Well, not every movie can be about positive role models for women. Variety reported Tuesday that Paul Feig’s Feigco production company has landed Supermodel Snowpocalypse at Paramount. Feig and Feigco partner Jessie Henderson will produce, while Dan Magnante and Alana Mayo head up the film at Feigco and Paramount respectively. (Full disclosure: My wife used to work with Henderson at Universal.) Supermodel Snowpocalypse will be based on a Mickey Rapkin article in Elle, which ran under the extremely long but extremely descriptive headline, “This Drug-Fueled, Multimillion-Dollar Supermodel Snowpocalypse Has Been Fashion’s Best-Kept Secret Since ’77: The Epic, Never-Before-Told Story Behind Possibly the Greatest Fashion Emergency in History and a Daring, Near-Deadly Escape.”
Rapkin’s article tells the story of an extraordinarily ill-fated 1977 trip to Chile’s Hotel Portillo, a ski resort in the Andes that was to be the shooting location for a catalog called The Fabulous Furs of Neiman Marcus. Chile was a natural place to shoot fur coats in July for at least two reasons. First, it was winter in the Southern Hemisphere, and the other option was the department store’s hometown of Dallas. Second, despite the U.S.’s help delivering Chile to Augusto Pinochet, the dictator was having a hard time delivering U.S. tourists to Chile, for some reason. So a fur catalog sent to the United States’ richest shoppers showing American supermodels having a great time there was seen as a public relations “coup,” so to speak, and Pinochet helped foot the bill.
Shortly after the Neiman Marcus models arrived at the Portillo, they were snowed in but thankfully managed to procure a vast quantity of cocaine before their supply lines were cut off by the blizzard. Over the rest of their stay, as snow reached the second story of the hotel and supplies dwindled, the models—including not-yet-as-famous-as-she-would-be Jerry Hall—reportedly did a lot of cocaine, held an impromptu fashion show, sent startling amounts of cocaine up their impeccable noses, created a Studio 54–like atmosphere in the snowed-in hotel’s disco, hovered geometrically perfect lines of white powder off a variety of glass surfaces, managed to shoot the photos they needed, and were eventually evacuated, along with their drugs, by Chilean military helicopters (while leaving the hotel’s other guests to wait for the storm to clear). After attempting to use up the rest of their supply in the airplane bathroom on the way home, they cleared customs with nosebleeds (and the remaining coke hidden in a chapstick). It’s not really clear from the article why a story about a dictator-funded coke bender would be right for Feig instead of, say, Scorsese, but he’ll only be producing; someone else will direct. And one thing is certain: That year’s edition of The Fabulous Furs of Neiman Marcus looks amazing.
