The trailer...I will see this movie!

[Rob Wick]

Even though I'm not sure about his voice, I will see this movie. Hope I didn't miss someone else posting the full trailer.

Best
Rob

[LincolnMan]

Looks great. The voice is "okay"- we've all heard worse for sure.

[RJNorton]

I had trouble getting used to all the fading.

[BettyO]

It's HERE!!!

This trailer took my breath away -- and I got cold chills in the opening sequence of the burning of Richmond -- my great-great grandmother was there that night -

Fantastic!!

[Hess1865]

Interesting.
Any word as to how long it will be??

[Linda Anderson]

The Daily Mail has an article on the movie.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/art...ncoln.html

[Craig Hipkins]

Looks good. I know where I will be on November 09, or the 16th. I wonder why Day-Lewis didn't use his Bill "the butcher" voice from Gangs of New York

Craig

[L Verge]

Exactly what is the consensus of opinion on Lincoln's speech patterns, tonal qualities, etc.? Since we have no recordings to verify things, have there been descriptions by his contemporaries?

[Rob Wick]

The source escapes me, but I've always heard that he spoke with what was described as a high-pitched nasal twang. Many people believe Sam Waterston came close, but I think Hal Holbrook was probably closer. Of course, that's only my opinion.

Best
Rob

[L Verge]

I have read the same description - and that's about the only description I have ever seen. I think someone described it as a Midwestern twang like those from Indiana - which makes sense since his formative years were spent there.

[RJNorton]

There are a lot of descriptions, but here's one that seems to be fairly consistent with many. It comes from a gentleman named Horace White regarding a speech Lincoln made in Springfield in 1854:

"I observed that, although awkward, he was not in the least embarrassed. He began in a slow and hesitating manner, but without any mistakes of language, dates, or facts. It was evident that he had mastered his subject, that he knew what he was going to say, and that he knew he was right. He had a thin, high-pitched falsetto voice of much carrying power, that could be heard a long distance in spite of the bustle and tumult of a crowd. He had the accent and pronunciation peculiar to his native State, Kentucky."

Although White's description was made many years after the event, I have also seen several references to the "terrific carrying power" of Lincoln's voice at Gettysburg. Regarding the Gettysburg Address, Pennsylvania Governor Andrew G. Curtin said, "He pronounced that speech in a voice that all the multitude heard."

Thank you to Gene for sending this link.

[Joe Di Cola]

(09-14-2012 07:12 PM)Rob Wick Wrote:  The source escapes me, but I've always heard that he spoke with what was described as a high-pitched nasal twang. Many people believe Sam Waterston came close, but I think Hal Holbrook was probably closer. Of course, that's only my opinion.

Best
Rob

I agree, Rob; Hal Holbrook had it nailed. I am convinced, from the all-too-few descriptions we have of Lincoln's voice, that Holbrook did the best job. I feel the same after viewing the trailer for the new film.

[LincolnMan]

Speaking of movie trailers, here is the one for Abe Lincoln in Illinois: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryYZwg0Ib...re=related

[Laurie Verge]

As a member of The Lincoln Forum, I just received this notice:

SPECIAL FREE SCREENING OF SPIELBERG’S LINCOLN
AT THE LINCOLN FORUM NOVEMBER 15!
Dear Lincoln Forum Members,
Over the last few weeks, as you know, excitement has been building over the upcoming mid-November premiere of Steven Spielberg’s eagerly anticipated film, Lincoln, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, Tommy Lee Jones, and David Strathairn, and based in part on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s acclaimed book Team of Rivals.
The Forum recently learned that the Gateway Theater, located in the same complex as our headquarters Wyndham Hotel, has booked the film as a commercial attraction beginning November 16. It has further come to our attention that some of our registrants have been pre-booking tickets to some of the showings even though they may conflict with Lincoln Forum sessions.
We are pleased to report that at the request of Vice Chairman Harold Holzer, who served as Content Consultant for the movie, Mr. Spielberg and co-producer Kristie Macosko have most generously arranged a free Lincoln Forum preview screening of the movie for the evening of November 15 at 7 PM—the day before the Forum officially gets underway—at the same Gateway Theater. All Forum attendees who can make it to Gettysburg a day early—and we know many of you do come on the 15th—are invited to attend free as guests of Mr. Spielberg.

Unfortunately, my mobility issues have prevented me from attending the Forum for the past few years. Sure would like to be there for this screening.

[RJNorton]

Thanks to Bob Cook for sending this article from the New York Times:

Abe Lincoln as You’ve Never Heard Him
By CHARLES McGRATH
October 31, 2012

“NOW he belongs to the ages,” Edwin Stanton, Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of war, said at the president’s deathbed. “And to the studios,” he could have added.

The latest in a long parade of screen Abes, coming right on the heels of Benjamin Walker’s ax-swinging, martial arts version in “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” is Daniel Day-Lewis, who, though he grew up in England and Ireland and had to learn about Lincoln almost from scratch, plays the lead in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” which opens Friday.

Mr. Day-Lewis, 55, has already won two best actor Oscars, and his performance here, tender and soulful, convincingly weary and stoop-shouldered, will almost certainly earn him a nomination. He’s neither as zombified as Walter Huston in D. W. Griffith’s 1930 biopic “Abraham Lincoln,” nor as brash and self-assured as Henry Fonda in John Ford’s “Young Mr. Lincoln” (1939), nor as stagy and ponderous as Raymond Massey, a year later, in “Abe Lincoln in Illinois,” in which he sounds, during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, a lot like the television evangelist Harold Camping proclaiming the end of the world once more.

Tall and thin, with big hands and a long neck, Mr. Day-Lewis physically resembles Lincoln more nearly than many of his predecessors — more, certainly, than Kris Kristofferson, who in the 1995 television movie “Tad” had to wear platform shoes to boost him to Lincolnesque stature. Yet the first time Mr. Day-Lewis opens his mouth in the movie, he’s also a little startling. His Lincoln speaks not in Massey’s stentorian baritone, or in the echoing, ballpark-announcer tones of the Disneyland animatronic Lincoln first heard at the 1964 World’s Fair, but in a voice that is high, earnest and folksy.

Mr. Day-Lewis is famously fussy about what parts he takes, sometimes waiting years between films while spending time in both Ireland and America with his wife, Rebecca Miller (the daughter of Arthur Miller, whom he met while filming “The Crucible”), and their two sons. (He has a third, older son with the actress Isabelle Adjani.) For a while he seemed to give up movies altogether and apprenticed himself to a cabinetmaker and a cobbler.

Mr. Day-Lewis is even fussier about what he calls “the work”: his process of preparing and then inhabiting a part. For “The Last of the Mohicans” he taught himself to build a canoe, shoot a flintlock and trap and skin animals. For the opening scene of “My Left Foot,” about Christy Brown, an artist with cerebral palsy, he taught himself to put a record on a turntable with his toes; he also insisted on remaining in a wheelchair between takes and being fed by the crew.

He learned to box, naturally, for “The Boxer,” in which he played a prizefighter and former member of the Irish Republican Army and in the process broke his nose and damaged his back. To play the gang leader Bill the Butcher in “Gangs of New York,” he took butchering lessons, and to play Abraham Lincoln he half-convinced himself that he was Abraham Lincoln.

Mr. Day-Lewis, who has a deep voice and a British accent, not in the least Lincoln-like, prefers not to talk much about his method of acting. He doesn’t entirely understand it himself, he says, and doesn’t want to. “There’s a tendency now to deconstruct and analyze everything,” he said during a recent interview in New York, “and I think that’s a self-defeating part of the enterprise.”

He added: “It sounds pretentious, I know. I recognize all the practical work that needs to be done, the dirty work, which I love: the work in the soil, the rooting around in the hope that you might find a gem. But I need to believe that there is a cohesive mystery that ties all these things together, and I try not to separate them.”

Mr. Spielberg, who had never directed Mr. Day-Lewis before, said of working with him: “I never once looked the gift horse in the mouth. I never asked Daniel about his process. I didn’t want to know.”

They did talk a lot about Lincoln, however, not just on set but also starting in 2003, when Mr. Spielberg first approached Mr. Day-Lewis. The script then was very different — less presidential and more about the Civil War, Mr. Spielberg said — and Mr. Day-Lewis didn’t care for it. He also said he thought that the idea of playing Lincoln — or of his playing Lincoln, anyway — was preposterous.

Six years later Mr. Spielberg came back with a new script: by Tony Kushner, loosely based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” and covering just the last four months of Lincoln’s life. That’s when he pushed the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, through Congress. “I found it quite intriguing,” Mr. Day-Lewis said. “I thought it was a great idea — for someone else.”

Even after accepting the part, “I thought this is a very, very bad idea,” he added. “But by that time it was too late. I had already been drawn into Lincoln’s orbit. He has a very powerful orbit, which is interesting because we tend to hold him at such a distance. He’s been mythologized almost to the point of dehumanization. But when you begin to approach him, he almost instantly becomes welcoming and accessible, the way he was in life.”

Mr. Day-Lewis prepared for the part not by splitting rails or doing sums on the back of a shovel but mostly by reading. He started with Ms. Goodwin’s book, pored over Lincoln’s own writing and finished up with the Carl Sandburg biography. He also spent a lot of time studying the photographs taken toward the end of Lincoln’s life by Alexander Gardner. “I looked at them the way you sometimes look at your own reflection in a mirror and wonder who that person is looking back at you,” he said.

All told he spent about a year studying and thinking about Lincoln. “There are always practical decisions to be made about any character you’re playing,” he explained. “But I always try to find my way toward, and into, a life in a manner that allows me to think those decisions make themselves.”

The voice was one such decision. There is historical evidence, in the form of contemporary accounts, that Lincoln had a high-pitched voice, and Mr. Day-Lewis has a private theory that higher voices carry better in crowds, and that made Lincoln such an effective orator.

“All these things are variables, luckily for me,” he said, smiling. “No one can categorically say this is or isn’t what Lincoln sounded like.” For any part, he went on, he listens for a voice, and generally he hears it at some point. “That to me was a genuine breakthrough for Lincoln,” he said, adding that being able to reproduce a voice after you’ve heard it is another matter and so, sometimes, is holding on to it.

To hold on to Lincoln’s voice, he used it all the time, between takes and even after the filming was over. Mr. Spielberg said he couldn’t remember for certain whether Mr. Day-Lewis used his Lincoln voice in their private conversations but then added: “I just came to see him as the character. I assume he didn’t change the voice. Why would he?”

Jared Harris (better known to most Americans as Lane Pryce in “Mad Men”) plays Ulysses S. Grant in the movie. He recalled that like other British cast and crew members on the set, he was asked not to throw Mr. Day-Lewis off by speaking in a British accent, so Mr. Harris too stayed in character.

“It was sort of an extended improvisation,” he said in a telephone interview. “You didn’t go up to him and say, ‘Hey, did you see the Pirates game last night?’ It was important for him to retain the attitude, if you like, and the dialect he had created. So we would sit there and joke, for example, about the Vicksburg campaign.” He added, “At the end of the day sometimes we’d ride back in the car, and he’d stay in character but talk about ‘Mad Men,’ which of course he couldn’t know about, because television hadn’t been invented then.”

Mr. Kushner said that Mr. Day-Lewis warned him that once shooting began he would no longer be speaking to him, only to Mr. Spielberg. He also recalled a day early in the filming when they shot possibly the movie’s most important scene: a speech Lincoln gives to his cabinet explaining the importance of the 13th Amendment.

“Everyone’s jaw was on the floor,” he said. “It was one of the great things I’ve ever seen. To do that, you have to be there, in that moment. It’s not psychosis; it’s sustained concentration. Is all that necessary, the staying in character? It makes sense to me.” He added: “I’ve never seen a great actor do a major role that didn’t cost a lot. They’re sacrificial animals of a sort.”

Mr. Day-Lewis said that he felt a “great sadness” when the movie was done and that he still feels connected to it. “I’m woefully one-track-minded,” he said. “Without sounding unhinged, I know I’m not Abraham Lincoln. I’m aware of that. But the truth is the entire game is about creating an illusion, and for whatever reason, and mad as it may sound, some part of me can allow myself to believe for a period for time without questioning, and that’s the trick.” He laughed. “Maybe it’s a terrible revelation about myself that one does feel able to do that.”