A year ago, Madeline Witek helped plan future exhibits at the Haines Sheldon Museum. She realized then a blockbuster was heading the town’s way.
It was the 25th anniversary – give or take – of one of the most memorable, satisfying, frustrating, lucrative, disastrous and downright crazy times in the long history of Haines: The filming of “White Fang,” the only feature-length movie shot in Haines. It was the town’s biggest splash on the big screen.
Produced in the winter and spring of 1990, the Disney film based on author Jack London’s 1906 novel about a wild wolfdog brought nearly $3 million into community coffers.
In the process, the Hollywood types, known as Fangers, took over the town.
Scores of Haines residents were enlisted as extras, craftsmen, carpenters, location scout liaisons, cooks and even as armed sentries to discourage grizzlies from wandering onto some backwoods sets. Male extras were encouraged to grow out their facial hair before any shoot.
Residents were paid $50 a day for a non-speaking role, $150 if they actually said something.
“White Fang was a really big deal for this town,” Witek said.
As museum community coordinator, Witek wanted to recognize the event. But the in-house collection contained few artifacts: a dogsled, a few scripts and a clapper used to mark the start of scenes.
“I thought maybe we could use a White Fang exhibit to change that,” she said.
So Witek put the word out around Haines. The result: a walk down White Fang memory lane.
Haines came up with so much stuff, it fills an entire exhibit room. There’s the producer’s chair, a binder kept by resident Thom Andriesen – a location scout for the movie – that contains contracts and a host of film records as well as news coverage of that colossal long-ago project.
There are scores of photographs of Haines residents, as well as soundbites of others discussing their roles – including Andriesen, magistrate judge Linn Asper and others.
Asper talked of playing a cardsharp dandy who was filmed reading a book; in this case an old volume by Voltaire. On a rainy winter day, his woolen three-piece suit and bowler hat got drenched.
The hand-warmers the film crew used were the only thing that saved them. Then there was the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals representative on the shoot who harassed Haines locals for leaving dogs out in the rain as the extras huddled in unheated tents.
“People began bringing in their photographs but I realized they were meaningless without the stories behind them,” Witek said.
The film shoot used the area near the old sawmill at James Point to represent Skagway and Dalton City. But the Hollywood people filmed most everything else in and around Haines.
Eventually, problems arose.
“People here weren’t used to waiting in line at the grocery store. There were also huge shortages of things because the film crews needed them,” Witek said.
Perhaps worse was showing up in the backcountry to ski or hike and running into a sign that read: “Attention: This area has been prepared for filming and must remain undisturbed. Thank you for your cooperation – Hybrid Productions/White Fang.”
“Suddenly, people couldn’t do what they wanted,” Witek said. “They moved to Alaska to do what they wanted.”
For their part, Hollywood had its own problems – including Ferry breakdowns and a mid-winter thaw that drove filmmakers to the Yukon to keep on schedule, which blew the budget. That was after they tried using dehydrated potatoes for snow in Haines.
But rain turned the spuds into starch, attracting wolves and wild dogs.
Then carpenters walked off the job for more pay. The mail moved too slowly. Filmmakers noted each “problem of the day,” leading one local to observe there was “more finger-pointing going on than construction work.”
The crew later held a tug-of-war with locals, a send-off many found fitting. The January 1991 premier was in Juneau, because Haines had neither a theater nor a projector.
While Hollywood never returned to film another complete major motion picture Haines, Witek has heard rumors the town was the basis for the TV show “Northern Exposure.”
The show, which ran for five years through 1995, contrasts the foibles of a New York City physician and the quirky locals he meets in the faux Alaska town of Cicely.
“One story says the Northern Exposure people were inspired by such Haines characters as Dr. Feldman, the Jewish physician, the liberal outspoken deejay and the resident lady bush pilot,” Witek said.
But the producers didn’t think Haines could handle both a movie and TV show, so they shot Northern Exposure in Washington state.
Witek said the White Fang exhibit, which opened last week at the Sheldon Museum and runs through February, has been an instant success.
“People got excited the moment it opened,” she said. “They look at everything and tell stories, which is exactly what I wanted them to do.”