Like Elvis, Abe Lincoln is remembered more for his death than his birth — even on the national holiday connected with his birthday.
There’s something so dramatic about the assassination — in full view at a theater, five days after the end of the Civil War, the declaration by the assassin before the gaslights of the stage and the 12 day manhunt for him and mad ride through rural Maryland and Virginia, made it the stuff of legend, fodder for hundreds of books, the latest of which was a bestseller for Fox News gasbag Bill O’Reilly.
“Killing Lincoln” (National Geographic, 8 p.m.), the adaptation of the book for National Geographic Channel (which, like Fox News, is under the News Corp. umbrella) actually has as little to do with the O’Reilly book as possible.
Instead, screenwriter Erik Jendresen spent months researching every aspect of the famous case, such that every part of dialogue is sourced, the setting of every room, when possible, is exactly as it was (though filming was done in a scorching hot Richmond last summer over just over 15 days).
For rangy actor Billy Campbell, who portrays the president, it is the second consecutive role as a charismatic politician who gets shot (following his role on the first two seasons of “The Killing”).
Contacted for the job while out sailing the Nova Scocia tall ship Picton Castle , he kept the beard he had been growing and jumped right into it, he says, with no time left to analyze accents or approaches, the way Daniel Day Lewis did for his likely Oscar-winning depiction in Stephen Spielberg’s “Lincoln.”
In fact, Campbell didn’t have time to go see the Spielberg film. He still hasn’t seen it, he said over lunch last week at a restaurant also called Lincoln in Washington, D.C., blocks from the Ford’s Theatre that has been rebuilt as a national shrine, and the less well known boarding house across the street that is actually a shrine where the President died. “I tried to see it last week but the power went out in the theater,” he shrugged.
For all the focus on Campbell in the film, whose recreations are nearly as impressive as those in the much bigger budget big screen film, the actor who dominates “Killing Lincoln” is Tom Hanks, hired as a narrator after the film was complete, sitting in a chair and playing something of the omniscient reaper at the end of each scene, intoning “Lincoln had 72 hours to live!” and later: “Booth had three days to live..”
For Nat Geo, it’s a high profile project, enough to send the actor over to the TV Critics winter press tour in Pasadena last month (where Cambell helped close out an opening night party recounting how he had been a Confederate re-enactor growing up in Virginia, and talking about how Gen. Robert E. Lee didn’t like slavery any more than Lincoln did.
In D.C., international press were flown in to go on an all day trip to the actual sites built on sets and with CGI in the film — Ford’s Theatre, where the finger-sized single bullet derringer that was the murder weapon is on display in the basement museum, to the boarding house across the street open to tourists to peek into where the 16th President died, and the new conference center next door where a tower of Lincoln books ascends three stories (just to show that Lincoln is second only to Jesus as a subject for authors). Also, there was a gift shop with the Lincoln bobbleheads, T shirts and such.
Chartered buses traversed some of the Booth escape route to Maryland, stopping at the tavern and boarding house turned local museum where Booth stopped for more guns. It’s set still on a bit of a crossroads, where once was a livery and stable is now a Citgo station near a 7-11.
The tour guides in period costumes had way too much detail about the place but made the same comparison about Booth that the artistic director at Ford’s Theater had — as the most famous actor of his time, he was like Brad Pitt is today.
Turning back up to what was once called Washington City, a stop was made at the Soldier’s Home, a kind of pre-Camp David where the war was always a daily reminder. It was where Lincoln spent his D.C. summers with his family on a hill three miles from the White House, where he could feel a breeze on a hill and still see the Potomac in the distance.
Few of us will get to roam in the Lincoln bedroom of the White House, but the Lincoln cottage at the Soldier’s Home, reopened for visitors just five years ago, allows one to traverse the rooms where the President paced, thinking about the progress of the war. There were assassination attempts as the President rode his horse back and forth to work each day but the closest a gunman got was to hit his stovepipe hat, a scene that appears in the movie.
The screenwriter Erik Jendresen had some verbal volleys sent his way after a comment he made at the TV Critics press tour panel discussion last month when he said Booth “believed in what still probably 20 percent of this country believes in today. He could be a poster child for the Tea Party, actually.:
This didn’t go over well with conservative radio, book author O’Reilly or tea party members, who flooded National Geographic with calls. Even at the press conference Jendresen was given a chance to further explain himself, and he said:
If you look at sort of the politics at the time and a lot of the epitaphs that were being hurled at Lincoln, there was a feeling in the nation that is not dissimilar from what we have experienced in the last four years with the response to Barack Obama, the sense of an imperial presidency or sound bites about somebody who’s going to essentially proclaim himself king and take over. It’s stunning, to me, to read some of the newspaper articles and some of the interviews from the times, and some of the contents of some letters memoirs from the time. And some of the things that were thought about Lincoln in the South are so similar to and could almost betransposed to a dialect of today. It was really astonishing.
Leave it to pundits who like to complain about things they hadn’t seen, so it was a controversy for a couple of days. For Jendresen, it was a chance to really research an important historical moment and its aftermath. What he turned up, he said on the bus trip, was enough