Behind that dollar bill face ...

Press, 20 December 1986, Page 19

Behind that dollar bill face ...

For the third year in a row top-flight mini-series will dominate prime-time summer viewing on Two. This year TVNZ has bought and stripped a further 12 of these smallscreen epics, a mixture of first run and repeats.

The Americans lead off the season for four consecutive nights from this evening with “George Washington.” This historical four-parter, which chronicles the life of Washington from the ages of 11 to 51, has proved something of a groundbreaker. “It turned out to be the first time in American television history Washington had ever been done — we couldn’t believe it,” says the producer, Richard Fielder. “America has ignored its own history.” Not unnaturally most Americans were woefully ignorant about their first president. And, what they thought they knew was mostly untrue ... George Washington did not chop down a cherry tree, he did not have wooden teeth, and he did not live in a continual state of unarmed warfare with his wife, Martha. Fielder’s idea and inspiration for the series came from “George Washington,” the Pulitzer Prize winning, fourvolume biography by James Thomas Flexner.

“The Flexner biography

was a revelation,” he says. “How could we have destroyed this man by turning him into a saint or hero, a monument, a face on a dollar bill?”

Fielder was given the freedom to treat Washington as a human being. “I didn’t have to keep this man on a pedestal. He was plagued .by angers, overwhelming ambition ... things I ■ could identify with. It was a history filled with dark places as well as light,” says Fielder.

Nor did Fielder encounter any resistance when it came to detailing the rela-

tionship of Wahsington with Sally Fairfax, the wife of his best friend.

Barry Bostwick plays Washington, and making up the all-star AngloAmerican cast are Patty Duke Astin (Martha), Jaclyn Smith (Sally Fairfax), the late James Mason (General Edward Braddock), Trevor Howard (Lord Fairfax), Lloyd Bridges (Caleb Quinn) and Robert Stack (General Stark). “George Washington,” which screens over four nights, was filmed entirely on location in Virginia and Pennsylvania. Many scenes were filmed on the sites where the historic events being dramatised actually occurred, including Washington’s home at Mount Vernon; the Governor’s Palace, the Capitol and the Raleigh Tavern, all in Colonial Williamsburg; the battlefield at Yorktown, Carlyle House in Alexandria, and George Mason’s plantation, Gunston Hall, in Lorton, Virginia. Historic Pennsylvania locations include Independence Hall in Philadelphia; Valley Forge, site of Washington’s winter encampment in 1777-1778, and both the House of Decision and the Delaware River at Washington Crossing. “George Washington” screens over four nights from this evening (Saturday) on Two.