Perhaps most widely known as host of the PBS series American Experience and narrator of Ken Burns documentary The Civil War, McCullough is twice a winner of each of the three most prestigious awards for historical writing - the Pulitzer and Parkman Prizes and the National Book Award. Furthermore, he has managed to rack up eye-popping sales, with his work on Adams now in its 65th printing with 2.7 million sales and 149 weeks on The New York Times best-seller lists.
"When you turn your work - your book - over to someone, you're putting your faith in their interpretation of your text," McCullough says of the transition from print to screen. "Two hours into our first meeting, I knew Tom Hanks was someone who was keenly interested in American history and totally committed to getting it right. And I must say, Tom Hanks never, ever let me down."
Hanks, Hooper and screenwriter Kirk Ellis made dozens of daring choices in their adaptation of McCullough's book, and the reward for their dedication to historical accuracy and detail is an immediate and gripping sense of verisimilitude.
The opening sequence is representative of the way in which the series successfully pulls viewers out of the present and transports them to 18th-century life as it was brutally lived on the ground - rather than in the prettified portraits of Founding Fathers that hang in schools.
Instead of the color and pageantry often used to open historical costume dramas in hopes of grabbing viewer attention, John Adams begins in 1770 with a solitary man on a horse that is gingerly trying to find its way along an icy road in a snowstorm. At least, it looks like a man on the horse. All one can see is a bundle of gray wool sitting in the saddle.
At the risk of tune-out, director Hooper (Elizabeth I) holds the desolate image until the viewer can almost feel the icy ruts under the horse's hooves and the snow tearing into the face of the man on its back.
The rider is Adams, making his way from his farm outside of Boston to Philadelphia for the gathering that would ultimately draft the Declaration of Independence.
Forget forming a government and founding a nation, just making it from Boston to Philadelphia on horseback in the winter seems a monumental achievement.
Hard realities
"You hear people say of days gone by, `Oh, that was a simpler time,'" McCullough says. "That's nonsense. Life was hard, harder than we have any idea. Because John Adams was stout, people often think of him as pudgy and soft.
