A&E; Figure-Skating Special Barely Avoids Being Iced

Weather was not something Steve Sterling spent much time thinking about when he began planning a figure-skating special for A&E.; Sterling, who with director Larry Jordan co-created “Winter Solstice on Ice,” and the team at Automatic Production, which signed on to produce the show, wanted to film above the Arctic Circle. The ideal spot would be Kemi, Finland, home to the three-story Snow Castle, the construction of which has become an annual event.

With Finland and the idea of using the Snow Castle as a backdrop in mind, they went about getting the involvement of the Windham Hill music group, which for the last 10 years has released a franchise album called “Winter Solstice.” Sterling pitched the idea of taking the Winter Solstice concept to television as a figure-skating show. Windham Hill loved the idea of skaters Brian Boitano, Yuka Sato, Caryn Kadavy, Mandy Wotzel and others performing to music by Windham Hill artists.

But the two-hour special, hosted by Windham Hill recording star Jim Brickman and premiering Saturday, almost didn’t survive the winter. It took quick thinking and an ice breaker at the last minute to save it from quite literally a meltdown.

During the four months it took to set up the whole production, there was talk of taking out weather insurance, but, Sterling says, it would have eaten up about 40% of the entire special’s budget. Besides, they were guaranteed the weather would, on the average, be minus 25 degrees during the day and minus 45 degrees at night.

“We knew in this kind of weather the skater would be good outdoors for two or three minutes and then we would have to put them in a warming hut,” Sterling says. “We had eight full days of location set up for three days of actual shooting, mostly night shooting.”

But as soon as everyone got off the plane in Kemi, they realized it was much warmer than anticipated. “The temperature was 34 degrees Fahrenheit,” Sterling says.

The skaters did manage to skate on a man-made rink the first night. “They had put the ice surface on the ground and just watered it,” skater Kadavy says. “It wasn’t exactly level. The ice wasn’t too bad during the first part of the day but later that night it started getting warmer. It started snowing which means the temperature was a little bit warmer. It wasn’t conducive to skating. People made it through their numbers but we had difficulty with doing some of the maneuvers. But we made it through the first night.”

Plowing Ahead With Teamwork

But it got worse. For the first time in recorded history in that area, it began to rain. The Snow Castle began to melt, as did the ice-skating rink. And the weatherman didn’t know when the storm would break.

So Sterling called all his department heads together. “We just had this very dark moment,” he says. “I said we are going to come up with Plan B, Plan C and Plan D. We cannot accept defeat. We need to know who among you are with us.”

Thankfully, Sterling says, all the department heads agreed to continue. Calling the weatherman, he learned that 40 miles west of Kemi it was snowing. “We had some people get on snowmobiles and go across the frozen tundra 40 miles where it was 10 degrees and snowing.”

Sterling called the captain of the ice breaker who kept the waterways open during the winter and told him they needed to relocate the entire production ASAP. “He said I will do that, but my crew is off tonight and they are off at the bars and I am afraid they are too drunk to be helpful.”

So the production loaded its own equipment, including generators and a Zamboni, aboard the ice breaker and the captain managed to round up his crew, who slept off their night at the bars on board before they reached the destination.

The ship’s deck, Sterling says, looked like the Clampetts’ truck from “The Beverly Hillbillies.”

“We put the skaters in different rooms inside the boat and two hours later we had steamed ahead 40 miles. The ice was 10 feet thick and the sound, it was like some monsters were munching away. It was this insane surreal scene. He slowed the boat down and rode over 10 feet of ice.”

The crew lowered down the snowplow and Zamboni machine as well as five miles of cable and spotlights. “We were rigging these spots on the deck of the boat,” Sterling says.

Finally, he says, “the weather gods” gave the production a break. “We were able to start shooting at 6:30 in the morning. The sun was up but it was still snowing and the snow was kind of glistening. There were white foxes that roamed around and reindeer that passed by.”

Still, Kadavy says, she could only do minimal jumps. “It just felt it was difficult for me. I made it through my number, thank God, and tried to look as beautiful and mystical as possible.”

She acknowledges it was also just “strange” to be skating in the middle of nowhere. “You are just out there,” she says. “You had to go down these planks to get to the level of the sea. It was amazing.”

Because the skaters were dancing on top of the sea, they had ice specialists making sure the ice was safe. “They scraped the ice clean and they drilled holes off the performance area to pump up water. They were all out there with these chamois polishing the ice by hand.”

Sterling says thankfully no one got frostbite. “Nostrils were burning, but these were creative, artistic people. They would say, together we must overcome this. We must express ourselves.”

The result, Sterling concedes, turned out to be worth the trouble.

“It ranks as my No. 1 ultimate production nightmare,” Sterling says. “But in the end, we ended up in such a place of visual beauty you could have never produced it any other way.”

*

* “Winter Solstice on Ice” can be seen Saturday at 6 and 10 p.m. on A&E.; The network has rated it TV-G (suitable for all ages).