Anchorage Daily News

HOPE, Alaska (AP) - Only in a quirky, backwater hamlet like Hope, with its weathered buildings, listing outhouses and free-range dogs, could an aging, alcoholic prostitute, a man who's seen too many "Dukes of Hazzard" reruns and a decrepit old truck dubbed "The Pig" come together to make art.

It was, at first, the name that lured the Los Angeles filmmakers to Hope, to shoot the Alaska segment of a moody, independent, art-house film called "Fireflies." A name like "Hope" connotes faith and optimism, and the story's lead character, Gina, sure could use some of that.

"Welcome to Hope," says the sign on the edge of a town on the edge of the boondocks.

Writer-director Jeong Jung "J.J." Kim nearly gasped when he saw it.

Perfect.

But the kind of hope Gina needs is not the kind of hope that Hope was named for. Its namesake came with a pulse.

This town of some 135 year-round residents was founded as a gold mining camp around 1896, nearly 20 years before Anchorage's founding fathers pitched their tents near the mouth of Turnagain Arm across the way. On a lark, as the story goes, prospectors decided to name the place after the youngest guy to step off the next boat. Percy Hope was his name.

Think how badly that could have gone.

Alaska Magazine once dubbed Hope "Alaska's friendliest town." Some locals would prefer "On the cutting edge of the lunatic fringe." Somewhere between the two probably nails it.

No wonder filmmakers are drawn here.

HAD TO BE HOPE

Whatever it is that makes Hope what it is and isn't met the director's vision for the film, a sometimes sad, sometimes trippy meditation on fate and humanity.

"Fireflies" was one of 10 projects chosen for financing by the Korean Film Council and the first in a foreign language - English, with Korean subtitles. It's a huge honor for Kim. The film will tell the story of a Korean immigrant's hard, vacant life, although as it moves from one segment to the next, you're not quite sure whether it's the story of one Gina or several Ginas.

"J.J.'s kept a lot of things kind of ambiguous for a reason," said Susie Park, who plays the Alaska Gina. "He likes to write a lot in symbols."

The story begins in Korea, where a child stands alone, staring up at an imposing house with a tile roof. You know something's going to happen to her, and whatever it is can't be good. The story picks up several years later in Los Angeles, then several more in Las Vegas as one dream after another comes to a dead end.

By the time Gina makes it to Alaska, she's aging and ailing and obsessed with seeing the aurora - for deranged reasons reminiscent of the girl being drawn into the glow of the TV set in "Poltergeist." By coming to Hope, Gina quite literally seeks the end of the road.

Kim, a Korean living in Los Angeles, scouted various locations for this Alaska piece of the picture. He'd planned to shoot in Anchorage, Valdez and Homer and piece the scenes together to create the village where Gina would come to lose herself. He'd even checked out Whittier.

All the while he kept hearing about Hope, said Nicole Ettinger, who along with Luci Kim is co-producer.

"Why don't we just go to that place Hope you keep talking about and check it out," she suggested.

So they went up and over Turnagain Pass, took a right off Seward Highway and headed up the narrow asphalt tributary that leads to Hope, some 17 miles off the beaten path.

They rolled into a town so authentic, so ideal for how J.J. Kim wanted to shoot this segment - with a monochromatic mood - Hollywood couldn't have dreamed up a better place. With its sweeping view of the Chugach Mountains across icy, metallic waters, the backdrop was so right, computer-generated imagery couldn't have done it better.

"We couldn't believe it," Ettinger said.

Kim bagged the other locations and decided to shoot all the village scenes here.

As plans were coming together, Kent Bowman, who, with his wife, Melanie, owns Bowman's Bear Creek Lodge & Cafe in Hope, got a call from one of the crew members.

"She says, 'Do you think I should call the mayor and let him know we're coming?' "

"Not exactly," he told her.

In late March, the rest of the 15-member team came up from L.A. After shopping for cold-weather gear at Anchorage's Sixth Avenue Outfitters and the Army Navy Store, the crew found its way to Hope and moved into the Bowmans' rental cabins.

The next day, Hope old-timer Peck Hassler sat hunkered over a cup of coffee at the Bowmans' cafe, scoping out the Lower 48ers as they ate lunch.

"I'll tell you what," he said. "I've never seen so many new boots in one place in my life."

In Hope, things just started falling into place for this crew. Take the truck.

They needed one for the scenes in which "Tim" (Chris Devlin), a guy in camo fatigues with no life, picks up a hitchhiking Gina and takes her to Hope, then later drives her to the mountains to stalk the aurora.

Someone from the crew asked Bowman if he knew where they might find an old truck.

"Well, how old?" he asked.

"Oh, pre-1985."

"We all just laughed."

"Have I got a truck for you," he said.

CHUCK'S TRUCK:

Bowman hooked them up with longtime Hope resident Chuck Graham, who introduced them to his 1952, three-quarter-ton military weapons carrier, a Dodge M-37, with its old-fashioned flat-head, six-cylinder engine. It's been part of the family since he bought it off a Fort Richardson couple years after he moved here in 1967, back when only 26 people lived in Hope and his arrival made 27.

"The Pig," as he affectionately calls it, served as the town wrecker for years, pulling vehicles out of various pickles. It has hauled countless cords of firewood. It also gave one old miner his final ride back in the early '70s.

This was a guy who mined the hard way, with a pick and shovel. He was also a drunk and was lubricated when a 30-below cold snap settled in. A neighbor across the way got concerned when he noticed no smoke coming from the man's wood stove and alerted folks in town. Graham's truck was the only vehicle able to grind its way up the snowed-in road to the man's cabin, where he lay curled in a corner, frozen stiff.

"The old guy had been trying to light his fire with paper money," Graham recalled.

That truck also played a role in Graham getting together with his wife. Her place had a driveway close to impassable in winter. His was the only set of wheels able to make it through.

It's not much to look at, but Graham is crazy about this old truck.

"My wife asked me once what meant more to me, her or the truck. 'Don't ask,' I told her."

The moment the film crew laid eyes on it, they understood.

The driver-side door is gone, so Graham rigged on a spare with a bungee cord. The windshield is all cracked. There is no muffler. A winter's worth of snow and years' worth of firewood debris had to be shoveled out of the bed.

And those things dangling from its underbelly? Hydraulic lines. In other words, no brakes.

Perfect.

"You couldn't buy a truck like this in Hollywood," cinematographer Seamus Tierney said.

"Yeah," said co-producer Ettinger. "In Hollywood, this truck would cost us $10,000 a week."

Industry rules prohibit using real license plates, so they brought along a plastic one they picked up at a prop shop in L.A. They sprayed it with fake dirt.

Graham wasn't sure what to charge for use of the truck. A hundred bucks?

That sounded good. And they threw in a little extra.

"This was not a high-budget enterprise that I could see," Graham said. "Other people come to Hope to shoot commercials and such, and they throw money around right and left."

And that's kind of how it went for these guys the whole week.

The Bowmans let them use one of their hand-hewn log cabins as the motel room Gina checks herself into. And somebody the crew never met offered the keys to their place for filming a scene.

"Normally when we're shooting a film, it's not like this," Ettinger said. "Normally we have to get permits to shoot locations. Negotiate contracts. It's much more complicated.

"In Los Angeles if they catch you shooting a movie and you don't have all the paperwork done, they'll shut down the production."

"It's been amazing here," Park said. "We've driven into the snow and been stuck, and some people just stopped and said, 'I'll get you out.' This guy named Dave, he took all this time and pulled us out."

And then there was the hitchhiking scene, in which Park, as Gina, is out on the highway with her suitcase trying to thumb a ride. One thing the film crew hadn't counted on was how eager Alaskans would be to help out a stranger. Drivers kept slowing down, so members of the crew had to stand along the road and wave them on by.

That wouldn't happen in L.A.?

"Ahh, no," Park said.

OTHER ROLES FOR HOPE:

This is not the first time film crews have found what they're looking for in Hope. Or partaken of its local living color.

Hassler, with an unruly white beard and suspenders hitching up his trousers, teaches tourists how to pan for gold here in summer.

"For the longest time I'd see these German people pointing at me, hollering 'TV! TV! TV!' I'm going, 'What?' I couldn't figure it out."

Seems he'd made it into some travel show in Germany.

Then Sony filmed a commercial here. It featured an Alaska Native high school basketball player hoping for an athletic scholarship. So his talent is captured on a Sony camera, and the video shipped to a big-league basketball coach on the other side of the country.

Crews brought in 42 truckloads of snow and dumped it on Main Street for that one. They added a bait shop sign, scraped paint off a newly painted building, attached a netless basketball hoop to a weathered backboard and nailed it to a telephone pole, then topped it all off by creating a fake snowstorm.

The Goo Goo Dolls shot here too, for their CD "Music in High Places." Although they hadn't planned on it, they ended up joining some local kids as they indulged in a favorite summer pastime here - mud sliding.

When the tide goes out around Hope, it leaves these deep gullies resembling slippery slides that kids, and apparently rock stars, find hard to resist.

"The kids go down there and just seal into it," Kent Bowman said. "They get covered in muck, I mean, it's just slime. They come out solid mud, except for the whites of their eyes."

So several local kids made it into the Goo Goo Dolls video. That was a thrill.

As for "Fireflies," it seems Graham's old truck will be the local star of that one. How Hope is that?

Kim plans to finish the film this year and show it at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007. He hopes to bring it to the Anchorage International Film Festival too. So stay tuned.

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Information from: Anchorage Daily News, http://www.adn.com