Can the Hodag go Hollywood?

He has a screenplay, a booth at this month’s Hodag Heritage Festival in Rhinelander, and a dream that a mythical creature of the Wisconsin Northwoods can make people forget Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and maybe even the shark from “Jaws.”

“I was bitten by the Hodag,” Alex Melli told me.

The thing is, when 57-year-old Melli — a city native and Edgewood High School graduate who is again living in Madison after many years in Southern California — first mentioned his Hodag bite to me, it was 2010.

Melli has been stalking the Hodag for a film for nearly 15 years.

The Hodag can do that to people. It has cast a long shadow since it was first “discovered” at the end of the 19th century by a colorful promoter named Eugene Shepard.

Shepard — hoping to bring tourists to the Rhinelander area — thought a scary monster might do the trick. He seized on a creature out of lumberjack lore, described like this by a folklorist on the Wisconsin Historical Society website: “The ferocious beast had horns on its head, large bulging eyes, terrible horns, and claws. A line of large sharp spikes ran down the ridge of its back and long tail. The Hodag never laid down. It slept leaning against the trunks of trees. It could only be captured by cutting deeply into the trunks of its favorite trees.”

Shepard purported to have captured a Hodag and exhibited it — from a distance, in dim lighting — at the 1896 Oneida County Fair.

A 1996 biography of Shepard by Kurt Daniel Kortenhof put it like this: “Shepard, in cahoots with Luke ‘Lake Shore’ Kearney and possibly others, carved the Hodag from a peculiar-looking stump. The conspirators covered their creation with the hide of a young ox and fit it with the horns of more mature cattle.”

Fair goers — some, anyway — bought it. Shepard took his creature on the road. In an obituary of Kearney years later, the Milwaukee Journal noted that the Hodag “attracted world-wide attention until the Smithsonian Institution sent investigators, and Shepard admitted it was a hoax.”

Which hasn’t stopped the city of Rhinelander from embracing all things Hodag, including the annual festival on May 18.

Alex Melli’s mother — the late Margo Melli, a decorated University of Wisconsin–Madison law professor — was from Rhinelander. His grandmother knew Shepard.

So the Hodag was on Melli’s radar even as he made films from his base in Laguna Beach, including the feature-length thriller “ Things You Don’t Tell ”, shot in California and released on DVD in 2008.

But it wasn’t until Melli read Kortenhof’s biography of Shepard that the idea of a Hodag film began to percolate. Melli mentioned his interest to me — “I was bitten by the Hodag” — and I put it in a newspaper column.

“People in Rhinelander read that column,” Melli told me recently. He was deluged. What could they do to help? Might they be in the movie? The local paper ran a story: “Hollywood filmmaker ready to shoot the Hodag.”

“It was kind of out of control immediately,” Melli said. “I backtracked. I told people it was in development. It may happen someday.”

Over time, he said, “it was kicking around in the background as I was doing other things.”

Now Melli has finished his script and he not only has a booth at this month’s festival, but also the movie project is an official festival sponsor.

Melli’s hoping to attract Hodag fans to the film’s website , where they can sign up for news and offer potential investors proof that the Hodag has fans who will buy tickets to see the film, which Melli hopes to shoot in the Rhinelander area.

He shared a bit about his screenplay, which has a young filmmaker from Rhinelander, disillusioned with his career, coming home with the idea of making a documentary about the city’s obsession with the fictional Hodag.

“He’s planning on poking fun at the town,” Melli said.

But then a dead body turns up, mutilated. Of course, everyone still knows the Hodag is mythical. The sheriff insists it was a bear attack. Then another mutilated body is found.

Can the Hodag be real? Melli offered a hint.

“I want to make a monster movie,” he said.

​COPYRIGHT 2024 BY MADISON MAGAZINE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS MATERIAL MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST, REWRITTEN OR REDISTRIBUTED.