Under pressure on eve of HBO’s Lincoln Memorial concert

WASHINGTON —  Don Mischer is Hollywood’s go-to-guy for high-energy, classical spectacles -- four Super Bowl halftime extravaganzas, the opening and closing ceremonies for the Winter and Summer Olympic Games, enough televised award shows to fill a freight train with swag bags.

But even he is a bit awed by the setting of his latest project: the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Mischer is orchestrating today’s concert and opening ceremony for this week’s inauguration of the first African American president. That’s why Saturday’s crisp (OK, freezing) morning found him in a control booth near the memorial running everyone from Bruce Springsteen and Pete Seeger to a potentially fractious eagle through preconcert paces.

The atmosphere was sort of focused frenzy -- with a surprising leaven of humor. Mischer, who has won 13 Emmys, told one of his camera operators to consider hanging a steak from his lens to make sure the eagle -- added to awe the audience -- flew in the right direction. “Tell that eagle he has to fly to Camera 11 or that’s it. It’s back to Tennessee.” He added: “I would like a couple of rimshots in case the bird flies into a tree.”

He also had a few words about the performers, who kept stopping the rehearsal because of guitar problems. “Make sure they know this show is live. If there’s a guitar out, we’ve still got to go.”

So go the perils of live television. But this is different.

Some of the intensity of Saturday’s preparations sprang from a lead time that was, by Mischer’s meticulous standards, jaw-droppingly brief. As he explained in an interview, he and his associates spend as long as three years getting ready for an Olympic opening or closing, but in this instance he got just three weeks.

“It all happened so last-minute,” he said. “There were feelers about this event going around in our business way back before Thanksgiving, but I didn’t hear from the presidential campaign until four days after Christmas. At that point, I said to myself, ‘Man, we would normally spend four months. Can we really do this in three weeks?’ I told them, ‘There may be a few rough spots.’ ”

Still, Mischer called the assignment “an honor” and said he felt an unaccustomed “pressure to make this event memorable by striking the right emotional chords.”

Part of that pressure comes from the site of the concert itself. Mischer points out that the country will celebrate the bicentennial of the Great Emancipator’s birth this year and that “so many times in our history, people use Lincoln’s words when speaking about our most serious problems or to describe the hopes they have for the country.”

(Certainly that’s true of President-elect Barack Obama, who frequently quotes Lincoln and keeps a picture of that “other man from Illinois” on his office wall.)

Mischer also is acutely conscious of how often the Lincoln Memorial has served as the backdrop for significant events in the march toward civil rights.

He cited the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s immortal “I have a dream” speech of 1963 and Eleanor Roosevelt standing beside Marian Anderson on the steps in 1939 after the great black singer was denied a venue in Constitution Hall by, of all people, the Daughters of the American Revolution.

“It’s very significant to do a show in the presence of those memories,” Mischer said. Besides, he added, just having “Abraham Lincoln looking down over the performers’ shoulders will make every spoken word more meaningful and will give every piece of music or song more emotional value than it ever had before.”

Cold as it was Saturday, Mischer is clear that things may be even chillier today, when as many as a million people are expected to crowd the mall to hear Obama’s speech and follow the concert’s recitations, songs and musical performances.

Everyone from Bruce to Bono to Beyonce will perform. “The temperature will be 18 degrees,” Mischer said. “I think about people who will be waking up on this morning and standing in the cold, and I feel a great deal of responsibility about how they’ll feel when they walk away from it all.”

There will be something for everyone to carry away: songs of the civil rights movement, historical pieces, classical and country selections, as well as recitations from significant American documents.

“This is a historic event,” Mischer said. “It marks what I believe is a great turning point in the American story. We want them to feel good about being here. We want them to feel moved -- to give them courage and hope for a new beginning.”

Whatever else happens in Obama’s administration, Mischer is making sure that the new president’s first celebratory concert is on message.

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tina.daunt@latimes.com