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Producers Will Ferrell, Wyck Godfrey and Marty Bowen are developing a film about a 1968 expedition to the North Pole.
Based on Guy Lawson’s New York Times Magazine article “Ice Pack: An Insurance Salesman and a Doctor Walk Into a Bar, and End Up at the North Pole”, the film will be developed as “a buddy comedy” for Ferrell to star in.
Deadline brings the news:
The expedition was led by Ralph Plaisted, an insurance salesman who with his doctor friend Art Aufderhiede teamed with local Honda dealer Walter Pederson (they needed a mechanic for the snowmobiles) and geography teacher Jerry Pitzel (the navigator who initially had the group going the wrong way) and an athletic French Canadian named Jean Luc Bombardier. They got sponsors for whiskey, designer watches and the dehydrated food used by the Apollo program. Even though they failed a psychological stress test administered by a local college and were spurned by the National Geographic Society (which was protective of the 1909 Robert Peary expedition it had backed), the small group gathered their whiskey and snowmobiles and made it to a base camp on the precipice of a frozen Arctic Ocean.
There, they saw 425 miles of ice boulders, bottomless crevices, ice floes, open expanses of black water and hungry bears. Somehow, these amateurs overcame temperatures so low the whiskey froze. Melting ice caps nearly drowned them, yet they became the first successful expedition to reach the North Pole on Ski-Doos — though nobody seemed to care much at the time.
