Paul Giamatti stays true to John Adams on HBO

Playing America's second president in HBO's " John Adams" was quite the hands-on experience for Paul Giamatti.

On a break from his governmental duties at his Massachusetts farm, Adams shows his son, John Quincy, the finer points of working with manure - manually. "He was obsessed with coming up with a better kind of manure," the actor explains. "And that was real manure ... of some kind."

As unpleasant as it might have been for the actor, Giamatti insisted the producers keep the scene intact. "It was eccentric," he says, "but Adams took great pride in the fact that he was a real farmer, and it was emblematic of his being a real person."

The seven-part miniseries (which premiered Sunday and airs at 9 p.m. this Sunday) is, in fact, loaded with realistic portrayals of both the people and the period which, its creators feel, will depict the American Revolution in a way not previously available to audiences.

"I think it's as close as anything has ever been to bringing those people and that timealive in a fashion that I don't think people will ever forget," says historian David McCullough, whose book "John Adams" is the basis for the series.

"Anything else would have been a waste of time," adds executive producer Tom Hanks, shaking a bag of John Adams golden dollar coins he keeps on his desk.

Founding feathers

Everything from the Boston Massacre and the vote for independence to the Adams family's primitive farm life, smallpox outbreaks and barbarous practices like tarring and feathering are portrayed with gritty accuracy.

"It was very important to all of us that it be a sensory experience," explains Laura Linney, who plays Abigail Adams. "It was not an elegant time."

Perhaps most important, though, is the portrayal of America's Founding Fathers as more than the one-dimensional, schoolbook images. "We tend to think of them as godlike characters - marble deities or folk figures," McCullough explains.

"We have stereotypes about what the Declaration of Independence was and who these men were," Linney adds. "We know they were great men - but why were they great men?"

The most intriguing, of course, is Adams himself, who, says HBO Films president Colin Callender, was nothing short of the complicated figure Giamatti portrays.

Adams was a "rational man," he notes, "and yet a man who's impetuously impulsive and often acts without thinking. He's humble, yet madly ambitious. He was a simple man, who was very vain. He was a man who loved his family, yet spent half his life away from them. And Paul is fearless in portraying all of this, warts and all."

His wife was his strength

As if those weren't enough personal issues for one founding father, Giamatti adds that Adams was "neurotic and he was depressive. And he was a hypochondriac. He would have complete collapses, and it was never entirely clear what was wrong with him."

Balancing out Adams' shortfalls were the strengths of his wife, Abigail, who suffered those long gaps away from her husband - as long as five years - forcing her to run the farm and family alone.

Despite such separation, however, the two maintained a durable and relatively close relationship, as evidenced by their letters to each other - all of which Linney read in her preparation for the role.

"From the letters, you not only get the deep affection that they had for each other, but also that they were true partners," the actress notes. "She understood where he was and why he had to be there. But it was tough on her. She wasn't a saint."

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