CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 4/04/08

Adapting Adams:
John Adams' Kirk Ellis

By jason davis

Screenwriter Kirk Ellis brings David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography to life as a seven-part HBO mini-series that seeks to redefine John Adams and the revolutionary era in which he lived.

Previously best known as the protagonist of the Tony Award-winning musical 1776 and often glossed over in American history courses as a speed bump between the presidencies of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, John Adams is finally getting his dramatic due in a seven-part HBO mini-series that examines a dedicated civil servant who—as HBO's publicity department so elegantly puts it—united the states of America. CS Weekly asks screenwriter Kirk Ellis what it took to bring Adams to life for an audience that scarcely knows he existed.

What did you know about John Adams before taking on this project?
Before I read David McCullough's book, I knew just as much as any average American school kid—not very much. We're taught that Adams (Paul Giamatti) signed the Alien and Sedition Act in 1798, was a bad president, and then we move on to Jefferson (Stephen Dillane). David's book helped to really cast light on a misunderstood man and, even more so, a misunderstood period in our history, one that has gotten a bad reputation for drama as being very musty and shopworn when in fact it's very exciting and very contemporary.

What interested you in the project?
I read the book when it came out. I'd started to read the book for pleasure, but unfortunately, you work long enough in the industry, you never quite read anything entirely for pleasure. I thought it would make a really good film. When I found out that [Tom] Hanks' company, Playtone, had bought the book, I immediately got back in touch with them. We had established a relationship on a television pilot about cadets at West Point that did not get made at ABC. Hanks and I both discovered this affinity for history, so we talked about our respective takes on the film and they meshed quite a bit.

How did you arrive at a seven-part structure for the mini-series?
There were a number of iterations going in. Initially, the project started as a 10-episode series. That was whittled down for reasons both creative and financial. Over the course of the development to the current seven-episode structure, which is actually almost nine hours of storytelling time—because episodes two and six run about 90 minutes—we ended up with this structure that really works for the film. No scene takes place that was not witnessed directly by Adams or [his wife] Abigail (Laura Linney), so it helps give a dramatic intensity to what could be a very sprawling and unfocused narrative. The episodes, to a degree, are self-contained, and each one stems from a pivotal moment in Adams' life. When you look at them in the overall arc of the nine hours, you see that there is a three-act structure in place.

With so much of John and Abigail's correspondence in existence, how does that help you gain insight into their speech and thoughts?
Having that body of written work by the participants is very unusual. Had this project been about Washington (David Morse) or Jefferson, we would not have had those resources, because those men burned their letters. We don't know enough about their interior dialogue to imagine it for a film. In Adams' case, we do. We know what he was thinking all the time throughout his life. The same is true for Abigail. It's one thing to simply take the letters and, without any emendation, just put them down in dialogue, which is not what happened here. The idea was to get beneath the words of the letters to the actual subtext and to dramatize that in scenes that incorporated some language from the letters but also extrapolated from them into new dialogue. The letters and literature of the time were helpful in another, and I think, more important way. That was to hone in on a proper idiom for the speech of the film. We don't know how colonial Americans sounded, but we can approximate their language based on two things: One—the fact that the separation between written and spoken English in America was less than it is today. Secondly—through the literature of the period, books by Laurence Stern, Tobias Smollett, and Samuel Richardson, especially—Pamela, a wonderful book that is told in an exchange of letters. We can get some sense of the cadence of language and the syntax that may have been used. That was instrumental in crafting the dialogue for the show.

Beyond McCullough's book, what other research did you do?
I have a bibliography of over 50 books. It includes all of John Adams' political and personal writings, the letters he exchanged with Abigail and Jefferson, Jefferson's writings, Franklin's (Tom Wilkinson) writings, other biographies of Adams, histories of the time—some of them contemporary to the period and some written very recently, and biographies of the other principal characters in the film like Hamilton (Rufus Sewell). The research alone took over a year.

After the musical 1776 made a villain of him, I was pleased to see John Dickinson's (Zeljko Ivanek) opposition to independence carefully backed up by his Quaker beliefs.
Dickinson is one of my favorite characters because he is so complex. One of the things that Tom Hanks made clear, echoing David McCullough, was that there were to be no villains in the piece. Everybody was to be respected and given their humanity. Dickinson is a principal player in all of this. I've talked to people who listened to Dickinson's speech in the second episode and began to think it wasn't such a good idea that we voted for independence. That means we succeeded in providing an even-handed view of these people.

Besides John and Abigail, did you find any other characters to be particularly fun to write?
Ben Franklin is a marvelous character, and he gives the early episodes of the film a very important comedic lift. Tom Wilkinson really puts that performance across. I'm particularly happy with the way Franklin is portrayed in the film, because too often, he's thought of as this avuncular curmudgeon, but not this wily and duplicitous politician that he must have been to achieve what he actually did.

All of the supporting characters are seen as Adams saw them, and as they are portrayed in David's book. They have an idiosyncrasy that may surprise, indeed alarm, people, but they are true to Adams' own perception of them.

What was the hardest aspect of this dramatization?
Initially, the concern was that so much of the action was interior. It involved very complex political discussions. At some point in the process, I thought I should stop thinking of that as a disadvantage and look at it as an opportunity. How often, as a writer in American television, especially, do you have a chance to slow the action and just let people talk? This was a time in which men spoke complex thoughts in complete sentences. That is a luxury not to be underestimated.

Where and how have you taken dramatic liberties with historic facts?
We strove—both in the writing process and the production process—to maintain an accuracy to history. We did not want to put people in situations where they were not. For instance, it's been queried since the first two episodes were broadcast, why we didn't dramatize the Boston Tea Party? Why it's only referred to in dialogue? Because Adams wasn't there. He did not participate in that event. He came to it a few days later and wrote glowingly of it in his diary. It's one thing to have him talk about it and another thing to have him actually be there. While there are variations, from time to time, with historical record, I don't see any of them as being untrue to the instance of the time. They involve things like the fact that in our version of the story, Nabby (Sarah Polley) and John Quincy (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) do not accompany Adams and Abigail to France. They were scripted in there originally. When we looked at it, it was really important, in that episode particularly, to dramatize the renaissance of John and Abigail's romance. Having the side stories with the kids there and their own preoccupations took away from that. So, we shifted things like Nabby's marriage to Colonel Smith (Andrew Scott) to America, when in fact they were married in England. Are they variances from the record? Sure. Do they significantly alter the theme? No, they don't.

Given that two episodes are devoted to Adams' tenure as an ambassador in Europe, was that something you were very interested in highlighting?
I was keen on that, as was Tom Hooper, the director. It was important to both of us that it be given its proper allotment of time in the series. It's among the least known aspects of Adams' life, and it's also fundamentally important to his change in political philosophy when he returns to America, having witnessed government as it's practiced in the old capitals of Europe. So, throughout this process, as we had to think about what we could keep and what we had to jettison, those sequences came up for grabs and we always managed to hang on to them. I'm so glad we did, because they give the film two different looks, and you really understand, as a viewer, when you see Adams trying to navigate the protocol of the French court, especially. How shocking it must have been for an American who was used to a very different way of doing things.

In the upcoming episodes, we'll see the falling out between Adams and Jefferson. How do you dramatize the collapse of such a significant friendship?
For me, the real undercurrent in the story of Adams and Jefferson is how a great friendship can be riven by political concerns. Adams is somebody who always put the greater good over the personal good. That got him into trouble many, many times. He resisted the rise of party politics, whereas Jefferson manipulated [it]. So, you see these two men, from very different backgrounds, with very different ideas about which government is best for America, become friends and become partners in independence, only to be separated by what happens in American politics after independence. Then, in one of those great scenes that you cannot invent, they reconcile very late in life and die on the same day—the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—the scene that I know some people, not familiar with the actual story, will say I invented for dramatic effect.

It must be annoying to get accused of inventing things that actually happened…
(Laughs) That's fine. Let people think it was for dramatic effect and then find out that it actually happened. Your goal is always to illuminate these people enough that the viewer actually wants to learn more and goes to a book, or to the library, or to a textbook or a new textbook, and digs deeper. That's all we can ask.

Is that what you hope the audience takes away from this?
Absolutely. You cannot spend five and a half years immersed in this era and not come away with an appreciation for what a monumental achievement the founding of this country was and how duty and sacrifice played such an important part in that founding. Adams, like his contemporaries, was someone who believed in public service and was willing to put every other consideration aside in order to make America a better country for the next generation. We can't overemphasize that, particularly in an election year.

Jason Davis has been the DVD Manager for CS Weekly, a contributing editor for Creative Screenwriting Magazine, and has written for Cinescape.com, MSN.com, and created the TV series Studio 13, which ran on Lorne Michaels' Burly TV network. He lives in the small space left over by his ever-expanding library of books, movies, and music.

Kirk Ellis, John Adams courtesy HBO

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