Potsdam Filmmaker's Olympic Show On PBS

By ALEX JACOBS

Johnson News Service

LAKE PLACID - As 2010 Olympic fever heats up in Vancouver, officials in Lake Placid will be lighting their own torch next week to commemorate the two winter games that put the village on the map.

Meanwhile, a locally produced film is set to rekindle memories about the Winter Olympics of 1932 and 1980 nationwide.

Potsdam filmmaker Scott F. Carroll has put together an hourlong documentary about the Adirondack games, titled "Small Town, Big Dreams: Lake Placid's Olympic Story." The program will air on more than 250 PBS stations across the country this month.

"I really felt this was a story with national resonance to it: How did Lake Placid, a small village, manage to host the Olympics twice?" Mr. Carroll said. "A lot like the town itself, this is the little movie that could."

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Lake Placid's 1980 Winter Olympics - and the "Miracle on Ice" game that made those games so famous - Mr. Carroll developed the program along with Mountain Lake PBS. The film traces the growth of winter sports in the Adirondack High Peaks town.

"The Lake Placid Olympics were grass-roots, community-organized," he said. "It was a North Country contribution. I mean, the music came from Potsdam. It was a real pioneer sense of, 'If you don't have something, build it.'"

The documentary begins with the advent of the Lake Placid Club and follows the efforts of residents and athletes as the village worked to secure a spot hosting the third Winter Olympic games.

The film features footage of then-Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt opening the 1932 games, along with rare archival images and Depression-era audio recordings. It also documents the obstacles faced by Lake Placid officials as they worked to bring the Olympics back, finally succeeding in 1980.

"I wanted this film to show what a small town can accomplish when its residents work together to overcome the odds. Lake Placid is the smallest town in the world that everyone has heard of - yet it's a village of less than 3,000 people with only five police cars and three traffic lights," writer and director Marc Nathanson said in a statement.

Finally, the program focuses on the remarkable victory of the U.S. hockey team as it came from behind to beat the Soviet Union and went on to secure the gold medal. It also follows the success of Eric Heiden, who brought home five gold medals in speed skating that year.

"Thirty years ago, that hockey team reminded us of the capacity of who we are, what it means to be an American - to be the underdog and come from behind to excel and succeed," Mr. Carroll said of the "miracle on ice" game.

To put together the film, Mr. Carroll and his partner, Mr. Nathanson, scoured through archives, homes and even shops to find images, video clips and sound recordings.

"We literally took pictures off people's walls and scanned them. We discovered tapes that weren't marked that became a gold mine of information," Mr. Carroll said. "There used to be this thrift store in town, and we found hanging on the rack Soviet and East German warm-up jackets. It was like an Olympic museum in there."

Mr. Carroll first fell in love with the area as a competitive cross-country skier training at the Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid, and kept returning until he eventually bought a house in Potsdam.

"As a transplant coming into the area, there was a magic. Ask winter athletes anywhere in the world about Lake Placid, and they'll know where it is. Most have been here," he said.

The PBS program covered familiar territory for Mr. Carroll, who produced a two-hour DVD on the same subject in 2006, titled "Lake Placid: An Olympic History." He worked with the television broadcasting network to condense his material into a "bigger, bolder" Ken Burns-style documentary.

In the North Country, "Small Town, Big Dreams: Lake Placid's Olympic Story" will air at 2:30 p.m. Feb. 14 on WPBS-Watertown, at 9 p.m. Feb. 11 on Mountain Lake PBS-Plattsburgh, and in March on WCNY-Syracuse.

The program also is airing repeatedly throughout the country this month on PBS World, a digital substation available to many cable subscribers. In all, the TV documentary will log 1,000 hours of screen time during its run, Mr. Carroll said.

The filmmakers will screen "Small Town, Big Dreams" alongside the Disney feature film "Miracle" at 7 p.m. on Feb. 14 at the Herb Brooks Arena in Lake Placid. The films will be shown in Blu-ray high definition.

On the Net

Small Town, Big Dreams: www/smalltownbigdreams.com.