Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

This comedy was Adam McKay’s first film as director, and it drops a woman reporter into a San Diego news team in the seventies. The first script he and Will Ferrell wrote was a different film. By Ferrell’s account it was a plane crash picture: Ron Burgundy talks his way into the cockpit, puts the aircraft into a mountainside, clips a second plane, and the survivors are hunted by the orangutans and throwing stars spilling from its hold. It was never made. On the film that was made, the written lines ran out. Steve Carell has described McKay telling him simply to say something, because Brick had nothing left on the page; Carell looked at a lamp, said what he saw, and Ferrell built on it. McKay and the editor Brent White then assembled a second feature, Wake Up, Ron Burgundy, out of discarded takes plus a bank robbing gang cut from the theatrical version; it went straight to video on 28 December 2004. The receipts show where the jokes land. Box Office Mojo records 85.3 million dollars inside the United States against 5.4 million everywhere else. A good fit if knowing that Brick’s lines were never written makes them funnier. Not for you if you would rather not keep decoding American local news of the nineteen seventies.