5 Shocking Things I Learned About Anchorman
Fun facts from a new book celebrating the iconic movie's 20th anniversary.
Ron Burgundy, the egomaniacal protagonist of the comedy Anchorman, first appeared on the screen and in our imaginations 20 years ago. Since then, he’s become kind of a big deal.
“Anchorman is the film that, more than any other, had defined the course of the 21st-century comedy to date,” Austerlitz writes in his new book, Kind of a Big Deal: How Anchorman Stayed Classy and Became the Most Iconic Comedy of the Twenty-First Century.
Austerlitz loves Anchorman so much that every January, he screens it for a new group of students in his NYU course Writing About American Comedy. He also spent over a year of his life talking to over 70 people associated with the film, including head writers Will Ferrell and Adam McCay and various crew members, who give a unique perspective into what made this movie hilariously funny and weirdly timeless and profound.
Here are five strange but true things I learned about the movie.
The idea for the film came to Will Ferrell while sitting at home watching a documentary on A&E about pioneering TV news reporter Jessica Savitch. One of the talking heads interviewed was a former co-worker and anchorman named Mort Crim, who spoke about the male chauvinists who ran the newsrooms in the 1970s. Boom! Ferrell called SNL head writer Adam McCay, and they began to bang out a script.
The script's first draft was about a team of newscasters, including a Ron Burgundy-esque character, who crash on a plane bound for Philadelphia. The survivors must engage in cannibalism to survive. They also must avoid a band of ninja orangutans who throw deadly stars. Surprisingly, the script got 37 rejections in two days.
The part of Brian Fantana (played by Paul Rudd) was initially meant for Bob “Better Call Saul” Odenkirk. James Spader lobbied hard to play bumbling weatherman Brick Tamland, but the role went to a then relatively unknown comic named Steve Carell.
Rapper Chuck D of Public Enemy originally had a significant part in the movie, playing a terrorist named Malcolm Y. But the producers decided to cut that plotline out of the final cut. You can see Chuck D’s performance in an alternative version of the movie called Wake-Up Ron Burgundy.
The first screening of the movie received terrible reviews from the audience. Why? In that version, Burgundy’s lovable dog Baxter is punted off a bridge by Jack Black and presumably killed. In the final version, Baxter is still kicked off the bridge, but the dog flying in the air is obviously fake, and (SPOILER ALERT) he returns to save Burgundy and co-anchor Veronica Corningstone from a pack of wild bears.
Let me know what you think of the interview in the comments below.