Interview with Executive Producer Catherine Allan and writer Ron Blumer
LIBERTY! The American Revolution was written by Ron Blumer, who has
worked with Middlemarch on a number of projects, including Empire of
Reason.
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Ellen Hovde, Ron Blumer,
Muffie Meyer and Catherine Allan
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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.
