At some point today, a politician or a pundit or an athlete will say or do something completely untoward, and, in response, a broadcaster will smugly stare out from your television screen and admonish the offending party with the following words: “You stay classy.” Then later tonight, at a professional sporting event, the home team will fall ever so slightly behind, and the silent arena will suddenly echo with a sound bite exhorting the crowd to make “Loud noises!” And at around 1:47 AM in a college-town bar, a sloshed undergrad male will lean into a wildly disinterested young woman and embarrass himself by confessing “I want to be on you.”
ANCHORMAN: THE LEGEND OF RON BURGUNDY wasn’t a blockbuster when it hit theaters in the summer of 2004, but its influence on the popular culture is far more pervasive than any other film released that year. It is probably the most frequently quoted American comedy since CADDYSHACK (only it doesn’t have that Noonan’s-weird-Irish-girlfriend-might-be-pregnant subplot to trip it up), and, in my estimation, it was one of the very best films of the previous decade. No movie over the last twenty years has made me laugh as hard as ANCHORMAN.
Now that the exploits of Ron Burgundy and the Channel 4 news team are beloved by every right-thinking citizen of the Earth, it is time for writer-director Adam McKay and his stars (Will Ferrell, Paul Rudd, Steve Carell, David Koechner and Christina Applegate) to recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle brilliance of the first film with ANCHORMAN 2: THE LEGEND CONTINUES. Impossible, right? Perhaps not.
Last October, McKay and his rock-star editor Brent White (this is the guy charged with cobbling together all of McKay and Judd Apatow’s improv-heavy movies) invited around twenty online journalists to check out a couple of scenes from ANCHORMAN 2. A small sampling to be sure, but the sequences in question - the News Team reminiscing in a dangerously-modified Winnebago and their first encounter with news director Linda Jackson (Meagan Good) – were more than up to the riotous standards of the original (we were already quoting lines walking out of the edit bay). I hate explaining jokes, but you’ve seen bits and pieces of these scenes in the trailers. A quick summary:
1) The boys have just reunited, and they’re reminiscing in Ron’s new Winnebago over a few brews. All of their fond memories are utterly absurd, and it all culminates with Brick trying to join in by recalling a series of weird dreams and bizarre recollections of the future. That’s when Brian realizes the Winnebago is on cruise control with no one driving. The vehicle immediately spins out of control and flips, leading to a slow-motion, f/x heavy calamity inside the Winnebago (e.g. Ron’s decision to install a deep fryer in the back proves somewhat painful).
2) The News Team is introduced to their new boss, Linda Jackson. Three problems here: she’s tough, a woman and African American. Ron and the gang react to her being black like they just met a Martian – i.e. the joke here is the ludicrous extent to which they are flummoxed by a superior who is not a white male. Brick gets an amazing line in this scene that I wouldn’t dare spoil.
While they showed us these two scenes, Mckay and White fielded questions about the new film, their process and, as has been discussed in the media over the last few weeks, their willingness to release a second version of the film with all new jokes. To clarify: this isn’t a second film ala WAKE UP, RON BURGUNDY; it’s the same film with alternate, equally funny takes. Since they know fans will likely see the movie a second time (they’re that confident that ANCHORMAN 2 is going to kill), why not serve up a bunch of new jokes that worked during the testing process?
The most impressive part of this edit bay visit was getting to see Brent White’s editing program that allows him to sort alternate takes scene-by-scene - with color-coded ratings denoting their effectiveness (determined via test screenings). It’s a style of editing he had to invent while working with McKay and Apatow, both of whom flood him with footage on every movie.
The following Q&A offers fascinating insight into the careful method that produces such inspired madness. It’s also an honest, entertaining back-and-forth that ends with a warning to all comedy filmmakers: if you invite Seth Rogen to your friends-and-family test screening, make sure he’s seated far, far away from the microphones.
(Interspersed throughout are some brand new character posters.)
Q: With the first film, you had so much material left over that you made a whole second feature, WAKE UP, RON BURGUNDY. How long was the first cut of this one? Sixteen hours?
Adam McKay: You're not far off! The first cut was four-and-a-half hours. Our first cut where it all kind of tracked was about three hours. It played. It played like a real movie with a beginning, middle and end over three hours. I think we screened our first cut at two-and-a-half hours. It was the best screening we've ever had at that fat length. Normally when it hits two-and-a-half, three hours, the audience gets exhausted and starts yawning. This time it actually played throughout the whole thing. We probably shot a million-and-a-quarter-feet of film.
Brent White: It's hard to say now because everything is digital, but it's probably that easily.
Q: Have you ever thought about doing a comedy like IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD? Something that lives at that length and can be screened?
McKay: This is pretty long. This is 1:53 right now without credits, so this'll end up being two hours, which is by far the longest we've ever done. We usually do ninety minutes and then, tack on credits, it's 1:40. I don't know if I can quite go epic. It's not IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD, but it's very long compared to what we normally do. But it's good. It doesn't feel long. It plays. You guys will have to let us know, but it feels like the energy carries throughout the whole thing. But we talked about it. When we screened the two-and-a-half-hour version, we asked, "Should we do IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD?' We looked up what the longest comedies were, and the longest was THE BLUES BROTHERS at two-and-a half hours. We were like, "We're not going to do that."
Q: What about a Peter Jackson-style extended edition on home video?
McKay: It's funny you should say that. Brent was editor on the first ANCHORMAN with me. I went into the editing room and he said, "I think you've got a whole second movie here." Brent actually cut the WAKE UP, RON BURGUNDY version where we then went back and put in voiceovers. This time I came to the editing room and I went, "Well, Brent, do we have a second movie?" Brent goes, "Actually, you don't have a second movie, but you have a whole other movie with all-new jokes." I go, "What do you mean?" He goes, "You can replace every single joke with a different one. They're all quality [alternate takes].” That was crazy and, sure enough, we're doing it right now. I think we're at, what, 250 alt jokes?
White: It's like 240. Something like that. If you saw the movie and then they said, "Hey, come back and see ANCHORMAN 2 again with 240 new jokes, would you pay cash and go see the movie again?
Q: Yes. I don't think anyone has ever done anything like that before. Effectively, everyone would be very interested.
McKay: That's what we were saying! If someone told me it was PULP FICTION will all new story turns and new Sam Jackson monologues, there's no way I'm not going to see that. The question is, does Paramount release that in the theaters? Is it midnight screenings or just VOD and DVD?
Q: Not every film can do it, but the difference here is that, when you talk to people and you see how deeply it has soaked in for the fans of the film, it's not just a film they like - it's their favorite movie. It's a movie they know every word of. That kind of thing. That's why I think you could do it with this. People would happily say, "250 new jokes? I'm going back immediately."
McKay: I hope they do it. Even if they only did it on like 200 screens or something. Just to see it play. We're going to actually test it. We're talking about putting it in front of a crowd. The advantage you get, in that these jokes don't have to pass by an audience, is that you get some stranger jokes.
White: You can really go out on these tangents we couldn't quite put the in the movie because it has to be PG-13 on the box or whatever it is. There's a little bit of open-ended stuff that, because of timing or rhythm or whatever else, we could put in this version and let it be a little bit fat.
McKay: Translation: More crazy shit.
Q: Who goes out on the furthest tangent?
McKay: There's a run where Ron Burgundy and Brian Fantana talk about breast implants and all the alternatives they're using to silcone now. Nickels, taco meat… it's just this long, insane run that we tried at one point. Test audiences were like, "No thank you." But it still makes us laugh. That's part of the fun.
Q: That was a big part of what WAKE UP, RON BURGUNDY was: tangents. Like the car scene for example, that goes so much further than you’ve ever taken a movie into breaking reality. But in that version of it, that’s a great Champ Kind moment, and it’s such a Koechner run, so…
McKay: Yeah, I’m actually glad that didn’t end up in the final movie, ‘cause that would have been – that almost popped the Koechner game. Like, he said it so tangibly, whereas we still get to bat it around a little bit in this one, but in that one he just says it right to his face, “I love you!” (Laughter) Will and I were talking about it, we were like, “Kind of happy that didn’t make the final cut.”
Q: What’s the story behind Meagan Good’s character?
McKay: She’s the manager of the whole new network – she’s not the owner, but she’s the day-to-day kind of manager of it. She’s an asskicker. She’s brilliant. She went to Columbia School of Journalism, and she’s overqualified for the job, but of course, because she’s a woman, because she’s a minority, these idiots can’t get around that at first. Then she kicks their ass so badly that they have no choice but to accept her. She’s awesome in the movie. She plays really, really well and funny as hell and beautiful. She was a great addition to this cast, and seeing Burgundy struggle with the issue of race was just really funny. And you forget the early ‘80s was really when you saw this big leap happening: you had THE COSBY SHOW coming, and certain music was mainstreaming. It really is the point at which people like Ron Burgundy would have been dealing with issues of race. So it was a really fun kind of relationship for us to have in this movie. It felt new enough and different enough. Se’s such a different energy for the movie that it really worked well.
Q: Did you guys feel any pressure? Were you like, “Man, we’re playing with something that people really love here!”
McKay: You know, I was thinking about this before. The spirit of the movie is so much, “Who gives a fuck?” that if you had pressure, it would nullify the whole premise of the movie. It’d be like The Sex Pistols having to worry about if their guitars are in tune. You kind of have to not give a shit going into it. You’re just purely trying to make each other laugh, trying to come up with crazy shit - that’s really the game of the set. And then at the end of the day sometimes, you go, “Oh wow, that was a good day,” or “Hey, this could be good.” But in the moment, we’re just trying to make each other laugh. That’s the engine of the entire thing. Now that it’s done, you’re kind of like, “Hey, I wonder what people will think of this,” but in the moment, we’re just purely laughing around. It’s Paul Rudd in underwear, posing with an underwear model. It’s these guys flying around in a Winnebago on a giant gimbal for half a day. It’s pretty hard to have standards while you’re doing that.
Q: We’re in a time now where race is such a hot topic issue, and it seems in the trailer that it’s actually a big part here. Were you worried that this is going to push some buttons, that this is going to offend some people, while you were writing it?
McKay: We were aware there’s a fine line. I mean, these guys are so dopey that it’s not the subject of race like we experience it in the news now. They’re so innocent and so stupid about it that it’s never really mean or pointed. You’ll see in the whole movie that they really just don’t get it. They never fully get anything. They get it a little bit by the end of the movie. They deal in this movie with about five or six different issues. In the first movie, it was just the idea of a woman in power. In this movie, it’s race, there’s another woman in power, there’s psychology, there’s issues with a child…there’s all this different kind of stuff they have to deal with. And obviously fame and money that they’ve never seen before.
Q: You mentioned a gimbal in the Winnebago scene. What was the process like to shoot that? It seemed like a pretty effects-heavy scene for a comedy.
McKay: Yeah, it turned out to be a giant pain in the ass. We wrote it at two in the morning laughing like idiots, and then suddenly the reality of it was “Oh god, we’ve got to do all this.” It was a huge gimbal with the Winnebago. It was them hanging from a greenscreen, it was stunt doubles inside the Winnebago, it was the plates you had to get from the inside. Then it was all the objects you had to get: you had to have fake bowling balls and real bowling balls… it was probably a total of three days of shooting to get that silly little sequence. Don’t tell anyone that.
White: You can feel the work and the money behind it.
McKay: It took us an hour. It was easy.
Q: Watching this footage, you have a lot of characters that offer a lot of different types of humor, but Brick is a guy who can say anything and its funny - the more obscure the better. Is there ever a tendency to abuse that, to have too much Brick?
McKay: That’s a good question. Brent and I talk about this all the time. He’s definitely the Harpo Marx of the team in the sense that he has no rules whatsoever to him. He can step out of scenes. He can comment on scenes. He can look at the camera. He’s got this magical power, and then, rhythm-wise, he can just get laughs. He has one line in the movie that’s not even a joke and it gets a huge laugh. He just says something and the crowd goes crazy. We actually did a pass where we would go through and look at Brick and take out anything that’s mediocre or-
White: Sweaty
McKay: Sweaty, and we’re like, it should only be high quality when it’s Brick.
White: Absurd and just something that actually says something, too, that comments in a very odd way on what’s going on.
McKay: Yeah, it’s got to be a fresh premise. It’s got to be like the one you saw in the Winnebago of him not understanding what reminiscing is. I’ve never seen that joke before, so Brick gets that. You are right though, it’s very tempting because you can literally put him in any scene and get a laugh. You have to be very careful with it.
Q: What was the writing process of the movie? How did you decide what jokes to keep?
McKay: We come in with a script that’s been pretty beaten up. We do a lot of table reads with it, we do punch-ups, and we do rewrites constantly. You want to have a script that’s working really, really well so then you always know you’re getting the written script. On the day, we usually do a couple of takes where you get the written script, and then we’ll start messing around. I’ll throw out some lines, they’ll throw out some stuff, and then eventually you’ll discover an area like, “Oh that’s funny,” and you’ll do a whole take on that. You have digital, [you can go] longer now. The really quick answer to what I’m telling you is basically [Brent] has to make sense of it all.
White: That’s another reason why there’s so many options, so many alts, because there’s the joke idea and I would cut different versions of every scene. Some of these scenes, there’s three or four or five different versions of every scene and they’re all completely different. They still do the same job in the movie, but they all have different joke runs in them. And then from there we can cherry pick and find the ones that really make us laugh, or put them up in front of people and see which ones [work].
McKay: And you remember the good ones. Brent and I will dig into a scene for, like, a whole day, so when you’re looking at that scene, it’s bringing back all the memories of shooting it. I’ll go to Brent, “Hey, we did this one really funny bit,” and he’s got this whole cool cataloguing system where he can just call up the lines. Can you show them that script thing you have? This is the coolest thing. He’s actually got the script, and then you can click on it and the take will show up.
Q: Are there times where the guys ad-libbed and took it off-script?
McKay: Oh, god, yeah. That's mostly what we do. We do a couple of takes where it's the script, and then we just start screwing around. We try different lines, we try different takes, different attitudes. There was one scene where Will gets punched, and we did five different reactions of him reacting poorly to a punch. One version was that his whole sense of orientation was off, and he couldn't speak or even stand up. So that was a whole version. Another version was where he tried to act tough about the punch and tell the guy who hit him, "That didn't bug me." But while he's doing it he's fighting back tears and his voice is cracking. Then there was another version where he goes on at great length about all the people that have hit him harder than that, and it's women and children. And I'm forgetting, like, two more. That was a thing that, in the script, was maybe one line of dialogue, and we ended up improvising on it for an hour, and were laughing so hard we had tears in our eyes, and then it's not in the movie!
Q: With lines like that or takes that are so much better than the last one, how do you pick your favorites?
McKay: You screen and screen is what you do. You keep putting it up in front of people, whether it's friends and family or whether it's a recruited audience, you just want to see all these jokes you liked when you shot them to make sure either they work or they don't work. So you're constantly kind of flipping them in and out. On this movie, which we've never done before, we did A and B screenings. We were doing two screenings every night. So you had one whole rack of jokes in the A screening, and you had a different rack of jokes in the B screening, and we were constantly... the B screening was like the minor leagues. So if a joke got a big laugh at the B screening, we would then bring it up. If a moment worked or if there was a cool shot, we would then move it into the A cut.
Q: Are there any arguments, like, "I really want that line in the final cut, and it didn't make it!"
McKay: You know what we do? Despite everything I've just said, at the end of the day, we do go through it and go, "I just want that line [in the movie]." There are some lines the audience never... like the joke where he opens his mouth and goes, "The only way I can stop saying that is to just open my mouth" actually doesn't get a laugh from a regular audience, but we love it, and we're like, "Too bad, you're getting it anyway." Because eighty percent of the time, it's a give-and-take with the audience, but sometimes... and on the first movie, we did that a lot, too, and it actually proved to work. Like "I'm kind of a big deal" never got a laugh, but we just liked it. So we were like, "Too bad, it's staying in even though the audience was never laughing at it." And it ended up becoming one of the big quotable lines. We do that with all the movies. At a certain point we just put in ones we just like. So it's a give and take that you're playing.
Q: Has it been satisfying for you to see the way ANCHORMAN has grown in stature in pop culture, and become this iconic film that actually led to the momentum to get this film made?
McKay: Yeah, it's been crazy. We all kind of witnessed it slowly. The first movie came out and it did pretty good, and we got pretty good reviews. And we were like, "Hey, we got to make that crazy movie, and it was fun." Then we're kind of going on to our next movie, TALLADEGA NIGHTS, and while we were doing it Halloween would happen, and we would keep seeing people dressed as Ron Burgundy. We'd hear quotes, and I'd have friends calling me saying, "I just heard it quoted on ESPN." I had a Google Alert, and it got to be so many I had to turn it off because they were quoting it [so much]. It went from this insane movie that made Will and I laugh to this thing that everyone connected with. Yeah, it's definitely satisfying and exciting. I mean, it made it harder to do the second one because a lot of the comedy has been co-opted in commercials and kind of other styles in other comedies, so we really had to write this script over and over again to make sure we had original things. It made it a little harder, but at the same time without a doubt it was great to know your 2 AM flights of fancy other people think are funny. Things I used to get in trouble for writing at SNL, suddenly other people like it. It was nice.
Q: In what way did that help you refine what the story was going to be, since the first time around you essentially had two movies?
McKay: The first one was definitely an unloading of material because we'd waited so long to do it. This one, because there were all these delays and because we could never quite get the budget right and the schedule right, we got really lucky that we got to keep refining the story. We approached it once where it was going to be a musical, and then there was a delay again and we went back to it. Because there were those delays we had time to test them and sleep on ideas and see how they felt the next day. We had some crazy idea for an ending where it was going to be an Irwin Allen thing. The Underwater Hotel was being announced. It was the most obvious setup for a disaster ever. There was this glass dome over it, and Burgundy has ignored the story about how the glass manufacturers skimped on prices because [the network] advertises undersea dome glass. Ferrell and I wrote this crazy ending, and... there were like gushes of water coming through and shooting sharks at people. It was absolute madness. But we wrote the whole thing, and it wasn't bad. It almost worked. Then we took a beat, and were like, "That's not the end of the movie." It was going to be crazy expensive. I'm not sure it would've worked. But, yeah, we got those advantages of being able to work on the story and see how it felt as time went by.
Q: Without spoiling too much, you mentioned the musical thing. Did any of that make it into the movie at all? What was the musical going to be?
McKay: It was going to basically be the same storyline and the same kind of CNN twenty-four-hour news/Fox News kind of thing, but just a musical. We had four or five numbers written, and we did shoot them, so there are a couple of musical numbers in here. But we had one big giant one that didn't quite play the way we wanted it. It always worked. It wasn't like it was bad. It just didn't quite play storywise, so we took that out. But that having been said, there are still a couple of songs in there. There's one big love song at the end of the movie that... I'll wait. I don't want to give it away. I’m tempted to tell, but you’ve got to wait and see.
White: He’s tempted!
McKay: I am so tempted! It’s such a fun sentence to say, what that love song is about. But wait and see it. You’ll see it. Yeah.
Q: How political do you allow yourself to get? Do you take any shots at the Tea Party or anything contemporary?
McKay: You’ll have to see. A lot of it’s about when you do 24-hour news, it’s so much about ratings. It’s so much about for-profit news. That’s a lot of what the commentary is about: just trash news and infotainment. 1980 was like a dividing line where they started going towards puffier, sugary news, so that’s a lot of what it’s about – and of course Ron Burgundy is right in the middle of that change and leading that change. We did feel like with ANCHORMAN more than anything we’ve done, it’s such a fun, colorful movie that we wanted to keep it pretty buoyant. But some of the commentary did lend itself to that. There’s definitely some shots at our infotainment American media and how they oftentimes don’t talk about much beyond animals and breasts.
Q: Since Ron learned about equality in the first film. Did that handicap you in any way with the character in this?
McKay: He mostly forgot that. (Laughs) I mean, we always laugh about the first one, “What did he really learn?” He learned not to be a dick when your girlfriend gets a job, which isn’t really that much. So you’ll see pretty quickly in this one he’ll have to deal with some more success that she has, and he’s not equipped to handle it at all. He’s a tad less of an a-hole than he was in the first one, but it’s so small that it doesn’t really play.
Q: Could we get a demo of the script thing?
McKay: Yeah, you guys have got to see it.
White: Basically each line of dialogue is tagged and so I can play it. I can literally get every ad-lib, every shot of any given ad-lib. So I have all of the options, and every time we go through, we can just look and make sure that’s the best idea, that’s the best joke, that’s the best delivery, that’s the best rhythm - whatever it is we want to make the thing work.
McKay: And then the filing system for the alternate runs and bits is also in there.
Q: Is this something you developed yourself?
White: Over time working with McKay and Judd [Apatow]. This kind of improv-based comedy just needed a way that you could handle it so you could get around all of the material and just be able to find it on any given day. Because, like Adam says, he would remember the day he shot it, he would remember something he did, and now he says, “I know it’s in there… somewhere.” And I would have to go in there and dig it out and, in a fairly easy time, try to figure out what it could possibly be.
Q: Do you have a name for this system?
McKay: It’s called the Brent White. Brent designed the program. Everything. It’s all him.
White: It was just something that’s in the Avid. It’s called a scripting tool that’s in the Avid that we’ve just utilized in a way that’s probably different than a lot of people do it.
McKay: It’s really cool though, isn’t it? Click on the script and see all the alts. We just sit here all day and just look through them. It’s really fun.
White: There’s a locator mark on all the different little pieces. I can look through them, and I can see what each line said. So I can just go through and pick them up. Everything that’s different in the scene is written up and textualized so that I can find it in that way as well.
Q: Who catalogues that? Is it your assistant editors?
White: I have an amazing crew that are very patient and they spend a lot of time. While they’re shooting, we’re just getting all this stuff in the machine and getting it ready so when we get back here and start cutting, we can actually find stuff and get stuff together.
Q: How long was the editing process on this film compared to the first one and compared to some of your other films?
McKay: This was actually shorter. We had a little bit of a crunch time. How many weeks was it, Brent? Twenty-two?
White: Yeah, because we have to be in theaters for Christmas, so we just had to get everything done a little bit faster. But even the fact there was so much material, that’s the other reason why I cut - and the other guys around me cut - alternate versions of each of the scenes. So we’ve already kind of explored all the options.
McKay: We did something on this movie that we’ve never done before, too. We did pretty extensive notes, while it was shooting, on cuts he was sending me. In the past, I would just lazily give some notes and go “Hey, take it more in this direction.” But we actually went back and forth like three, four times on certain scenes so by the time we got into the edit room, some of these scenes were like eighty- to ninety-percent there as far as a first pass. It really helped us a lot in the sense they got a pretty playable cut really early on, so we were able to do a friends-and-family screening. [But] on the friends and family screening, Seth Rogen was there and he sat dead center. We had 100 people there, it was a two-and-a-half hour cut, and the entire laugh track we recorded was completely wrecked because of Seth Rogen sitting in the middle going “Huh, huh huh..” One of the great laughs of all time! But his comedy sense of humor is so good that you’re like “I don’t know if other people will laugh at that. I know Seth Rogen finds that crazy joke [funny].” So we were like “Okay, friends-and-family screening useless because of Seth Rogen.” I wish it would just play for 300 million Seth Rogens. I don’t know what that would do to the world, but yeah…
Q: Is he on the no invite list for the next friends-and-family screening?
White: No! He’s actually a really great barometer of what we know to be funny.
McKay: He just laughs at everything we laugh at. That’s basically it. And with the loudest laugh you’ve ever heard. No better audience member than Seth Rogen.
(White plays a chunk of the friend-and-family laugh track. Sure enough, there’s a big Seth Rogen laugh.)
White: It’s just that that laugh is so distinctive.
Q: You should release a version just with him.
McKay: That’s really funny. Just release the Seth Rogen laugh track. That’s really funny. There should be a law for one whole year that all laugh tracks are Seth Rogen for all TV shows. The world would get ever so slightly better.
ANCHORMAN 2: THE LEGEND CONTINUES arrives December 20th, 2013.
Faithfully submitted,
Mr. Beaks
