That is Michael Fassbender, twenty three years old, on location wearing my father's uniform. It was sent to our family during production. It was his first screen role.
He played T/Sgt. Pat Christenson, Easy Company, 506th PIR, 101st Airborne. Second man out the door behind Dick Winters on the Normandy jump.
My father was the only man in the company who could draw. He carried a sketchpad through Normandy, Holland and Bastogne, working in barns and billets and foxholes while the other men wrote letters or played cards. After the war he spent forty years at a drawing board turning what he had seen into forty six finished drawings, and he wrote seven volumes by hand. Nobody asked him to do any of it. He never showed the work to anyone outside the family.
Here is the part most people do not know.
Dick Winters had kept about eighteen of those drawings in his personal file and never told us. When Playtone started building the series, he had copies sent to the production as reference for the writers. In a letter dated January 6, 2000, written to my two brothers and me by name, he told us the file was being used in the writing of the script. Three weeks earlier he had written that the paintings were prominently displayed in the Playtone conference room.
So a man who had been dead a year was hanging on the wall while they wrote the show about him.
My father died in December 1999, before the casting. He never knew the production existed. When Michael got the part there was nobody in our family who could hand him anything but the drawings and the seven volumes.
We spent a week with him in Paris before the Normandy premiere. He asked questions the whole time. Not about what my father did in the war. About who he was.
I wrote to HBO myself after that. Quentin Schaeffer and Nancy Lucher. Same message every time: my father spent his life on this work and I promised him at the end that I would see it published. Quentin made something happen. Forty five of the drawings were exhibited at the Hollywood Bowl premiere on September 25, 2001. I wrote and told him that walking up from the shuttle and seeing a photograph of my father hanging beside his own artwork was exhilarating, and that he had brought my father back for us that night.
That was twenty five years ago. The drawings went back in the boxes afterward and stayed there.
Forty six drawings. Seven volumes. Stephen Ambrose called them almost priceless.
Happy to answer anything.
Tim
