A Familiar ‘Path’

More than 285 actors in dark suits and thin ties stood in the crisp-looking White House of the 1960s as director John Frankenheimer demanded louder applause for Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, played by a bespectacled Alec Baldwin.

There is something eerie, though, on the set of HBO’s “Path to War,” which explores the agonizing decisions reached by Lyndon B. Johnson about the Vietnam conflict. It is the drizzly late October day after President Bush said there was credible information about another possible terrorist attack, and Frankenheimer finds little reassurance in the parallels between his current project and this country’s new, unfortunate reality.

“You have another president from Texas,” the 71-year-old director said in between bites of corn on the cob during a home-style Southern lunch break in his trailer. “You have another president [who] knows little to nothing about foreign affairs. You have another president facing a war he may not win. I’ve been accused of making movies ahead of their time, like ‘Manchurian Candidate.’ It would be nice to make a movie that could conceivably be of its time.”

At $17 million, “Path to War” is one of HBO’s biggest investments. It meticulously tracks the relationships between President Johnson and his two most influential war advisors, McNamara and Clark Clifford. Donald Sutherland plays the white-haired attorney, and Michael Gambon (“The Insider”) is President Johnson.

On this day, McNamara’s departure ceremony is being filmed. The scene was shot in an ornate, high-ceilinged room of the Pasadena Civic Center, which set designers converted into the East Room of the White House with a large fake chandelier and Styrofoam-framed portraits. Off camera, crew members read newspapers carrying headlines of the terrorist warning.

“It’s incredibly timely, because, while the circumstances are different, it’s about how a president conducts a war and the pressures within a cabinet,” said the film’s executive producer, Cary Brokaw, who feels the need to point out the irony in one of his other productions for HBO: the 1997 film, “Path to Paradise: The Untold Story of the World Trade Center Bombing.”

“There are clearly parallels to be drawn,” Brokaw said. “LBJ was led to believe that by escalating the U.S. involvement the war could be won. It has a very profound reference to the world we’re living in day-to-day and our actions in Afghanistan.”

The crew’s original shooting schedule, which included exterior shots of the Pentagon, the White House and Lafayette Park, was scrapped after the attacks because filming permits were impossible to secure in the locked-down capital. Images of the White House will be digitally inserted into the background of several scenes.

Written by Daniel M. Giat, “Path to War” is the story of the development project that could. It first landed at HBO eight years and almost 30 drafts ago. At one point the film was a four-hour miniseries, but it is now scheduled to air in May at no longer than 21/2 hours.

This is the first screenplay that Giat--who has made a living on what he calls a “handful of development deals”--will ever see come to life. It is a deeply personal project, and, like so many people who came of age during the Vietnam War, Giat recalls biographical milestones that seem hinged to events in the conflict.

He remembers walking out of his synagogue on Long Island after practicing for his bar mitzvah when he learned the Tet offensive had just occurred.

“I thought, ‘Great! The war will be over by my bar mitzvah. What a great gift!”’ But that was in 1968, and by the time Giat graduated from high school in 1972 he had a draft number, even though he was never called up.

“I was so opinionated and yet so unknowledgeable, and that has always been very embarrassing for me.”

His shame and an admitted case of survivor’s guilt produced a student of the Vietnam War. As he described a defining moment in the development process, he wiped away tears, shook his head and apologized. The memory reaches back to 1996, when he stumbled upon a U.S. Marine Corps reunion at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.

“I witnessed one of the most moving moments of my life,” Giat said. “The chaplain, the second in command, called them to the wall, where they laid the wreath. I always felt I wrote this in tribute to them.”

Giat was exhaustively conscientious in his research. Attached to the script is a 99-page annotation, as well as a lengthy list of sources. But overall, the film aims to humanize Johnson and show how his image of a Great Society, with attention to people of color and poverty, was completely trumped by a doomed war he knew would become his legacy.

“Unfortunately, his tragedy is the nation’s tragedy,” said Howard B. Dratch, who first met with Giat in 1991 to brainstorm a film about the Johnson administration. Dratch is now one of the executive producers, and he says he remembers countless meetings with HBO executives when he was the only one who still thought the script was alive.

In 1992 Giat and Dratch brought the treatment called “Counsel to the President” to independent producer Edgar Scherick, a World War II veteran whose film credits stretch back to “Take the Money and Run” (1969) and “The Stepford Wives” (1975). Scherick urged them to shine a more focused light on Johnson’s tragedy as caused by the conflict.

“It’s the story of a man and my country under terrible pressure, and it’s good food for drama,” Scherick said. “During Vietnam I had four children, and I was in no position to do much protesting.... I’ve been [producing for] a long, long time. I’m not a child. In the future when a student wants to know what it was like in the White House at the time, they’ll dig this movie out. It’s a look at the terrifying dilemma our country was caught up in.”

While “Path to War” is heavy on meetings and policy talk, it also contains moving subplots, like the one about McNamara’s wife and son, who developed bleeding ulcers as the U.S. became more and more deeply involved in Vietnam.

“It’s a hard movie to do because you have to emotionally involve the audience,” said Frankenheimer. “If they just want to learn, they can go to the History Channel for that. They don’t need me.” He said the relationship between Lady Bird and LBJ has to play out like a love story, or viewers won’t see Johnson’s quieter moments. “Lady Bird was the only person that Johnson really trusted. I have to establish the warmth of it--the depth of it.”

Many of the scenes contain chunks of dialogue between Johnson and his advisors, and Frankenheimer is determined to let the camera sit still on the face of the actor speaking. But other scenes, such as the one being filmed on this day, require hundreds of extras. In all, 99 actors have speaking parts in the movie, although Gambon dominates the script.

He had been approached 18 months ago by HBO, when Barry Levinson was still the director, but Levinson ran into scheduling conflicts, clearing the way for Frankenheimer.

A dialect coach helps Gambon mask his British accent with Johnson’s Texas drawl. Makeup artists have dyed his eyebrows and designed a toupee for him that mimics Johnson’s receding hair line. Although Gambon stands 6 feet tall, costumers gave him shoes with thick soles and inserted lifts to bring him up to Johnson’s stature.

“When [you’ve] got the lifts on and make those speeches, you feel presidential,” Gambon said. “But you feel so responsible.”

Some of the fictitious lines exchanged between characters seem prescient of today’s debates about the U.S. military action following the Sept. 11 attacks. During one briefing Clifford asks the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Earle Wheeler, “If the president proceeds with this plan, what in your view would constitute a victory?” The general responds that a “military victory in the traditional sense is not what we are seeking.”

“Path to War” aims to look at the turns taken by the most powerful men in the country. While Frankenheimer thinks there is redemption for Johnson, especially in Gambon’s portrayal, the film ultimately shows how sloppy things can get, even within the protected walls of the White House.

“These are human beings, and they go on the best instincts they have,” Giat said. “But we have to be mindful of their flaws and their hunger for power and influence.”