John Adams: One-term president, prime-time HBO star

BY VERNE GAY | verne.gay@newsday.com

March 16, 2008

Who (or what) is John Adams?

a) A rather pricey but good beer.

b) Amy Adams' brother.

c) The second president of the United States.

If you picked a or b, then, boy, has HBO got a miniseries to set you straight.

Beginning Sunday at 8 p.m., nine brilliant hours on a president whom few probably can identify, and even fewer say (exactly) why he deserves nine hours on HBO in the first place. Consider a poll conducted by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni a few years ago. The poll found that only 33 percent of college seniors knew that George Washington commanded the troops at Yorktown.

How would these seniors do with our little quiz above?

Overcoming the deficiencies of American education has never been a singular goal of HBO's, so to say that the miniseries is a gamble is stating the obvious. But if this gamble succeeds, then this Founding Father may almost become as famous as the beer (Sam, that is).

Based on David McCullough's bestselling 2001 biography, "John Adams" is the progeny of Hollywood royalty. As producer, Tom Hanks has long championed this series. Gary Goetzman ("The Silence of the Lambs") has co-produced it. With Paul Giamatti as Adams and Laura Linney as Abigail, alongside a cast of (literally) hundreds, 18th century America - raw, violent, boiling and almost unquenchably vibrant - comes alive during these hours.

And so, by association, does a one-term president who died 182 years ago.

But why this one?

According to McCullough's 700-page account, Adams was brilliant, dogged, passionate, loyal, deeply learned and deeply dyspeptic. He had the misfortune to be overshadowed by charismatic leaders like Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who bookended his own presidency, which began March 4, 1797. But without him the revolution would have lost its intellectual moorings, and almost certainly its financial and diplomatic ones as well (he raised money in Holland for the cause during a particularly pivotal moment).

Adams was also a two-term vice president, and wrote thusly to Abigail (in one of thousands of surviving letters), "My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived."

Translation: This job stinks.

Yes, he complained (often) and bickered with many. He feuded bitterly with Jefferson (with whom he'd eventually reconcile), and even today his official White House biography speaks delicately of a certain "vanity." One gets the sense from McCullough's bio that the Continental Congress shipped him overseas because he wasn't much fun to be around.

During a call with reporters, someone observed that Giamatti was often drawn to "edgy, neurotic characters." What say Paul?

"What was sort of intriguing to me is that boiling under the surface [Adams had] a lot of anxiety about things, and I thought it would be interesting to dramatize," said the Oscar-nominated (" Cinderella Man") actor. "But few actors ever get the opportunity to play a character like this, and run the gamut [of emotions] from depression to being exultant. He was enormously intelligent, but also earthy. He was in love with his wonderful wife, and would fight with her. I got to do everything in this part."

Still, a curious subject for a multimillion-dollar biopic. An intriguing one as well.

A small-screen natural

In a recent call with writers, McCullough (perhaps best known to the TV generation as the wonderfully avuncular former host of PBS' "American Experience") explained why Adams has been dismissed, as well as why he's a natural for the small screen, too.