In 2004, Adam McKay and Will Ferrell brought the uniquely absurdist comedic sensibility they honed at Saturday Night Live to the big screen with Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. Solidifying Ferrell as a bona fide movie star, Anchorman was a modest box office hit that later became a cult phenomenon.
While it certainly has some bizarre non-sequiturs, Anchorman is now widely beloved as the tale of a chauvinistic ‘70s newscaster who’s threatened by the arrival of a new female co-anchor. But the original script that McKay and Ferrell used as a jumping-off point was very different.
McKay and Ferrell’s journey to success on the silver screen began with a script they wrote while they were still working at SNL titled August Blowout. Described by Ferrell as “Glengarry Glen Ross meets a car dealership,” the script became very popular in Hollywood circles. Boogie Nights director Paul Thomas Anderson read the script and loved it enough that, when all the studios passed on it, he promised to shepherd another script by McKay and Ferrell into production.
So, the pair got to work on another script. According to McKay, the idea for Anchorman originated with the character: “Will saw an interview with a ‘70s anchorman, talking about how sexist they were. And it was that tone of voice he loved.” Ron Burgundy was born, and he remained more or less the same character from the initial conception to the final movie, but it took a few script drafts before McKay and Ferrell concocted the right story to put him in.
In an appearance on the Bill Simmons Podcast, Ferrell revealed that the first draft of Anchorman was a parody of the disaster thriller Alive!, in which a Uruguayan rugby team resorts to increasingly desperate methods of survival following a plane crash in the Andes. As Ferrell described the setup: “The year is 1976, and we are flying to Philadelphia, and all the newsmen from around the country are flying in to have some big convention. Ron convinces the pilot that he knows how to fly the charter jet, and he immediately crash-lands it in the mountains. And it’s just the story of them surviving and trying to get off the mountainside.”
As if Ron Burgundy leading the survivors of a plane crash he caused isn’t a wacky enough premise, it gets even wilder: “They clipped a cargo plane, and the cargo plane crashed as well, close to them, and it was carrying only boxes of orangutans and Chinese throwing stars. So, throughout the movie, we’re being stalked by orangutans who are killing, one by one, the team off with throwing stars.” It’s unclear if the plan was to use real orangutans and teach them to throw prop throwing stars or CGI the whole thing with the primitive digital effects of the early 2000s. Knowing McKay and Ferrell’s offbeat sense of humor, it’s entirely possible they planned to just dress up human extras in orangutan suits.
While this version of the Anchorman story sounds massively different than the one that ended up playing in theaters (aside from the fact it focuses on newsmen), it surprisingly carried the same themes as the final movie. Christina Applegate’s character Veronica Corningstone was featured in the original script and, just like in the final movie, she’s constantly ignored and undermined by her much less competent colleagues. According to Ferrell, throughout the initial script, “Veronica Corningstone keeps saying things like, ‘Guys, I know if we just head down, we’ll hit civilization.’ And we keep telling her, ‘Wrong.’ She doesn’t know what we’re talking about.” Although ninja orangutans and crashed planes don’t appear in the final cut of Anchorman, it sounds like the core of the movie remained untouched through all the heavy rewrites.
The great thing about going in with a script this bold and experimental and out there – apart from the fact that it’ll never get made – is that even after all the studio-mandated rewrites, it’ll still be pretty weird and unique, and that’s what happened with Anchorman. The original version, a spoof of Alive! directed by Adam McKay and starring Will Ferrell as Ron Burgundy, could’ve been a really great comedy, but no studio was going to make it, so McKay and Ferrell had to ground it just a little.
The final version of Anchorman actually seems pretty tame compared to the early drafts, but McKay and Ferrell still had a tough time getting the movie made. It wasn’t until the success of Old School, in which Ferrell plays a hilarious supporting role, that DreamWorks decided he was a big enough name to take a chance on his ludicrous ‘70s newsman script. Whether the original version of Anchorman would’ve been a success or not, almost two decades later, the final version remains a modern comedy classic.