BRAINERD DISPATCH
Boston filmmaker could put Brainerd back on the movie map
By JOHN HANSEN
APRIL 20, 2006
After three months in Brainerd, Alex Karpovsky lost his mind. And he captured it all on film.
Granted, one could make a case that the Boston filmmaker wasn’t entirely stable to begin with. Frustrated with his day job editing karaoke videos, Karpovsky needed an excuse to jump-start his filmmaking career, and he got it when he picked up a Wall Street Journal in January 2003.
In a small town in central Minnesota, the article said, a mysterious hole had formed in the middle of a lake that should have been frozen solid.
“I thought, Yeah, this is perfect,’“ Karpovsky said in a phone interview Monday.
“The Hole Story” — which chronicles Karpovsky’s search for meaning behind the “black hole” on North Long Lake north of Brainerd and his frustration at finding the hole is frozen over — will make its Minnesota debut April 29 at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival.
Area film buffs frustrated with how 1996’s “Fargo” portrayed Brainerd can take heart in “The Hole Story,” certainly the most high-profile movie ever filmed locally (“Fargo” was set in Brainerd but not filmed here).
“I really like ‘Fargo.’ It’s a good movie,” the 30-year-old Karpovsky said. “But my tone is different, and I also think, quite honestly, they overdid the accent. I didn’t know that till I went to Brainerd. After spending a few months in Brainerd, I said, ‘OK, this is totally exaggerated.’ That was something I didn’t want to do. Everyone in Brainerd was so friendly and generous with their time and resources.”
“The Hole Story” features interviews with real folks, from Brainerd Mayor James Wallin to fishing guru Babe Winkelman, and many Brainerd landmarks are showcased (although, humorously, Karpovsky has a heckuva time getting a decent shot of Paul Bunyan). The 86-minute film is sort of a documentary, but mostly a tragic comedy.
“The editing would dictate what we needed to do,” said Karpovsky, who had originally planned “The Hole Story” to be a pilot episode for a TV series, “Provincial Puzzlers.”
“It was a very gradual process. There wasn’t a definite, concrete moment (when the TV pilot became a film). At some point I realized I couldn’t get the special effects to work. But I didn’t want to go back to life as a karaoke editor; I wanted to come back home with something that was finished. As the anxiety and fear of going back to the karaoke world mounted, the more creative I was forced to be.”
So he told his cinematographer, Robert Henry: “Shoot everything.” In the editing room, “The Hole Story” took shape as a dark comedy with “the town as the straight man and me as the one who is unraveling,” Karpovsky said.
The film includes many laugh-out-loud moments — one resident’s explanation for the hole is an “increased density of fish” — but the highlight might be when Karpovsky sits down with Winkelman. The interview is ostensibly to discuss the North Long Lake hole, but it ends up being more about Karpovsky’s troubles, and it’s filled with deliciously awkward pauses that would make Ricky Gervais proud.
“We told (Winkelman), ‘Listen, we’re in town to do a story on the hole and the hole isn’t there. Can you help us out?’ It was kind of news to him that it was frozen over. He thought it was funny. He knew we were kind of winging it.”
But the end result suggests Karpovsky has literally made something out of nothing: “The Hole Story” has earned critical praise and film-festival honors — last month, it received an honorable mention for best narrative feature at the Fargo (N.D.) Film Festival. (One thing it doesn’t have is a distributor, but people can view the trailer and buy a DVD through www.theholestoryfilm.com.)
“I’m happy with the way it’s gone over,” Karpovsky said. “Probably the best response the film got was in Fargo. People came up to me and said they enjoyed it and that meant a lot to me because it’s in their back yard. I am looking forward to the Minneapolis show. It’ll mean a lot to me if they respond to the film.”
Oddly, one place the film hasn’t been screened is in the Brainerd area. Karpovsky isn’t against the idea, but the modest filmmaker is skeptical about the interest level. Indeed, in “The Hole Story,” no interviewee has a passion for “the black hole” to match the interviewer’s.
Of course, he has a theory: The greenhouse effect — the sun heating the water through the ice, and the ice trapping the heat — caused the hole.
“A lot of people told me that who are knowledgeable,” said Karpovsky, who plans a mystery set in rural Arkansas as his next project. “They told me North Long Lake was unusually shallow, so immediately that was a red flag for me. When we were there, the hole had opened up the previous winter as well, and there was very little snowfall those two winters. That was another flag. It was just very logical.”