Like Edmund Hillary and Christopher Robin before him, Will Ferrell is mounting an expedition to the North Pole. Specifically he's producing and will star in a film based on the New York Times Magazine article Ice Pack, about a group of friends in the 1960s who embarked on an impromptu snowmobile trip.
Ice Pack: An Insurance Salesman And A Doctor Walk Into A Bar, And End Up At The North Pole was just published a couple of weeks ago. Its author is Guy Lawson, who also wrote the Rolling Stone article The Stoner Arms Dealers that's been filmed by Todd Phillips as War Dogs.
This story, as you might infer from the title, involves insurance salesman Ralph Plaisted and his fellow middle-aged, middle class Minnesotans Art Aufderhiede (doctor), Walter Pederson (Honda salesman) and Jerry Pitzel (geography teacher), plus the brilliantly-named French-Canadian snowmobile racer Jean-Luc Bombardier. Over a beer, they spontaneously decided to head for the Arctic. They were rejected for funding by the National Geographic Society, but managed to drum up some sponsorship - whisky, designer watches - and, incredibly, completed their chaotic enterprise in April, 1968. They were the first party to succeed in a surface traverse of the ice to the pole.
Wyck Godfrey, Marty Bowen and Jonathan Kadin are joining Ferrell as producers on the project, which they've set up at Sony. Deadline's sources say the tone they're aiming for is a buddy comedy something akin to City Slickers.