While appearing on The Bill Simmons Podcast in 2017, Will Ferrell revealed that Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy was his favorite out of the movies that he’d done. The reason, he explained, was the journey that it took to get the film made. If you can believe it, in the early stages, no studios were interested in Anchorman. And that might’ve had something to do with how wildly different the original script was compared to what we ended up getting when the movie was finally released in 2004.
For starters, the version of Anchorman that Ferrell and Adam McKay initially pitched was a parody of the 1993 disaster film Alive, in which a plane carrying passengers crashes in the Andes Mountains, leaving the survivors stranded. The characters we all know from Anchorman find themselves in the same situation in this script after Ron Burgundy crash-lands a charter jet on the way to a news convention in Philadelphia. He also manages to clip a cargo plane in the process, which happens to be carrying orangutans and boxes of ninja stars. From there, the story revolves around the Channel 4 news team as they try to reach safety.
Throughout the movie, the characters are, of course, stalked by the orangutans, who quickly figure out how to make use of the aforementioned ninja stars. One by one, the team starts getting killed off by the star-wielding primates. All the while, Veronica Corningstone (as played by Christina Applegate in the final film) keeps telling them to head down the mountain to escape, and they repeatedly insist that she’s wrong. Reportedly, there was even supposed to be a musical number involving sharks.
The script was so “kooky,” in Ferrell’s words, that Paul Thomas Anderson, who’d signed on to produce Anchorman in the beginning, actually walked away from the project because he didn’t understand it. McKay later joked that he and Ferrell single-handedly destroyed Anderson’s producing career. “Or, the other way is that I’m the asshole without my name on Anchorman. How great would that have been?” Anderson said in response.
You can check out Ferrell’s breakdown of their first script below.
The post 22 Years Ago, This Classic Comedy Was Almost a Disaster Movie With Orangutans, Ninja Stars, and Sharks appeared first on VICE.
