Bridging the Life of Barnum : Father and son team up to play the larger-than-life show-biz visionary.

When Jordan Bridges was in fifth grade, he did an oral report on P.T. Barnum, already captivated by the infamous King of the Circus. His father, actor Beau Bridges, helped him find a voice and a costume.

Little did he know that 15 years later, he and his father would share a wig of voluminous curls to portray six decades of Barnum in a four-hour miniseries. Being shown Sunday and Monday on A&E;, “P.T. Barnum” is a sweeping look at the gigantic life of Phineas Taylor Barnum, whose vision of entertainment and the ways it could be marketed for the masses helped shape the entertainment industry; and whose pursuit of fame, riches and glory embodied the early promise of the American Dream.

This time, dad did the homework, taking a field trip to the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport, Conn., pouring through letters and journals, looking at photographs and reading Barnum’s autobiography.

Director Simon Wincer says he was initially worried that casting father and son “might be a bit gimmicky,” but changed his mind once Jordan, 25, read for the part.

Shooting in a cold Montreal winter, the father-and-son team worked together to make the transition from young to old Barnum as seamless as possible. They began by studying a lone audio clip of Barnum’s grand booming New England show-biz voice, a few sentences recorded in London shortly after the invention of the phonograph.

“It begins, ‘I thus address the world,’ ” remembers Beau Bridges over tuna tartare and crab cakes at a Beverly Hills hotel. “It was scratchy, but it gave me a sense of what he sounded like, which was very theatrical, almost English-sounding. My son--because he’s classically trained--was all over it. Then there’s me with my California twang. Jordan helped me tremendously, and hopefully I get close to matching him.”

Says Jordan Bridges: “I listened to that fascinating recording over and over. For a while on my own I went for that New Englandy, stagy thing, but when I listened to my father, I realized it would have been jarring, so I started to really do my father.” The actors read one another’s scenes, and the younger Bridges says he studied his father’s mannerisms--from his eyebrow gymnastics to his hand flourishes.

“This part was wonderful, I think, for him,” says Jordan Bridges. “A lot of time he has to tone down his instincts, but Barnum is so huge that he had room to go with it, let all of his gestures come to the surface.”

Wincer found in directing the elder Bridges that “Beau brought so much energy to the part it was almost overwhelming.” Bridges, who on this day is soft-spoken and toned down, his hands most often folded in front of him, says that it was a challenge to learn the lines of a big talker who spoke a mile a minute in almost every scene

“Barnum was very comfortable with language,” Bridges says. “I felt this guy had to be very precise and clear; there couldn’t be any wasted moves, like watching a great basketball player. When I’m trying to express myself, I tend to do a lot of mumbling. I was worried because that doesn’t belong with Barnum.”

Bridges says he was drawn to the energetic and unshakable dreamer and visionary hustler in Barnum, who believed he could make the world a better place by producing “The Greatest Show on Earth” for ladies, gentlemen and children of all ages.

“When he was trying to get you to come to one of his shows, he would do anything,” Bridges says of Barnum’s oft-times sensationalist tactics for drawing a crowd, as well as his ability to manipulate the media to publicize his cause. “But he always delivered once he got them in the room.”

Bridges takes a moment to reminisce about the days when he and his brother Jeff would take their flatbed truck, wired with sound equipment, into market parking lots, where they staged fistfights to draw a crowd before regaling them with “impromptu scenes from ‘Come Blow Your Horn’ or some weird thing. So I know all about that hustle,” he says with a twinkle in his eye.

Like many people, Bridges admits he knew little beyond the surface profile of Barnum: “I always thought of him as a circus hustler, kind of a cheesy guy. But I think he was a true visionary who thought entertainment was as vital to a human being as breathing, eating. It was sustenance, and he found great joy providing that to families. Here’s a guy who was momentous in my chosen career. He was Mr. Show Business.”

Writer Lionel Chetwynd says he also wanted to highlight Barnum’s place in the American story. “Barnum is the model for modern America,” says Chetwynd. “The first time he saw Manhattan was in 1821 on a cattle drive from Bethel, Conn. . . . When he dies, the Flatiron Building is up and Barnum advertising is on the side of it. Modern America was already distinguishable. Mass entertainment was there, and the more you looked, the more you could see Barnum had his hand in it.”

But Chetwynd says he wanted to capture more than Barnum’s triumphs, in some cases leaving out interesting real-life events--such as a visit from Abraham Lincoln--in favor of making an attempt to show the darker, more interior sides of the man who drank too much, who made and lost his fortune several times over, facing painful obstacles including the loss of his wife and the death of his child.

Bridges says that he had mixed feelings about Barnum, a man who was accused of exploiting the Tom Thumbs of the world to make a buck, who often neglected his own family in vigorous pursuit of his own dreams.

“You could love him for a lot, because he was so bold and exciting and had such a zest for life,” Bridges says. “But he was also narrow-minded, exploited people, sometimes ignored his own family. In the end I think you basically have to love the person that you’re playing, so I got comfortable with P.T., I enjoyed his energy. He wanted to celebrate the good things in life. Basically he had a good heart. He tried to be as good a man as he could.”

Bridges says that while he made a lot of money off Tom Thumb, for example, he also made the dwarf rich. “He considered the people he hired as his family. He may have exploited them to the public at large but he took care of them. I went to his grave site and right next to him is Tom Thumb. Barnum introduced him to the kings and queens of Europe, and the first time Barnum lost his fortune, Tom Thumb came and bailed him out.”

“People will find fault with him for ignoring his own children,” says Bridges. “But I think he believed that all children were in a way his children--to turn on, to affect and to communicate to. Because he was bigger than life, this guy.”

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* “P.T. Barnum” appears Sunday at 5 and 9 p.m. on A&E;, concluding Monday at the same times. The network has rated it TV--PG (may be unsuitable for young children).

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“You could love him for a lot, because he was so bold and exciting and had such a zest for life. But he was also narrow-minded, exploited people, sometimes ignored his own family.”

BEAU BRIDGES

actor, ‘P.T. Barnum’