us outline a story. I had the
enormous good fortune of being put in touch with [Lead Consultant] Michael
Zuckert (see Scholars). We asked him to do a kind of position paper, outlining
some of the themes and ideas that stem from the period.
This idea of 13 diverse colonies
eventually becoming one country based not on ethnicity, or culture, or
religion, but on ideas and political principals---the notion that to be
American is to believe in these principals---that seemed very relevant
to our current multicultural experience.
KTCA was given a grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop the series. Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer of Middlemarch and Ron Blumer, a New York-based writer and native of Canada, were given the assignment of turning a complicated history into compelling television.
RON: I came to the subject [of the
American Revolution] as a complete innocent. In Canada, you sort of vaguely
learn about the loyalists and they're the good guys, the heroes of the
history. I knew absolutely nothing about the subject, which I think is
a wonderful way of starting. I wasn't bored by the mention of the Stamp
Act or Valley Forge because I wasn't sure what they were. I didn't have
it crammed down my throat when I was a kid. What I discovered in this innocence
was a great tale, a story with an incredible beginning, a riveting middle
and an exciting end.
People have so many preconceptions
about the American Revolution and most of them are wrong. The complexities
of the story are enormous. It's not good guy vs. bad guy, it's not a linear
thing. What you think happened, probably didn't, and what you didn't think
happened, probably did.
We had to break down a lot of the
pre-conceived notions of the history, and we had to do it immediately in
the 1st episode. People just don't realize the extent to which Americans
were British in 1763, for instance. As [scholar] Pauline Maier points out,
Americans were British, they wanted to be British, and they were convinced
that being British made them the free-est people on earth. Given that fact,
why would they stage a revolution?
The end of the story, too, is very
puzzling for most people. There's an assumption that from the Declaration
of Independence onward, we were always a country, always united. But if
you simply look of the usage of that phrase at the time, they were two
distinct words, united and States, with the States being the capitalized
word.
Just those two simple facts: one,
that we started out being British and the second, that even after the war,
we were 13 separate countries is terribly difficult for most people to
really understand.
In essence, what you have to say
to people is this: In order to have you understand the story, I'm going
to have to tell you 15 different things, half of which you won't believe.
Furthermore, some of this is going to be information and not storytelling.
So the challenge for me and Middlemarch was, How do we get them on the
rollercoaster without changing channels?
One way was to quickly let them
know, that though this is a story that has themes, ideas and important
issues, it's also about people. It's about events happening to human beings
who were not prepared for them. To once again quote Pauline from Episode
1, "What happened was unexpected." It was a surprise. If you told people
in 1763 that 13 years later they would be forming their own country, they
wouldn't have believed you. It was totally unexpected.
Capturing this surprise is one of
the reasons for using 1st person accounts in the series.
RON: Using primary documents is
to see the wonder at what was happening through the eyes of the players.
To read Burgoyne's accounts prior to the Battle of Saratoga, for instance,
to feel his total confidence, his absolute certainty that he was going
to win, and then to find out what really happened---I kept thinking over
and over again, that this is Shakespearean.
CATHERINE: Because we use actors
in the series, there is a tendency to wonder if the words they say were
written by a script writer. The fact is that they all come from actual
writings of the time; nothing is made up. Ron would modernize the language
occasionally for clarity, but the words and ideas are all authentic.
The most difficult parts of the writing process was determining what to include and what to cut.
RON: It was obvious to me how to
divide up the story into 6 episodes. The hard part was to select from all
of the interesting things that were happening---the what to eliminate question?
And film is like music in that it moves inexorably through time. There's
no getting off the train. So everything has to be clear and unpuzzling
for a viewer.
Of course all of this is complicated
by telling a story set in the 18th century, where so many details are hard
to explain. There's a section in the film about smallpox. If you mention
the devastation of smallpox, how feared it was, and how people guarded
against it, you have to explain the difference between vaccination and
inoculation. You have to explain why people would actually give themselves
smallpox in order to escape a more horrible version of the same disease.
What makes this storytelling so
difficult is that the 18th century is in many senses closer to the Middle
Ages than modern times. Their minds had values and structures that we don't
understand. The seeds of modernity are there, but not modernity itself.
They were inventing the new world.
It's a tradition that continues in the United States.
CATHERINE: One of the points to
emerge from the series is that we're a country born out of denying its
past. Americans are always looking into the future, rejecting tradition
in favor of something to come. Maybe that's why most Americans know so
little about the founding of our country. And yet to overlook that history--the
story of how our political freedoms and rights were achieved--is to put
those liberties at risk.
