By PETE DOUGHERTY
Staff Writer

Lake Placid is so quaint and old-fashioned, it's hard to imagine DVD players even exist there.      Yet as the Winter Olympics gear up this weekend in Turin, Italy, the village that played host to the 1932 and 1980 Games is featured in a documentary available this month on DVD. "Lake Placid: An Olympic History" focuses on the people in the village of 2,800, according to its writer and director Marc Nathanson, a former reporter at the Lake Placid News who now works for New York One, a cable news operation similar to Albany's Capital News 9.      "It's a place where you dial a wrong number and you end up knowing the person that you called accidentally," Nathanson said. "That's how small and close of a town it is."      Nathanson and producer Scott Carroll, whose credits include the 2003 documentary "The Last Link" and the 1999 feature film "Drive Me Crazy," assembled hundreds of photographs, video clips and audio clips to produce this 82-minute portrait of Lake Placid.      "It's an extremely good historical coverage of the 1932 and 1980 Olympics, and the period in between, and what drove this town to do what it did," Carroll said. "It's just one of those things; you feel it in every frame."      New York stage actor Ted Kastenbaum narrates the documentary, which features the obvious highlights from the two Winter Olympics (hometown hero Jack Shea winning gold in 1932, the "Miracle On Ice" hockey victory of 1980, etc.) and some lesser-known feats.      "There was historical events and information that had to be in it," Nathanson said. "We had to tell the Jack Shea story, and we needed to talk about the importance of the Lake Placid Club. On the other hand, there was material I discovered along the way - films, recordings, photographs - that I wouldn't have necessarily thought of including. I'd be going through people's attics or the back of collections by museums or libraries."      Among the gems Nathanson uncovered was an audio recording of Bernard Fell's 1978 eulogy of Ron MacKenzie, a driving force behind Lake Placid's bid to land the 1980 Games.      "I heard it, and I almost couldn't believe it," Nathanson said. "Clearly no one other than the people who were in the church that day had heard that. To be able to find a record of that great moment, where he is now urging themon to work in his memory, that was a great find."      The DVD documents people such as MacKenzie and Godfrey Dewey, the man responsible for getting the 1932 Olympics to Lake Placid.      "Lake Placid's a resort town, but there are people who have lived there their entire lives, three or four or five generations of Adirondackers," Carroll said. "These are the people who are largely the force behind these Olympic Games.      "I read a letter about five or six years ago that was written by Ralph Waldo Emerson on a hunting trip in the Adirondacks about 100, 120 years ago.      "His description of people in the area is still true today," Carroll went on. "These are people, they're tough, they're driven, their grit and determination, and when they put their minds to doing something, they largely find a way to make it happen.      "The movie really captures that sense of frontier spirit."      Information can be found at the Web site http://lakeplaciddocumentary.com.           Pete Dougherty can be reached at 454-5416 or by e-mail at pdougherty@timesunion.com.

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