‘American President’s’ Cast of Characters

How can this be? April Fools’ Day was last week.

After hearing George Will as John Quincy Adams, Don Imus as Andrew Johnson and James Carville as Andrew Jackson--Jesse Ventura and Howard Stern weren’t available?--I knew that the makers of “The American President” had a sense of humor.

If not always a sense of history.

Although it was described as a “unique casting coup,” having these and other public figures be off-camera voices of presidents in this new PBS series may be the worst idea in the annals of documentarydom. Charlie Rose as John Tyler? Walter Cronkite as George Washington? Former Sen. Bob Dole as Herbert Hoover? Former Rep. Dan Rostenkowski as Chester Arthur? I mean, get a grip.

The apparent reasoning behind some of these exotic choices? Abe Lincoln grew up in Illinois, so his voice is done by Paul Simon, a former U.S. senator from that state. The thoughts of New Yorker Martin Van Buren are mouthed by former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo. And Ulysses S. Grant, a general before ascending to the White House, is given the voice of former Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf.

The responsible parties here are brothers Peter W. and Philip B. Kunhardt III and their father, Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., who wrote, produced and directed “The American President” and somehow, in a moment of giddiness, signed off on these voices for presidents who lived before the advent of recordings.

In doing so, they’ve injected comic absurdity into an otherwise watchable, if thin, series that groups the nation’s 41 presidents thematically by such categories as Sunday evening’s opening “Family Ties,” concerning presidents born to power, and “Happenstance,” about vice presidents who took over when chief executives died in office.

In separate interviews, President Clinton and former presidents Bush, Carter and Ford speak for themselves. Ronald Reagan and other former presidents from the TV Age show up in file footage.

A surface treatment is unavoidable. Cramming all these presidents into 10 hours gives you 14 1/2 minutes per guy.

And the jolt is immediate. On Sunday, when that sniffy syndicated columnist and ABC News pundit Will emotes amateurishly as Adams, “I cannot escape my destiny,” you almost expect Cokie and Sam to break in and urge him to keep his day job. In your mind’s eye, it’s not the sixth president but Will’s effete bow-tieness that’s on view.

The late great Jack Benny had a signature line that fits here: “Now stop that!”

Double takes are in order, too, during “Happenstance,” when a surreal printed message appears on the screen introducing “Don Imus as Andrew Johnson.” Say who? Imus the brash, muttering, hunched-over radio jokester as the president who succeeded the assassinated Lincoln? Listen:

“An inscrutable providence saw proper to remove Lincoln from this to, I trust, a better world, and I came in and took his place.” When Imus delivers this, you can almost see his furry brows shift word by word beneath his mass of wiry hair. Getting in touch with his inner hamminess at another point, Imus gathers steam in a higher voice (“I’m a goin’ for t’ tell ya here today, yes, today, that the people are everything!”) as if goosed.

I skipped around, watching only about half of the series. The master thespian I wanted not to miss was that Democratic Party hit man Carville--the guy who’s always bickering with his Republican wife, Mary Matalin, when not on CNN with Larry King--weighing in mightily as Jackson.

Not that Carville isn’t an actor on some level, but his forte is fantasy, making him hardly the kind of actor required for this sort of work.

Carville/Jackson: “My reputation is dearer to me than life.” And again: “I am denounced as a man of revengeful temper, with a tomahawk in one hand and a scalping knife in another. Many conceive me to be a ferocious animal.”

Here, he’s a ferocious farce. Some casting coup.

Presidents are an especially hot topic this election season, and this chain of handsome-looking but flawed and greatly abridged histories or vignettes, narrated flatly by veteran journalist Hugh Sidey, is barely a shadow of “American Presidents: Life Portraits.” That was the wonderfully smart, scholarly and conversational Peabody-winning series that C-SPAN produced in 1999.

As for this new celebrity-friendly series, its reliance on famous readers doesn’t obscure its focus on presidents but does distract from it. It also dramatizes something usually taken for granted. That’s the importance of documentary narrators--the best in the business are Will Lyman and historian David McCullough--and those in such films who speak the words of historical figures.

Actors’ voices have become a signature in the historical documentaries of Ken and Ric Burns, among others, the danger being that these professionals may misleadingly convey an eloquence or authority that wasn’t present in those whom they’re playing. There’s no danger of that in “The American President,” which is so muted by amateurism that sitting through it becomes problematic.

As Imus said on the air Tuesday morning about the windup of his own radio show, “It’s gonna be a great hour, and I’ll try to stay awake for it.”

*

* “The American President” airs Sunday through Thursday at 9 p.m. on KCET.

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be contacted via e-mail at calendar.letters@latimes.com.