Tomorrow marks 20 years since Fargo first hit movie theaters.
So let's take this opportunity to revisit a "Coen Brothers" classic.
And more than likely spend the rest of the day doing really bad impressions of
a Minnesota accent.
- Yeah?
- You're darn tooting.
- Here are seven things you didn't know about Fargo, probably.
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The snow in Fargo is really important,
it's practically one of the characters in the film.
So it was pretty unfortunate for the Coen brothers that the winter
of 95 was the second warmest winter in Minnesota in 100 years.
They started principal photography in January in Minnesota that year, and
they simply didn't have the five to seven feet of snowfall that Minnesota had
gotten pretty much every other year they'd been alive.
The Coen brothers are from Minnesota, by the way, which is probably, boom,
a bonus thing you didn't know.
Without enough real snow on the ground, they had to use artificial snow for a lot
of the shots, or simply find new locations farther North that did have snow.
Like right here in the parking lot, if you look in the distance,
there's no snow on the ground.
The effects crew spent the entire night covering the ground with snow they made
from an ice chipper.
It was so much work that they wound up doing only one take of this shot,
because it would've taken too long to cover the tracks and do it again.
Or take this part when Carl is burying the money in the snow.
Any other year and Steve Buscemi would've been up to his waist in snow,
but no such luck in 95, eh?
Then, there's this scene.
The part where Carl and Gaear get pulled over, kill the police officer and
then the young couple who wind up driving by and seeing it.
Well, the place where they stage the crimes at night is actually
a completely different location from the crime scene that Marge is
investigating in the next morning.
- You see something down there, Chief?
- No, I just think I'm gonna barf.
- They had to move farther north in between those shots,
from Minnesota up to Grand Forks, North Dakota, just to find more snow.
So, to Leonardo DiCaprio and everyone else on the Revenant,
the Coen brothers feel your pain.
Going back to that couple and the car, we actually have a thing about them well,
really it's just about the guy.
That guy is Jay Todd Anderson, who was the story board artist for Fargo, as well as,
several other Cohen Brothers' movies, like The Big Lebowski and
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
In the end credits, his character is listed as Victim In Field.
But instead of putting Anderson's name, they put this symbol.
You know, kind of like Prince's symbol, back when everyone had to call him
the artist formally known as Prince, for a while.
Well, the Cohen brothers' joke didn't go completely unnoticed, and
there were people who wondered if "Prince" had actually played a part in Fargo.
Hey, purple one is from Minnesota too, so I guess it could've been possible.
Tricking people into thinking Prince may have been in Fargo is just
one of the ways the Cohen brothers messed with the audience.
Just take the name, Fargo.
Fargo is in North Dakota and very little of the film takes place in North Dakota,
even less of it in Fargo, specifically.
But the biggest goof might be the film's prologue.
Fargo is not a true story, not really.
Fargo is a movie that pretends to be true.
It was the Cohen's way of subverting the whole based on a true story phenomenon in
movies, and encouraging audiences to take it with several grains of salt.
Fargo combines elements of several real events that the Cohens
strung together into one made up story.
Including the true story of Hella Crafts, whose husband fed her body through
a wood chipper in Connecticut in 1986, not Minnesota in 1987 by the way.
If you think about it there's no way that the Cohen brothers could have been present
for any of the real events that inspired Fargo, or for
them to know what people really did or said while those events were happening.
- You're darn tooting.
- Which makes it pretty much impossible for
them to tell the stories exactly as they occurred.
And that's true to some extent for
pretty much every movie that claims to be based on a true story.
So, I guess the takeaway here is that nearly every so-called
true story is just a bunch of bull crap.
Moving on.
Despite what we just covered in our third thing, there is
one part of Fargo that is based entirely on a real event with total accuracy.
And it's probably not a part you're thinking of,
this scene where Jerry is scamming his customers with the whole true coat thing
is based on a real life experience that Ethan Cohen had with a car salesman.
And the scene reiterates how it really went down almost verbatim.
- Yeah, but I'm saying that true coat you don't get it, you get oxidation problems.
- But the asshole car salesman in Ethan Cohen's case more than likely had not
also arranged for his own wife to be kidnapped, I'm just guessing.
Even though the winter of 1995 was warmer than a typical Minnesota winter,
it still wasn't exactly tropical.
And that created a problem for Frances McDormand's pregnancy girdle,
which she wears throughout the film.
One night after wrapping, she left the girdle in her trailer.
Now the belly was filled with birdseed so it had some good weight to it, but
the girdle also had boobs built in which contained silicone.
After being left in the frigid trailer overnight the girdle got so cold that
the silicone inserts froze and then burst the next day while they were shooting.
Exploding boobs seems like it should be sexy but it is definitely not.
By the way, you may not have realized that the pregnant belly isn't the only fake
thing Frances McDermott wears in the film.
Her hair is a wig.
In fact, she once said that she can't do her Marge Gunderson accent without wearing
a wig, and that is boom, another bonus thing you didn't know.
- You betcha, yeah.
- Yeah. (Sound)
- Hi dad!
Yeah.
Hun.
Yeah. He's here, yeah.
I'll get him for you.
Hun.
- The actress Kristin Rudrud plays Jean Lundegaard in Fargo.
But most people don't know that once Gene is kidnapped and she has the hood on,
that is not Rudrud underneath the hood.
After the kidnapping scene, Rudrudd was replaced by a double.
And it may seem a bit harsh, but that's show biz.
And you gotta remember Fargo was a low budget movie.
No point in wasting money paying a principle talent,
when you're not even going to know you swapped him out for a cheaper stand-in.
I'm just sayin'.
Fargo went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Screen Screenplay, and
Frances McDormand also went on to win for
best actress, but it was also nominated for a slew of other awards,
including best picture and even best film editing for editor Roderick Jaynes.
What you probably didn't know is Roderick Jaynes doesn't exist.
It was a pseudo name that the Coen Brothers made up to hide the fact that
they edit their own films.
Basically they felt too vain listing their own names so
many times in their film's credits.
- "Roderick Jaynes" for 'Fargo'.
- So when "Roderick" was up for an Oscar for
'Fargo' the 'Cohen Brothers' weren't really sure what to do if they were win.
They even considered having Albert Finney dress up as Roderick Jaynes to
accept the award.
Ultimately, Walter Murch won the Oscar for editing 'The English Patient' so
it didn't matter.
But Roderick did score another nomination in 2007 for
'No Country for Old Men.' If any of you guys saw Roderick's
latest work 'Hail Caesar,' let us know what you thought in the comments, eh?
That's a wrap on 'Fargo,' but if you're a fan of Joel and Ethan Coen's work,
be sure to check out our episode on 'The Big Lebowski.' And
if there's another Cohen Brothers flick you'd like to see us cover on the show,
let us know and we might just do it.
Thanks for watching, and be sure to check out cinefix.com and
subscribe for more true-ish things about movies in sometimes Minnesota, eh?
Right here on Things You Didn't Know.
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