Todd Melby - A Lot Can Happen in the Middle of Nowhere: The Untold Story of the Making of Fargo

A LOT

Can Happen in the Middle of

NOWHERE

A LOT

Can Happen in the Middle of

NOWHERE

The Untold Story of the Making of Fargo

TODD MELBY

Foreword by William H. Macy

Copyright 2021 by Todd Melby. Photograph copyrights indicated with image captions. Other materials copyright 2021 by the Minnesota Historical Society. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, write to the Minnesota Historical Society Press, 345 Kellogg Blvd. W., St. Paul, MN 55102-1906.

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ISBN: 978-1-68134-188-0 (paper)

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020950775

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Contents

by William H. Macy

Foreword

Its common for an actor to be asked, Did you know the film would turn out so well when you read the script? The truthful answer is usually no. And if youre young or new in your career, there is the nagging thought that the film cant be that good if theyre casting me. But I knew Fargo would be magnificent from my first reading of the script. A great script, talented directors, and a wonderful part well, duh. I was in my little cabin in the middle of Vermont when I got the call, and I had no one to tell. I went outside and screamed for twenty minutes.

I remember the set as being very calm and quiet. We were called to Minnesota before shooting began to rehearse and work with Liz Himelstein on the accent. But Minnesota had one of its freakish winter warm spells, and Joel and Ethan Coen were out looking for snow. I kept trying to get Peter Stormare and Steve Buscemi to go out and get in trouble with me in Minneapolis, but they always turned me down, preferring to stay in and work on the script. I remember the guys at the Oldsmobile dealership, where we shot for nearly a week, really wanted to sell me a Toronado. I remember sitting at the dealership office desk, doodling on a pad while a shot was being set up, and Ethan looked at my doodles, laughed, and decided to shoot them in the film. I remember Roger Deakinss quiet shorthand with his crew as he set up his magical lighting. I remember Joel, Buddhalike, while Ethan paced the set. Ethans big note to me was to always stomp the snow off my shoes when I walked into the Lundegaard house. I dont remember a note from Joel. I remember the lovely music in the dialogue.

Toward the end of shooting, production came to me, knowing I had a few acres in Vermont, and asked if I wanted to buy the wood chipper. It was an excellent one, and I had admired it. But they had taken the thing apart in order to make the leg-in-the-chipper gag work, and I said no. I really regret that decision.

Fargo changed everything for me, and I will always be grateful to Joel and Ethan. I recently came upon the film while channel surfing. I watched the whole thing, and I loved it. It was difficult to recognize my young self, but Jerry Lundegaard was just as I remembered him.

Directing has been described as building a boat while youre in the water. The director is asked hundreds of questions during the prep weeks and through shooting. Which actor do you want to cast? Do you like the green shirt or the red one? Where do you want to put the camera? As mundane as some of the questions are, and no matter how long the day has been or how behind schedule you might be, the director had better think long and hard before answering, because at some point he or she will sit in an editing room and stare at that damn red shirt, knowing that it will be red until the end of time. This book will give you a glimpse into some of the thousands of questions Joel and Ethan had to answer, and you will delight in how masterful their answers were.

William H. Macy
Hollywood, California

Preface

Movies arent escapism for me. I dont just show up at the multiplex or flip on Netflix hoping to find something worth watching. I stalk trailers, reviews, listings, and special screenings like a gambler studying The Racing Form. At age eight, I talked my mother into buying me a ticket to 2001: A Space Odyssey. At nineteen, I watched All That Jazz six times. At thirty-four, I took the day off work to attend a midafternoon screening of Pulp Fiction. At age fifty-two, I messed up. Instead of flying to San Francisco for a rare, five-and-a-half-hour screening of Abel Gances 1927 silent epic, Napolon, I hunkered down in North Dakota to report on an oil boom.

Seemed like a good idea at the time.

In the mid-eighties, the Coen Brothers got my attention with Blood Simple, an eerie thriller that seduced me on a Saturday night and wooed me back to the theater the next afternoon. On my second viewing, I snuggled in just three rows from the screen so the rain on the windshield, the bullets through the wall, the knife through the hand, and the shovel to the head would seem that much closer. Blood Simple and the Coen Brothers captivated me like a beguiling dame in a Raymond Chandler novel. A decade or so later, when I learned the pair had made Fargo, I knew where Id be on opening night.

The Coens didnt film Fargo in North Dakotas largest city. The plan was to film Minneapolis scenes in Minneapolis and its suburbs, many of the locations not far from Joel and Ethans childhood home in St. Louis Park. The prairie on the edge of the suburbs, on the outskirts of places like Chaska and Eden Prairie, would serve as stand-ins for rural highways prowled by Marge Gunderson, the films pregnant heroine. However, in early 1995, Minneapolis lacked snow. So the Coens caravanned to Grand Forks, North Dakota, bunked at the Holiday Inn, and made excursions to Minnesota and North Dakota landscapes near the Canadian border so Fargo would look like the white, desolate Fargo of their imagination.

Lots of the suburban scenes in Fargo were shot along the I-394 corridor to the west of Minneapolis, in a series of middle-class malls, automobile showrooms, and corporate office towers tucked next to cloverleafs. Continue west on I-394, and the road narrows to two lanes and gets a new name: US Route 12. That road winds its way across western Minnesota, South Dakota, Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, and, hundreds of miles later, to a little prairie town where I was born.

Hettinger, North Dakota, is a city of about 1,221 souls in the arid western part of the state. During the winter of 1942, when my father was six years old, photographer John F. Vachon arrived. The US Library of Congress owns nineteen of Vachons black-and-white negatives from his visit. One shows a Hettinger shoe repairman proudly leaning on a snow shovel, having just cleared the sidewalk in front of his shop. Others feature abandoned farm equipment on a deserted road near a church, a lonely two-story house surrounded by snow, and a birds-eye view of a solitary figure in a dark coat trudging through Hettingers quiet streets on an overcast winter day. My favorite is Hettinger, North Dakota (vicinity). U.S. Highway 12. A diamond-shaped sign indicates the road curves to the right, only the pavement is damn near invisible. Fierce winds have covered the highway with white snow and clumps of dirt. On the left side of the frame, a series of telephone poles hint at the citys connection to the outside world. But on this day, locals are trapped inside, far away from civilization.