ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 16, 1997 TAG: 9702140020
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOSEPH J. ELLIS
MY INITIAL advice to Ken Burns was clear, sharp-edged and, as subsequent events would show, dead wrong. You cannot make a documentary film about Thomas Jefferson, I warned, because Jefferson predates the photograph. All the earlier Burns documentaries depended upon gritty photos - of Civil War battles, old-time baseball players or Western landscapes - artfully arranged and mixed with talking heads who explained what the pictures meant.
This was the signature style of Burns's production company, Florentine Films, but it could not work for an 18th-century subject.
What's more, Jefferson was all about interiors, about layered personae floating in a sea of enigma. Film is all about exteriors and observable action. The essential Jeffersonian action occurred inside his head, a place no camera could go. He was a man of words and ideas, therefore the proper subject for a book but not a film.
Since I was just starting a biography of Jefferson, my advice also had a transparently self-serving purpose. Loosely translated, it meant that Jefferson was my turf. Only a writer could get the American Sphinx to speak.
Burns listened attentively, then proceeded to destroy my defenses by asking if I would appear on camera for his ``Thomas Jefferson.'' A few weeks later, Camilla Rockwell, a producer of the Jefferson documentary with Burns and his longtime collaborator at Florentine Films, arrived at my house with lights and cameras.
In retrospect, Rockwell caught me at the perfect moment. I had been working on my book for about a year, long enough to have developed some interpretive hunches but not long enough to have my creative instincts blocked by inconvenient pieces of evidence. I was therefore poised to provide sound-bite wisdom of the following sort:
Jefferson is America's Everyman, and it's not just any man who can be Everyman.
The best and worst of American history are inextricably entangled in Jefferson, so anyone who confines his search to one side of the moral equation is destined to miss a big portion of the story.
Jefferson is like one of those dirigibles at a Super Bowl, floating above the stadium and flashing inspirational messages to both teams.
This sounded pretty good to me at the time. (Indeed, some of the sound bites survived later encounters with the evidence and got into my book.) I gradually began to conjure up the image of Joseph Ellis as the Shelby Foote of the film, recalling that sales of Foote's books had gone up exponentially after his bravura performance in the landmark Burns film on the Civil War.
My earlier doubts about the feasibility of a documentary film on Jefferson quickly dissolved. I leapt aboard the project as a consultant.
Two years later, after several meetings and memo exchanges, all the consultants were gathered at the headquarters of Florentine Films in Walpole, N.H., to argue about the final editing decisions. We sat around a large table while the raw footage flickered away on a makeshift screen about the size of a book. It quickly became obvious that Foote had nothing to fear from me. Most of my on-camera eloquence had ended up on the cutting-room floor. The star of the film was Monticello.
That made a certain sense, because Monticello was still around to photograph and Jefferson wasn't. Moreover, the architecture and carefully designed nooks and crannies of Monticello could be depicted as visual renditions of that elusive thing called Jefferson's mind. Not bad. Think about Jefferson's affinity for octagon-shaped rooms as a metaphor for his multifaceted personality. Or those incredibly steep and narrow staircases to the upstairs bedrooms as emblematic of his secretive character. I was starting to think like a film maker.
But a spirited debate broke out because all the consultants were professional historians. And the historical truth was that during Jefferson's lifetime, Monticello never really looked the way it does now. It was always in some state of construction or repair.
Burns had also included several photographs of slaves that dated from the Civil War era, suggesting they were slaves on Jefferson's plantation. But, we protested, Jefferson's slaves probably did not look like that. Many of them were only a generation removed from Africa and still bore visible traces of their African origins.
Burns initially declared these violations of historical accuracy to be covered by his poetic license. We insisted that he check his poetic license at the door. I was now thinking like a historian.
You see, during the two years since I had testified on film, I had written my book about Jefferson. I now actually knew a lot about his drafting of the Declaration of Independence, his presidency, his role in the Louisiana Purchase.
I had thought about the chief ingredients of his character: his sentimental style with women, his talent for self-deception, his ability to play hide-and-seek inside himself. I had developed a full repertory of stories about his tortured compromise with slavery, to include his apparent serenity while strolling past the slave quarters on Mulberry Row at Monticello while simultaneously thinking grand thoughts about human equality.
I could even explain why anyone who claimed to know the truth about his alleged sexual liaison with Sally Hemings was either a fool or a liar. I was brimming over with good Jeffersonian stuff.
But my acquired knowledge had become a burden. It created countless roadblocks to all sweeping generalizations. Instead of a creative resource, I had become an enlightened nuisance, capable only of ``yes, but'' wisdom. The film needed someone who could make Jefferson's shaded nuances into sharper images. All I had were words. If Burns had listened to my advice, his documentary film on Jefferson would have remained in perpetual production.
He obviously managed to press on without me. I have not seen the final version but will be tuned in with millions of other viewers to see if the great American Sphinx can be made to speak on film. Meanwhile, my book, with that image in its title, will issue forth this same week, accompanied by one preliminary review that describes its approach to Jefferson as ``intriguingly cinematic.'' Could it be ... ?
Joseph J. Ellis, Ford Foundation Professor of American History at Mount Holyoke College, is author of ``American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson.''
- New York Times News Service
LENGTH: Long : 116 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: File art. An engraving, circa 1830, of the West Frontby CNBof Monticello