By Anonymous on Tuesday, July 24, 2001 - 10:42 am:

From: Arts and Lifestyle | Television |
Monday, July 16, 2001

One for the History Books
Hanks & Co. retell a U.S. Army unit's
epic tale in TV's 'Band of Brothers'

By DAVID BIANCULLI
Daily News TV Critic


PASADENA

Words can be as powerful as bullets, or so it seems, listening to Tom Hanks talk about making "Band of Brothers," a 10-hour, $120 million miniseries about a decorated Army unit in World War II.

The HBO project, for which Hanks and Steven Spielberg served as executive producers, is based on Stephen E. Ambrose's 1992 history of the Army's Easy Company, 506th Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division.

Relaxing in his hotel room Friday between a press conference and a dinner promoting "Band of Brothers," Hanks recalled how, while researching World War II for his role in Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan," he read books including several by Ambrose, "Ryan's" historical expert.

"It was like reading for fun; it wasn't any work," he said.

Hanks, whose Oscar-heavy career includes several films and TV projects based on real people and events (including "Apollo 13" and his miniseries on the Apollo space program, "From the Earth to the Moon"), first became interested in history, he said, thanks to one of his professors at California State University in Sacramento, who approached every history lesson by putting it into a clear, and often very human, context.

"I don't think I'd be a good scholastic historian whatsoever," Hanks said, "but somehow, when you do connect it to human behavior, to me it becomes a very palpable thing that I probably will carry around with me for much, much longer."

Ambrose's histories, Hanks said, are full of such revealing and unforgettable details. Many of those details made it into the HBO version, which will have its premiere in September — but not all of them.

"Regarding 'Band of Brothers,'" Hanks said, "there are countless details that I wish we could have gotten in. For example, at the Battle of the Bulge, guys were urinating on their weapons to thaw them out — because otherwise, the weapons froze up and seized up."

How do you leave something that potent out of the finished TV drama?

"By sticking it in the script and having the day be too long, and the director not thinking it's an important thing" Hanks replied.

Overall, though, Hanks — who has a cameo in the miniseries — says he is immensely pleased with what he and his colleagues were able to accomplish. In "Band of Brothers," they tell the story of one brave unit whose members parachuted into France on D-Day, captured Adolf Hitler's Eagle's Nest compound near the end of the war, and engaged in several key battles in between.


The cast of 'Band of Brothers' prepares for battle.
"I have to admit," Hanks said, referring to the footage captured by the show's eight directors (of whom he was one), "it's better than I thought it was going to be. I thought more stuff was going to get away from us.

"When we are translating," he added, "we are obviously going to have things that didn't happen. People are going to say stuff they never said. I don't know if [Rick Gomez's character, George Luz] carried a radio. I'm not so sure about that. But there it is, and I feel good when the pedigree of authenticity carries the day. That's the thing that matters most.

"What we're trying to do is have a patina of authenticity that shades the entire story from beginning to end. That's what we're trying to do. And we're looking [in postproduction] at what we did, and I think we accomplished it about 78% of the time, which I think is pretty damn good. I would have been satisfied with 60%."

Hanks cited one sequence, from an episode directed by co-executive producer Tony To, dramatizing a volley of fire used to cover the retreat of a patrol across a river.

"It was described by Ambrose," Hanks said, "as, 'Every gun on the Allied side of the river opened up.' And, boy! It's there, man. Tracers are going; it is absolute hell-on-Earth mayhem — and you get an understanding, 'Oh, that's how they did it.'"

Earlier, at the "Band of Brothers" press conference, Ambrose said flatly that the current interest in the war is no fad.

"The fascination with World War II is not going to fade," he said via satellite from Montana. "It was the greatest event of the 20th century. It determined that we're going to live in a democracy. And it will last."

"If you go back and take honest stock of perhaps the key story of our collective lifetime," Hanks said at the press conference, "you must return to the years between 1939 and 1945, in which you can honestly say the fate of the world hung in the balance. And had it not turned out the way it had then, I think, without question, the world would be a very, very palpably different place than it is right now.

"The reason why democracy is working right now is because democracy showed its final moment back in this very altruistic time," Hanks added, "when Americans went ashore in France and in other parts of the world, not to conquer, not to plant the flag and to [claim], to literally liberate from, truly, forces of evil."