7 Surprising ‘Fargo’ Facts, Dontcha Know
by Patrick Lee
by Patrick Lee
Somerset Maugham famously called the French Riviera “a sunny place for shady people.” You might think of the literal polar opposite of such a place — the snowbound prairie of the Coen Bros.’ 1996 “Fargo” — as a frigid clime for torrid crime.
It’s the passions — lust, greed, arrogance, fear — that fire the story of “Fargo,” which might also be considered the forerunner of the now-hot red-snow subgenre nicknamed “Nordic Noir,” exemplified by such TV serials as “Borgen,” “Fortitude,” “The Killing (Forbrydelsen),” “The Bridge” — and, of course, F/X’s Emmy-winning series “Fargo,” based on the movie.
But the movie “Fargo” stands apart, not just because it was the first, but also because it may be the weirdest. Like a seagull in a snowstorm, the reality behind the movie and its mythology is sometimes hard to pinpoint, and the truth lies buried like a briefcase beneath the permafrost along a lonely Minnesota highway.
Here are seven things you probably didn’t know about “Fargo.”
1. It has nothing to do with Fargo, North Dakota.
Except for the opening scene, the movie takes place in and around the real town of Brainerd, Minnesota. (Writer/director brothers Joel and Ethan Coen are from St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis.)
So why’s it called Fargo? “The title of the film has something to do with the way it sounds,” Joel Coen told the Allentown (Pa.) Morning Call in 1996. “‘Fargo’ seemed like a better title than ‘Brainerd.’”
2. It’s not based on a true story.
The first thing you see is this title card: “This is a true story. The events in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.”
None of that is true.
“We wanted to make a movie just in the genre of a true story movie,” Ethan Coen told The Huffington Post. “You don’t have to have a true story to make a true story movie.”
3. Or is it?
Cinematographer Roger Deakins said that the story is inspired in part by the real-life 1986 disappearance of a Danish-born Connecticut woman named Helle Crafts. Police in 1989 discovered that Craft’s husband had murdered her —and fed her body through a wood chipper.
There is one other true story behind “Fargo,” Joel Coen told The Huffington Post: “There was a guy, I believe in the ’60s or ’70s, who was gumming up serial numbers for cars and defrauding the General Motors Finance Corp. There was no kidnapping. There was no murder. It was a guy defrauding the GM Finance Corp. at some point.”
4. The wood chipper was real. But the Coen Bros. didn’t know how to use it.
“They didn’t know how to work a wood chipper,” actor Peter Stormare told The Huffington Post. Stormare, you’ll recall, played the mute assassin Gaear Grimsrud, who feeds Steve Buscemi’s unfortunate Carl Showalter into the aforementioned machine.
“I was told to shove his foot down with my hand,” Stormare said. “I replied, ‘Crazy! I’m a country boy.’ You always use some wood so you don’t get your hand down there. I continued, ‘If I use some firewood, then I can use it as a weapon when the cop shows up.’ Throw it at her. They thought it didn’t sound too good to throw a piece of firewood, but they did let me try, and that is a one-taker. Almost hit Frances [McDormand]. But it was kept as is and is pretty funny. Just to think you can outsmart a cop with a drawn gun with a piece of wood.”
(The wood chipper eventually found its way to the real Fargo, where it is on permanent display at the Fargo-Moorhead Visitors Center.)
5. People think “Game of Thrones” author George R.R. Martin appears in a cameo in an early scene.
He doesn’t. But the extra standing in the left of the frame bears such a strong resemblance to the “Winter is Coming” writer that it’s practically become an internet meme.
6. There’s an easter egg referring to Minnesota native son Prince.
A sharp-eyed viewer will see an unusual credit at the end of the movie: “Victim in Field” opposite a glyph on its side that looks an awful lot like the symbol used by the Bard of Minneapolis (with a smiley face).
What’s it all mean?
“Prince is from there and a friend of [the Coens],” Stormare said. “This was during his battles with his record company, and that sign was the only thing he was allowed to use. He wanted to do a smaller part [in ‘Fargo’] — I was told — but it didn’t work out. But just having his symbol there helped his image a little in his long battle getting out from a stupid record contract!”
7. Police thought “Fargo” inspired the real-life death of a Japanese woman.
Takako Konishi, a travel agent from Tokyo, was found dead in windswept rural Detroit Lakes, Minnesota — halfway between Fargo and Brainerd.
Before that, Konishi — who spoke no English — had repeatedly uttered the word “Fargo” in a conversation with police in Bismarck, North Dakota. That led them to believe she had perished seeking a treasure: The briefcase containing $1 million, buried by Carl Showalter under the snow before he met an untimely, wood chipper-assisted demise.
Alas, like everything apparently connected to “Fargo,” it wasn’t true. Konishi was a real woman, and she did indeed die in rural Minnesota, but her death — ruled a suicide — had nothing to do with “Fargo.”
But, in a perfectly ironic postscript to this particular story, the truth, as it turns out, doesn’t matter: The story does. Filmmaker David Zellner went on to make “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter,” a depiction of the myth, not the truth.
Consider it the true sequel to “Fargo”: A fictional movie based on a real-life misunderstanding about a fictional movie purporting to be a true story that really wasn’t but maybe was. #
