Presidential Movie Quote/Trivia of the Day With today being February 12th, this movie seemed very appropriate. Abraham Lincoln - I cant listen to this anymore. I cant accomplish a goddamn thing of any worth until we cure ourselves of slavery and end this pestilential war! I wonder if any of you or anyone else knows it. I know! I need this! This amendment is that cure! Weve stepped out upon the world stage now. Now! With the fate of human dignity in our hands. Bloods been spilled to afford us this moment now! Now! Now! And you grouse so and heckle and dodge about like pettifogging Tammany Hall hucksters! -Abraham Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln) Did you know? In February 2013, numerous news sources reported that this movie led to the final, official 50-state ratification of the 13th Amendment, nearly 150 years after it was ratified by three-fourths of the US states. In November 2012, Dr Ranjan Batra, a (non-historian) academic at the University of Mississippi, saw the movie Lincoln. He did an Internet search to find out more about the 13th Amendment, and, along with his colleague Ken Sullivan, discovered that although Mississippi voted to ratify the amendment in 1995, a clerical oversight caused that vote to remain unacknowledged officially: the Mississippi Secretary of State never sent the votes result to the US Office of the Federal Register. Sullivan also went to see the film, and then the two men urged the office of the Mississippi Secretary of State to file that paperwork, which they did on January 30, 2013; on February 7, 2013, the director of the Federal Register responded that the resolution had been received and that the State of Mississippi had finally ratified the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Steven Spielberg has explained that during the movies climactic scene in which the names of House of Representative members are being called to vote on the 13th Amendment, the names of many of the men who voted No --for various reasons--were actually changed in the film so as not to embarrass the living descendants of these men whose reputations might have been stained by their negative vote-casting. During the 3.5 months of filming, Steven Spielberg addressed his actors in character: he called Daniel Day-Lewis Mr. President (i.e. Abraham Lincoln) and Sally Field Mrs. Lincoln, or Molly (i.e. Mary Todd Lincoln). Additionally, he wore a suit every day on set: I think I wanted to get into the role, more than anything else, of being part of that experience - because we were recreating a piece of history. And so I didnt want to look like the schlubby, baseball cap wearing 21st century guy; I wanted to be like the cast. The great-grandfather of Michael Stanton Kennedy was a newspaperman from the town where his character, Hiram Price, lived. When filming the scene where the 13th Amendment passes, Kennedy started to cry and couldnt explain why until later, when he told Steven Spielberg Were in this room recreating one of the most important moments in American history... and up there [in the balcony] with the press sat my great-grandfather. By winning the Academy Award for Best Actor for the film, Daniel Day-Lewis became the first actor or actress to win an acting Oscar of any kind for a movie directed by Steven Spielberg. The ticking heard from Abraham Lincolns pocket watch as he sits at his desk and plays with it is the actual ticking sound from the watch he carried in his pocket. An audio engineer went to the museum in Kentucky where the watch is kept to get sound bites from it. Sally Field was so determined to play Mary Todd Lincoln, she begged Steven Spielberg for the chance to screen test alongside Daniel Day-Lewis. Spielberg believed she was too old to play the part, but Field was adamant. She recalled, Im 10 years older than Daniel and 20 years older than Abraham Lincolns wife was and Steven told me he didnt see me in the role. But I knew I was right for this part and begged him to let me audition for it. He was kind enough to do that and Daniel is such a sweetheart that he flew over from his home in Ireland to screen test with me. Ill love him forever for that. After Liam Neeson dropped out, Steven Spielberg returned to his original choice for the titular role of Abraham Lincoln, Daniel Day-Lewis. Day-Lewis declined because he didnt know if he could play such an iconic role. It was Leonardo DiCaprio who convinced him to take the role after Spielberg told him that Day-Lewis declined. It is unknown how DiCaprio convinced Day-Lewis to take the role. Once Daniel Day-Lewis decided on the voice that he would use to portray Lincoln, he sent an audiotape of it to Director Steven Spielberg in a box with a skull & crossbones on it so no one but he would hear it first. Steven Spielberg spent 12 years researching the film. He recreated Abraham Lincolns Executive Mansion office precisely, with the same wallpaper and books Lincoln used. The ticking of Lincolns watch in the film is the sound of Lincolns actual pocket watch. Lincolns watch is housed in the Kentucky Historical Society in Frankfort, Kentucky (not the Lincoln Presidential Library.) It is the watch he carried the day of his assassination. Every major character in the film was a real person or at least a composite of real figures and the film strives to reflect the actual actions or thoughts of the historical figures. Although some viewers were surprised by the usage of the word f*ck in the movie, the Oxford English Dictionary dates the word back to (at least) the early 1500s, around 350 years before the American Civil War and Abraham Lincolns presidency. In the movie, the word is used only twice, both times by the vulgar and rough Bilbo character as a way of demonstrating his uncouthness. Viewers who thought they also heard Lincoln using the term to describe Tammany Hall hucksters during a monologue actually misheard the then-common word pettifogging, which means arguing endlessly over small legal details. James Spader was personally instructed by Daniel Day-Lewis to be as nasty as possible to portray William N. Bilbo. At one point in the movie, Abraham Lincoln scornfully references Tammany Hall. In Daniel Day-Lewiss earlier work, Gangs of New York, Day-Lewiss character is in a quasi-alliance with Boss William M. Tweed (played by Jim Broadbent in that film), who ran Tammany Hall during the Civil War. Describing his experience playing Abraham Lincoln, Daniel Day-Lewis said, I never, ever felt that depth of love for another human being that I never met. And thats, I think, probably the effect that Lincoln has on most people that take the time to discover him... I wish he had stayed [with me] forever.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Feb 2014 23:48:00 +0000
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