See and hear how historians at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum assisted Hollywood in making the 2012 blockbuster film, Lincoln, on Thursday, September 20, at 7:30 pm, at Farley’s Music Hall, Elsah, Illinois.
Ian Patrick Hunt, Chief of Acquisitions, ALPLM, will present clips from the acclaimed movie together with explanations of how he and others at the Springfield Museum helped Academy Award winning actor, Daniel Day-Lewis, Pulitzer Prize author, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Lincoln producer of Kathleen Kennedy achieve historic accuracy and authenticity in the Steven Spielberg film about the 16th President of the United States.
Daniel Day-Lewis, who played Abraham Lincoln, Goodwin and Kennedy visited Springfield and the ALPLM in 2010 in preparing to make the film. In addition to the Museum, they visited the Lincoln Home and Lincoln’s law office in order to absorb the whole environment in which Lincoln lived and walked.
Lewis, in particular, immersed himself into the physical world of Lincoln. At the museum, he examined special artifacts and read everything he could to make himself become the character of Lincoln on the screen.
The movie, which depicts the intense political fight to pass the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, ending slavery in the U.S., is based on Goodwin’s 2005 book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.
Ian Hunt has advised on numerous publications, television programs and movies about the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln. He is also a consultant too the U.S. State Department Public Diplomacy Program.
Hunt’s presentation, “From History to Hollywood: The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum and Making the Movie, Lincoln,” is the third of this year’s Hosmer-Williams Lectures sponsored by Historic Elsah Foundation and underwritten by Liberty Bank.
The program is free and open to the public. Reservations are not required. Parking is available. Refreshments will be served following the lecture.