(light music) - Hello, and welcome to "Prairie Pulse".

Coming up a little bit later in the show we'll tour the sugar beet museum in Crookston, Minnesota.

But at first Matt Olien got a chance to sit down with Todd Melby about a new book.

- And my guest is Todd Melby.

The author of a wonderful new book "A Lot Can Happen in the Middle of Nowhere, The Untold Story of the Making of Fargo."

So this is a subject near and dear to our hearts here in Fargo.

So Todd, thanks for coming on "Prairie Pulse".

- Thank you for having me.

- Just some background on yourself.

Where you're from originally, your background, that kind of thing.

- Sure, sure.

I'm from Western North Dakota.

I was born in Henninger, also graduated from high school there.

I live in Minneapolis now.

So this was a natural project for me because of my North Dakota roots and where I live in Minneapolis.

And the fact that the Cohen Brothers are from Minneapolis and obviously "Fargo" is very Nordic.

- So how'd you get started writing this book, researching, why this subject?

- So five years ago I produced a radio documentary about the subject, mostly about the accent.

Like We Don't Talk Like That, was the name of the radio documentary and we interviewed William H. Macy and the dialect coach and a bunch of the other actors.

And then I said to myself, well, this could be a book.

Of course, I'm gonna have to do a lot more work but this could be a book.

So I pursued it.

- And what kind of research did you do?

Who'd you talk to?

- I did so much research, so, so much research.

I interviewed about 45 people, cast and crew members, both local in the Twin Cities and North Dakota, and also nationally.

And I also went to libraries in Los Angeles, found a super early version of the script interviewed a local casting director who turned me onto audition tapes.

I got a production handbook.

I found all this background information that was kind of hidden in various places that I uncovered and that I shared with readers.

- And did you interview everybody?

I mean the Cohen's, McDormand, - No, not everybody.

- Who did not participate?

- I would have loved to interview everybody.

And the guy that just wrote the "Goodfellas" book, he missed a couple of actors.

It's very, very hard in a big project like this to get everybody.

So I didn't interview the Cohen brothers.

I didn't interview Francis McDormand, nor the two actors that played the kidnappers but just about everybody else.

- And you got Macy.

- Got William H. Macy.

William H. Macy wrote the foreword for the book.

- He did, we'll talk about that in a minute.

Can you talk about the casting of this film and the casting struggles?

- When Joel and Ethan Cohen wrote the screenplay they thought of three actors for specific parts.

So Francis McDormand as obviously Marge Gunderson, and then Buscemi and Peter Stormare as the kidnappers.

Other than that, all the other rules were up for grabs.

So Macy actually auditioned for a different part.

And then they asked him to read for Jerry.

And of course he was happy to read for Jerry and he fought for the role of Jerry.

And he famously traveled to New York to crash an audition to do yet another you know, audition for Macy.

Supposedly he threatened to shoot Ethan's dog if Ethan didn't give him the role.

There was a local Twin Cities actor by the name of Bill Shepherd who was considered, who they had called back after call back after call back for, but ultimately they chose Macy.

- And I met the casting director for Fargo.

She was here years ago doing a talk and yes, the local actor was really seemed like had the foot up on Macy to get Lundegaard.

Correct?

- I dunno if he had the foot up or not but he was definitely in the mix.

And he said that he hadn't auditioned very much for roles in the past that roles had just kind of come to him.

So he wasn't really good at the audition process.

And also I think, he didn't do as well at the super emotional dark scenes.

Like he did better at the lighter scenes.

So that scene where William H. Macy's character is calling in and pretending that he didn't know that his wife got kidnapped and he's on the phone and he's practicing this little speech, like that was tough for Shepard.

Shepard told me.

- Okay.

Interesting.

Yeah.

And what did Macy tell you about this film?

He wrote the forward.

He's very open about this film really made him, he's much more I think accessible talking about this movie than maybe the Cohen's or Francis McDormand are.

So tell me about that?

- I think he's grateful that he got the role that propelled his career to such stratospheric heights.

I mean, this role made him, and he said, when he read the script that he knew it was something special.

He said he'd read a lot of scripts before and he'd actually written scripts before.

And he said it just spoke to him and that he felt he could be as duplicitous as Jerry Lundegaard needed to be.

- And what did he write in the foreword for you?

- He wrote in the forward kind of his memory of getting the role, how he was at a cabin in Vermont and was keeping his fingers crossed.

Then when he heard he got the role that he was like obviously crazy excited and went outside and kind of let out a joyous roar.

He also said like a car salesman at the car dealership where they filmed the car dealership scenes in Richfield, Minnesota, that one of the guys there tried to sell him a car.

So he obviously had positive memories of the entire experience.

- When was the film shot, can you give us that timeline where the locations, famously the opening scene is not shot in Fargo.

There were several bars here that would have been perfect I always felt, but that's not how movies are shot sometimes.

So tell us about the shooting time schedule.

- Sure, it was a January, February and March of 1995 and they'd done prep work in 1994, came back to shoot it in the deep winter months of Minneapolis, St. Paul in '95.

And then there was no snow.

Like I looked up the National Weather Service data for those three months.

And if you just look down snow it's like zero, zero, zero trace.

And I also like read old newspaper articles by the chief meteorologist the Star Tribune had hired to write weather reports.

And obviously he's talking about it's a really warm winter.

And so you can just imagine Joel and Ethan just sort of freaking out that they've got no snow.

So for a lot of those Twin City scenes, which are mostly indoors, but as characters walk in and outside you'll see little bits of snow that are manufactured.

And then for the airport scene at the parking ramp where Steve Buscemi goes and steals the license plates, that scene is manufactured snow.

And I talk about that in the book and I interviewed the snow maker and he talks about how he and his crew were up on the ramp all night with these giant snow guns, shooting out snow, kind of like you might have at a ski resort.

But as far as the big outdoor scenes like the triple homicide investigation that needed to be outside with Marge down there with her coffee mug.

And of course, Steve Buscemi trying to bury the money in the snow with all that.

So all that they couldn't fake they needed big outdoor snow.

And so they just gave up on Minneapolis St. Paul.

- That was up by Pembina for the most part, correct?

- Correct.

Yeah.

So the whole crew came up to to Grand Forks and spent several weeks at the Holiday Inn in Grand Forks, and then went further north to shoot these big exterior scenes.

- Amazing.

The accents.

This was probably the most talked about aspect of the movie around here, when it was released.

Talk about the decisions by the Cohen brothers how far to go with the accents.

We've all heard that accent growing up around here, especially in Minnesota, talk about the decisions to how far push it.

- They definitely wanted that accent all the way from the beginning.

If you read the screenplay and you can buy it, like it's written in the dialect.

I mean, there are words that are written in the screenplay that they write like they want the actors to pronounce them.

So groceries isn't spelled G-R-O-C, they spell it G-R-O-W.

So it's groceries and believe me, it's in two words in the screenplay, it's a one word like believe me.

So they had that idea from the beginning.

Then they talked to a friend of theirs, who they went to private school with, and who was working as a reporter in Minneapolis and said like, will you go around and just record the sounds of Minnesotans with us.

And they were doing that.

So they could find like the best Minnesota from an accent point of view to share that sound with the actors.

So they found that woman who they really, really like, they like the lilt to her voice and they passed on that cassette to the dialect coach.

So that the dialect coach could take this cassette and play it for the non-Minnesotans who were gonna pretend to be Minnesotans and North Dakotan's in the movie.

I mean, Kristin Rudrud from "Fargo" didn't need that help.

- Nope.

- Like, et cetera, et cetera.

Lots of the local people didn't need that help.

But Macy needed that help, McDormand needed that help, the actor who played Mike Yanagita, who was from Los Angeles.

He needed that help.

So the actors who weren't Minnesotans or North Dakotan's were coached.

- Have you ever been able to find out why they named the movie "Fargo"?

- Well, Joel likes to joke it's because no one would see a movie called Brainerd.

- Okay.

- But I also think there's something about the word Fargo.

- There is.

- And I like Fargo.

I'm familiar with Fargo.

I enjoy spending several nights here, but people even only as far away as like four hours away, Minneapolis, St. Paul, a lot of them think of Fargo as is this distant, mysterious place.

And like, imagine if you're in Los Angeles, New York or Miami, you think of "Fargo" as even more distant and mysterious.

And so I think for the Cohen Brothers Fargo was just a place that was distant, mysterious but they had this dark underbelly where like bad things would happen.

- What do the Cohen's and Frances McDormand think of this movie?

- Oh, they love it.

I mean, it made all of their careers.

I mean, the Cohen Brothers and Frances hadn't been nominated for any Academy Awards before this, it was nominated for multiple Academy Awards, one won two Academy Awards, and just sort of raised their level in Hollywood.

And it I think it made it easier for big name actors to want to work with them suddenly.

They weren't just like crazy independent guys off to the side.

They were like, oh, these guys are like top, top filmmakers.

- Can you put your finger, Todd, on what eventually made this movie a cult phenomenon?

Not only around here, it's beloved all over the world.

- It's beloved all over the world, and it's gonna be playing in London at the British Film Institute in June.

And I know it played in Australia recently.

So around the world, people love "Fargo".

I mean, Francis McDormand when she was in Paris with a theater company she had Parisians come up to her and say, (speaks in French) "Fargo".

People really, really like this movie.

So it's got the typical Cohensian elements of being dark and funny at the same time, which is appealing to lots of folks.

But lots of people think that the Cohen Brothers movies are are cold, most Cohen Brothers movies anyway They don't really have this connection between people very much, but this movie is different.

I mean, this movie has Francis McDormand's character.

She's in love with her husband and it's not just pretend love or going through the motions love.

I mean, it's real dear commitment.

I mean she brings him night crawlers, even after she's done the homicide investigation she's thinking of the night crawlers, and he brings her Araby's.

They just I think that that warmth is like something we if we don't have that in our marriage, it's like we want that in our marriages.

And I think that's part of the appeal.

- Now you've obtained some audition tapes from some of the actors who got cast.

We're gonna look at those we're gonna look John Carroll Lynch and two of the escorts.

How'd you get those tapes?

- I interviewed the film's local casting director.

And so as I was interviewing her about her work and what it was like to work with Joel and Ethan and the actors that they auditioned, she mentioned she had these tapes, and I said, "Jane can you give me those tapes?

I really would like to look at them."

And she goes, "Well they're in my barn, and we're cleaning out the barn."

And I just kept calling her and emailing her and just politely prodding and begging like, Jane, could you please find those tapes for me?

So finally she found the tapes and we got the actors permission to share them with with viewers.

- And let's take a look now at audition tapes for three of the actors who were ultimately cast in "Fargo".

- [Woman] Hey hun.

- I brought some lunch, Margie.

What are those?

Night crawlers?

- [Woman] Yeah.

- Thanks, hun.

- Yeah, you bet.

Thanks for lunch.

So what do we got here?

Araby's?

- [Woman] So how's the painting going?

- Oh, pretty good.

I heard the Halpins are entering a painting this year.

- [Woman] Oh you're better than them.

- They're real good.

- [Woman] They're good, Norm, but your the best.

- Thank, hun.

- [Woman] Larissa Kokemot.

(indistinct) - [Woman] So where you girls from?

- Chaska.

I went to school in White Bear Lake.

- [Woman] Okay.

I want you to tell me what these fellas look like.

- Well, the little guy, he was kind of funny looking.

- [Woman] In what way?

- Like, I dunno, just funny looking.

- [Woman] Like, could you be more specific?

- I couldn't really say, he wasn't circumcised.

- [Woman] Was he funny looking apart from that?

- Yeah.

- [Woman] So you're having sex with the little fella then?

- Uh-huh.

- [Woman] Anything else you can tell me about him?

- No, like I say he was, he was funny looking.

- [Woman] Let's just give it a read.

- Okay.

This is Michelle Hutchinson reading for the hookers.

- [Woman] So where are you girls from?

- Chaska.

But I went to high school in Bear Lake.

- [Woman] Okay.

All right.

I want you to tell me what these fellas look like?

- Well, the little guy, he was kind of funny looking.

- [Woman] In what way?

- I don't know.

Just, I don't know.

- [Woman] Can you be any more specific?

- Couldn't really say, he wasn't circumcised.

Was he funny looking apart from that?

- Yeah.

- [Woman] So you were having sex with a little fellow then?

- Uh-huh.

- [Woman] Is there anything else you could tell me about him?

- No, like I say, he was funny looking.

- Todd, it's really amazing to see an audition compared to the onscreen performance.

Talk about that.

- Well, in an audition, especially a super early audition the actors in most of the cases they're reading from the script, it's called a table read, they don't have it memorized yet.

And so they haven't totally got the characters down and they haven't received input from the director.

So they're just trying to feel things out especially I think if you were to watch the entire John Carroll Lynch audition, which goes on for about four or five minutes, you hear him get feedback from the casting director.

I mean, and then of course the only reason she's giving feedback is because she likes him, because I watched hours and hours of these tapes.

And if she didn't like your performance at all, she'd just say, thank you.

And go on to the next person.

So the fact when she does give you feedback it means there's potential that she's seen.

- Can you talk about the initial reaction in this region that was negative toward the accents and why that was in general?

- Right, right.

I think it was just because it was so close to home and we weren't used to seeing ourselves on television or in the movies.

I mean, if you're a new Yorker or maybe even from Boston you're used to seeing yourself in the movies a lot or every now and then, and people have done your accent before, but nobody had paid attention to us and our accent.

So we never had it presented to us since we weren't forced to look in the mirror and see it.

So I think that was a lot of it is that we, no one had cared before, it was just us, right?

So I think that was most of it.

And then once people got used to it and once the movie became popular, and then once people kind of realized that maybe, maybe they weren't just poking fun of us, maybe they were celebrating it.

I'm still not sure which one it was.

I think it's a combination.

I think that the it's more about the behavior than the accent that they're sort of criticizing.

That's my take on the Cohen Brothers and this film.

But I think now 25 years later, like all is forgiven.

We love "Fargo".

- Right, yeah.

Were the Cohen's, Ethan, Joel, Macy, McDormand, were they surprised when the Oscar talk got started, and this was really a contender to win best picture.

It lost to "The English Patient".

Shouldn't have, that's my two cents.

- Who talks about "The English Patient" anymore?

- They talk about how long it is, how boring it is, that's what they talk about.

Were they surprised?

- Yes, definitely surprised because you think about the movie before this was "Hudsucker Proxy", big, big studio budget, $30 million studio budget and hardly anybody went to see it.

I mean, Joel joked, that he was surprised that the studio didn't repossess Ethan's car it lost so much money.

And so to think that a movie that's super regional and maybe even only specific to Northern Minnesota and North Dakota would have some sort of national and international resonance was super surprising.

I mean, they've since said that if "Fargo" is a hit you can't predict anything.

So it was definitely a surprise.

- Yeah.

Interesting.

Are there any other specific interesting shooting stories that you happened onto?

- Oh, there's so many.

Kind of don't know where to start.

- Just a few.

- Yeah.

Let's see.

So I like the story of J. Todd Anderson who played victim in the field.

He was the fat guy in the red parka, he was gawking as Buscemi was dragging the highway patrol officer off the interstate, or I guess it really wasn't an interstate.

It was a deserted two-lane highway.

But anyway, he had to run from the upside down car and then he'd get shot in the back.

But he had trouble with his timing and they had to reshoot that scene a bunch.

And every time they had to reshoot it, they had to move it away into a different part of the snow.

And they only had so many red jackets with the fake gunshots squib in it.

And so finally just to get him scared enough to do that scene right, they packed a bunch of snow up against the car.

So he'd be panicked trying to get out of the car, and Joel yelled at him extra loud.

And so then he panicked like they really wanted him to panic, because he needed to be panicked.

- Can you you put your finger on what you think makes the Cohen's so successful.

What do they have?

There's other film directors that have kind of that quirky thing going, but what is it about them?

- I think the thing that separates them from a lot of other people is the fact they write all their own material and they also edit all their own material.

And so for the first six films including this one, they claim that somebody named Roderick James was their editor, and Roderick James is just a name that they made up, 'cause they're quirky, and they're the Cohen's, and they just make stuff up and they want us to believe it.

But they're talented in these three major areas.

And they've also like cultivated collaborators that are super, super talented.

You know, the sound person has worked with them for all their films.

And so has the composer, et cetera, et cetera.

So they have this core group of collaborators that are loyal to them and they're hyper-talented.

And there's also two of them.

It's not just one of them.

So you've got like almost double the power.

- Do you have a favorite scene in the movie?

- I do.

I mean, every time we see the hookers scene I just laugh.

I've met both of them, the Larissa Kokemot and Melissa Peterman.

And it's just like, just the way they bobbed their heads.

And the way Larissa kind of looks off to the side, it just totally cracks me up.

And I also love the Bain Boehlke scene, Bain Boehlke played Mr. Mohra.

He was the bartender and he's got the big parka on and he's sweeping his driveway.

- That's a great scene, yeah.

It is, and just like the idea, like, that scene imparts no information.

It's just like, but it's so wonderful because it's such a great feeling for the region.

- And my favorite scene also really does nothing for the plot and that's Francis and Mike.

Having lunch and he confesses everything to her.

- He does.

- You're such a super lady Marge.

- Oh yeah.

And he's a fantastic guy, Steven Part's a fantastic guy.

And I would argue, and I didn't really realize this until I began writing, writing the book and hearing people talk about it is that that scene does advance the movie a little bit because Marge realizes that there are people in the world that lie, there are people that are duplicitous.

Like Mike has lied to her about his marriage to Linda Cooksey and the fact that he's an engineer, and neither of those things is true.

- You're right.

- And so as Marge is leaving the Hardy's, like in one of the next scenes and she's kind of thinking about things, that's when it probably occurs to her that she should go visit Jerry again at the car dealership and see if Jerry's really telling the truth.

- Quickly, we're running out of time, where can people get the book?

- People can get the book at their local bookstore, at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and at toddmelby.com/book, there are links on where to buy.

- Thanks, Todd.

The book is "A Lot Can Happen In The Middle Of Nowhere.

The Untold Story of the Making of Fargo."

My guest has been Todd Melby, stay tuned for more.

(upbeat music) - Crookston, Minnesota is the logical location for a sugar beet museum, because over 100 years ago the first beets in the Red River Valley were planted there.

Retired sugar beet farmer, Allan Dragseth, gave us a tour of this small town treasure.

(upbeat music) - Crookston is the logical place to have a museum because this is the first place that sugar beets were raised in the River Valley.

In 1918, a guy from Michigan moved here and he raised sugar beets in Michigan.

He brought some seed along and he planted in a garden up on the North edge of Crookston.

And from there, it's gone to hundreds of thousands of acres in the Red River Valley.

While we've got lots of beet harvesters we've gone all the way up to Alvarado and down to Kendra to get machines.

And then we start them back here in the shop and painted them.

After the First World war there was such a shortage of labor that the government set up a commission of some sort.

They gave out grants to machinery companies to develop something that would harvest the beets without so much labor.

And this one behind me is a McCormick Deering, one roller lifter.

And that was one of the first ones to come out and became the most popular, at least in the Valley.

It top lifted and cleaned the beets.

Then they went up elevator onto and got dropped onto a moving conveyor belt on a cart.

And two people stood on that and picked the beets out of the mud and dropped them down into the cart.

And the mud fell off the back of the conveyor belt.

I got a whole display along the wall here that's got all kinds of stuff from cameras to telephones, to phonographs.

Yeah, we've got the beet knives here, like this, to pick the beets up off the ground, grab them with her left hand, cut the tops off.

They'd use a fork like that.

Beet fork, it looks like a potato fork, but it has knobs on the tips 'cause you're shoveling up off the ground.

And that'd help them from digging into the ground.

One thing that we looked for for years is a guy that had a welding shop in town here.

And by the name of AOSP, he took Model T's and put big steel wheels on the back and made a beat cultivator out of them.

That was the first power driven cultivator.

I've walked through many, many tree rows.

And I have not been able to find them.

We plant about two acres of beets here every year and then harvest them om a Sunday afternoon in September, usually got four or 500 people to show up.

So we'll have tractor pulling contests.

Wheat thrashing with a steam engine, and also harvesting sugar beets out here all on that second weekend in September.

This fellow that moved here from Michigan and raised the first beets.

He dug them by hand from his garden and put them in gunnysacks and shipped them down to Chaska, Minnesota to the beet factory there.

And they wrote back to them that they have good quality and look good, plant some more the next year.

So he did.

And then the Northwest Experiment Station out here, it's UMC now, just about right away, they started researching them.

And then Minnesota Beet Company got interested and decided that they'd build a factory up here and it eventually became American Crystal.

And from there it's history.

- Well, that's all we have on "Prairie Pulse" this week.

And as always, thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008, and by the members of Prairie Public.