Will Ferrell Reveals Anchorman’s Crazy Original Story Idea

Anchorman is one of the most quoted cult-comedy hits of the last decade – but it was far from being an instant hit. It was a slow roll of positive word-of-mouth and home video viewing before Anchorman became the showcase of zany quotables that it is today – and according to Will Ferrell, it was also an uphill battle to get the movie made in the first place.

Speaking with EW, Ferrell revealed that when he tried to pitch Anchorman to studios, the film was rejected ten times in one day! However, the reluctance on studios’ part wasn’t without reason: As Ferrell himself acknowledges, the original story idea for Anchorman was pretty far out there – as in, really, really, nuts.

According to Ferrell:

“”The first version of Anchorman is basically the movie Alive, where the year is 1976, and we are flying to Philadelphia to celebrate the Bicentennial, and also, all the newsmen from around the country are flying in from their affiliates 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. 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.”

Is that not crazy enough for you? Then maybe this next part will be:

“So throughout the movie we’re being stalked by orangutans who are killing, one by one, the team off with throwing stars. And Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate) 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. So that was the first version of the movie.”

Apparently, Anchorman‘s first version was so weird, that it weirded out a director who is pretty much famous for making weird, mind-twisty movies:

“Paul Thomas Anderson came and guest-wrote for a week on SNL. And he sat down with us and he was like… What if you guys wrote whatever you wanted to write, and I would shepherd it for you and kind of find out how to make it?’ We were like, ‘We’d do it. We’d do it in a heartbeat.’ So that’s when we wrote Anchorman. So he was one of the guardian angels, even though I think the first incarnation of that was maybe a little too weird for Paul.”

Hearing what that first version of Anchorman looked like, one would expect there would’ve only been one logical reaction to reading it: