Still curious about George

LOS ANGELES — George Washington has one of the most recognizable mugs on the planet. But what was inside that head?

The History Channel program "Washington The Warrior" attempts to answer this and other questions about the formative years of America's first president in a two-hour Memorial Day special.

"We all know the Washington on the dollar bill and Mount Rushmore, and we know him as the president. But the more we started thinking about it, the more we realized that there is a vast undiscovered territory about Washington's early life," says Dolores Gavin, the History Channel's director of historical programming.

"One battle at a time," Gavin says, the program follows "America's first action hero" — through his transformation from a brash young officer, nearly killed during the French and Indian War in the mid-1750s, into the wiser Revolutionary War hero of Yorktown in 1781.

"His gut instinct got him into a lot of trouble as a young man," she adds, "but later he doesn't go down the path of brash action. He thinks it through."

The production is narrated by Stacy Keach, with Shea Patrick and Jackson Bolt portraying the tall, imposing Washington at two stages of his military career. They do so without words, because, as Gavin explains, "We made the decision that we wanted deliberately to stay away from the spoken word. We wanted them to just forward the story."

The battle sequences were re-created in Lithuania, with about 1,500 re-enactors.

Lithuania provided excellent locations for the battles, and sets were created with great attention to historical accuracy. Computer-generated imagery was used to complete the look.

"The story of Washington is an incredibly epic story, and we always took the approach that without CGI done in the appropriate way, we wouldn't really be able to convey the epic landscape in which he maneuvered," says Gavin.

The filmmakers called on the insight of numerous historians to help form a fully three-dimensional portrait of this ambitious man, who lost more battles than he won yet managed to found a nation.

Revolutionary War expert Wayne E. Lee of the University of North Carolina, who makes an appearance in the show, says there are "mounds and mounds and shelves and shelves" of Washington's writing, but his feelings are rarely exposed.

"One of the primary values of an 18th-century gentleman was reticence, and Washington in particular was very interested in cultivating an image of not unconcern, but stoicism."

Lee, who has complete confidence in the producers' concern for accuracy, acknowledges experts tend to be very picky.

"Some historians really feel that filmed versions of history are problematic because of all the things they get wrong. To a certain extent I agree, but I also tend to think that any conversation that begins because of a film is better than none at all."

Gavin believes viewers no longer want their history "filtered from a dry textbook" that offers only one-dimensional portraits of historic figures.

"I think now we want to pull heroes close," she says. "We want to see their humanness and their mistakes, and most importantly, how they learned from their mistakes, because then it feels like we know them."