IT ALL STARTED WITH THE LEGENDARY Fargo
THIS IS A TRUE STORY.
The events depicted 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.
If you’ve never watched this movie, you might have believed just about everything claimed on screen. But, reality tells us otherwise.
True to the offbeat, erratic, and strange nature of Fargo—both the film and the FX anthology television series—Fargo seems anything but “a true story.” It appears the explanation for the film’s opening text has morphed over time.
Upon its initial release, Joel Coen mentioned that the film was based on a real case, but the characters were purely figments of their imagination. ”If an audience believes that something’s based on a real event, it gives you permission to do things they might otherwise not accept,” he said at the time. In 1997, Ethan Coen told The Brainerd Dispatch that most events in Fargo were real, except for the murders not happening in Minnesota.
Many Minnesotans actually believed that the film’s core narrative—about a man (William H. Macy) hiring someone to kidnap his wife—was inspired by the true story of T. Eugene Thompson, who was convicted of hiring someone to kill his wife in 1963. When Thompson died in 2015, Joel Coen, in an interview with The New York Times, once again changed his tune on the authenticity of the film’s events. “[The story was] made up entirely,” he said. “Or, as we like to say, the only thing true about it is that it’s a story.”
A Special Edition version of Fargo on DVD provides yet another story—that the film was partly inspired by the 1986 murder of Helle Crafts, a woman who was murdered by her husband and disposed of in a wood chipper—events that infamously occur in the film.
So… you can kind of draw your own conclusions on Fargo the movie, and the origin of this bizarre, against all odds “franchise.”
The Fargo TV show,