An armchair commander

SOUTHBURY, Conn. —  Although Don Troiani was a pivotal behind-the-scenes historical advisor for “Cold Mountain,” the celebrated military history painter never set foot on the set during the film’s shooting in Romania.

Nor did the Southbury, Conn., resident ever catch a glimpse of glamorous Nicole Kidman, heroine of the tragic saga set in the Civil War. Nor did this author of several acclaimed books on Civil War military gear and garb get even a taste of being a silver-screen celebrity.

That’s because Troiani, whose paintings and painstaking scholarship have made him a household name among Civil War buffs, did his research and consulting at home.

For six months, the 53-year-old Civil War savant advised the filmmakers via the Internet, faxes, phones and FedEx.

“I was originally hired by costumers to do research and advise them on re-creating uniforms for the Civil War period,” Troiani says. “I worked for them for a month or two and was answering tons of questions from many other departments until they took me on as a consultant for uniforms and equipment for the entire film.”

Troiani served as a point man for authenticating a broad range of objects including regimental battle flags, uniforms, gunpowder barrels and fortifications, right down to the proper fork and firearm.

Generally, communication worked well, even if his phone rang at all hours of the day and night. It was sometimes difficult, he adds, because the various film-production departments were fiercely independent fiefdoms that didn’t like to communicate with one another. And not all of his movie contacts in Romania and Rome spoke fluent English.

“The set designers were all Italians. They were the same guys who did ‘Gangs of New York.’ Because ‘Cold Mountain’ was an international project, you were dealing with Americans, English, Italians and some Romanians.

“I would explain everything several times and then have to send them diagrams. Once I couldn’t explain to them how the Confederates would actually camp out. So I brought a couple of models out to my house and dressed them in period uniforms. We went out in my yard and built little brush shelters and tent-type shelters that Rebel soldiers used back then. I took digital photographs of my model soldiers making the shelters and sent those on.”

Troiani loves to work at home, a luxury he can afford because he lives in a historical researcher’s dream house. His sprawling, handsome three-story digs are a combination high-tech home-research center and traditional library stocked with thousands of military reference books and documents.

Not far from his books, papers and filing cabinets, he has an art studio, where he paints his meticulously researched battle scenes. Before putting brush to canvas, he likes to know virtually every inch of a battlefield’s terrain as it was, and exactly what the light and weather were like on that fateful day.

Troiani’s pride and joy seems to be the museum-like space he has stocked with a dazzling array of uniforms from the Civil War, the War of 1812 and the Revolutionary War. Looking like a Smithsonian showcase, the roomy quarters are jammed with martial flags, banners, sabers, guns, drums and brass instruments that look more lethal than the ancient firearms.

Among the curiosities is a crude wooden grave marker that was shipped home in the coffin of a Confederate soldier killed in battle. Such makeshift markers, Troiani explains, were used when fallen soldiers were temporarily buried on the battlefield. Later, the dead were exhumed and shipped home in a pine box, with the marker.

Name it and Troiani, a voracious hunter/gatherer of military memorabilia, probably has it. His collectibles range from rudimentary eating utensils to a 2,000-pound brass field cannon.

No historic detail is too small or too big to tend to, he says, whether it’s the shape of a fork or the design of a fort. Especially, he says, in a historically rooted film like “Cold Mountain,” which wanted to create a sense of what life was really like in the 1860s.

“For example,” he says, “when I read the scene in the script where Confederates are making breakfast, I forwarded information on what they would be cooking. I sent real recipes of the time and how the food would be cooked, along with images of the utensils that would be used and how the soldiers would actually hold them.”

A historical film consultant’s job, he says, is to try to prevent anachronisms and distortions from cropping up on the screen.

Troiani and Brian Pohanka, another noted film consultant, for example, vetoed a cavalry charge that the script had called for. Their objection? No such charge ever occurred at this battle. It was scrubbed. In its place, the two watchdogs suggested a gory, shockingly surreal scenario that actually happened: Union soldiers at the bottom of a giant crater being slaughtered by Confederates like fish in a barrel.

At the actual battle, Rebel soldiers gathered up muskets armed with bayonets they found lying around the crater top and hurled them down like javelins into the hapless soldiers below. The Confederates also used portable mortars to rain death on the heads of the Yankees in the crater -- another historically correct detail Troiani and Pohanka added.

In a much less dramatic blow for historic truth-in-packaging, Troiani trumped the anachronistic use of white tinware that the props department had purchased in Europe for the hospital scenes. “That kind of material didn’t come in until 1900, not the 1860s,” Troiani says.

No matter how carefully vetted, historical movies don’t ever score a 100 in history, says Troiani, who is noted in the art and collecting world for his painstaking research. (A Troiani historical painting, with a virtually photographic look, typically takes more than four years of research and brushwork. His larger historical paintings go for up to $60,000.)

How would Troiani rank “Cold Mountain” for accuracy on a scale of zero to 10? “I’d give it about an eight. But with me, most history films would only get a two or a three,” he adds.

“ ‘Gone With the Wind,’ a Civil War classic, I would give only a two for historical accuracy. Its offenses? The costumes and hairstyles.”