As Ferrell found success on the big screen with a scene-stealing turn in Old School (2003) and the starring role in Elf (2003), he and McKay reunited to create their own feature comedy: Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgandy, starring Ferrell as Ron Burgandy, the top newscaster in San Diego and a veritable god of a local celebrity. It's set in the mid-1970s, the glory days of local TV anchormen and an era of loud suits, carefully coiffed hairdos, manly mustaches and sideburns, and unchecked chauvinism. Christina Applegate challenges the old boys club as TV reporter Veronica Corningstone, who battles sexism and Ron's outsized ego when she becomes the first female newscaster in the city as his co-anchor. Paul Rudd, David Koechner and Steve Carell (as a meteorologist with the intellectual depth of a dust bunny) fill out the news team, and friends and colleagues from the comedy world fill in around the edges, including Fred Willard, Chris Parnell, Kathryn Hahn, Fred Armisen, Seth Rogen and Paul F. Tomkins. Danny Trejo has a memorable bit as a bartender who lays on the inspirational guidance and Vince Vaughn, Tim Robbins, Ben Stiller, Jack Black and Luke Wilson take uncredited roles as rivals in a news team rumble that channels West Side Story and Spartacus.
The script went through numerous drafts and incarnations before going before the cameras. One early version supposedly involves a plane crash in the mountains and a war pitting a TV news team against martial arts-trained monkeys, and McKay claimed another included a musical version with sharks. What can be confirmed is that the first cut sent the TV journalists after a gang of bank-robbing revolutionaries who called themselves The Alarm Clark. Maya Rudolph and Amy Poehler appeared in these scenes, which were cut after disappointing audience previews. Ferrell and McKay concocted a new third act involving the rush to cover a panda giving birth at the San Diego Zoo and shot new scenes for the release version. Though set in San Diego, the film is almost entirely shot in Los Angeles, with the old, long-closed Los Angeles Zoo and Griffith Park locations standing in for San Diego's world famous zoo.
Given the improv backgrounds of McKay and Ferrell, it is no surprise that the production involved a great amount of improvisation from the actors, with as many as twenty takes of performers trying out alternate lines. It's the preferred working method for both Ferrell and McKay, and they've made it standard practice on all their collaborations. Some of the cut footage appeared in the film's trailers and many of the alternate takes were featured in the film's DVD and Blu-ray releases, but there was so much alternate footage that they created an entirely new film, the shaggy direct-to-video feature Wake Up, Ron Burgundy: The Lost Movie, entirely from deleted scenes and outtakes.
Anchorman was a hit and McKay went on to direct Ferrell in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006), Step Brothers (2008), The Other Guys (2010) and the sequel Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, set in the early days of 24-hour cable news, and they created the comedy website Funny or Die, which they launched with the viral hit short The Landlady starring Ferrell opposite McKay's two-year-old daughter Pearl. It all began with Anchorman and the oblivious Ron Burgundy. "He is my favorite character I've played, if I have to choose one," Ferrell wrote in 2010. "Looking back, that makes it the most satisfying thing I've ever done."
Sources:
"The 100 Greatest Characters of the Last 20 Years," Will Ferrell. Entertainment Weekly, June 4-11, 2010.
The Director's Cut: Episode 7 - The Big Short With Adam McKay and Paul Thomas Anderson. SoundCloud, January 16, 2016.
Wake Up, Ron Burgundy: The Lost Movie. Warner, 2004.
IMDb
By Sean Axmaker
