That Escalated Quickly: The Making of Anchorman

Everything we couldn't fit in the Unspooled episode: The real newsroom sexism, the alternate film made of deleted scenes, and why Ron Burgundy became the internet

This week on Unspooled, we tackled Adam McKay’s Anchorman, which is kind of a big deal and not just because it made “Stay classy, San Diego” a permanent sign-off for an entire generation. Listen to the episode and explore the behind-the-scenes stories we couldn’t squeeze in: how a 1960s Cleveland horror host named Ghoulardi connects to the whole film, why most of “San Diego” was actually shot in Long Beach, and the real anchorman who admitted he was “a real male chauvinist pig” on camera and accidentally inspired the whole movie.

Adam and Will’s Backstory

Watch as they both don’t let each other get through the interview.

Before Ron and Veronica there was Mort & Jessica

The inspiration for Anchorman came when Will Ferrell was watching a television documentary about Jessica Savitch, one of the first women to anchor news telecasts. He was struck by her former co-anchor in Philadelphia, Mort Crim, who delivered his reminiscences in a silky baritone: “He literally said the line:

‘You have to remember, back then I was a real male chauvinist pig. I was not nice to her.’

Crim and Savitch co-anchored together at KYW-TV in Philadelphia in the mid-1970s as one of the first male-female pairings in the country.

After Savitch’s tragic death in a car accident, Mort Crim read the eulogy at Savitch’s memorial service. The man who’d admitted to being “not nice” to her had evolved—he later became a self-proclaimed feminist who defended Savitch’s legacy, writing to People Magazine after her death to rail against their “hatchet job” on her career.

Paul Thomas Anderson Shepherded the Script

Before Anchorman existed, Will Ferrell and Adam McKay wrote a script called “August Blowout” (described as “Glengarry Glen Ross meets a car dealership”) that never got made but was popular around Hollywood. Along the way, they caught the attention of a seemingly unlikely ally in filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, whom Ferrell has since described as one of Anchorman‘s “guardian angels.” As Ferrell recalls, “He’s 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?’”

Here’s the wild connection: PTA’s father, Ernie Anderson, was a legendary Cleveland TV horror host known as “Ghoulardi” in the 1960s, a wild, anarchic personality famous for blowing up pictures of Dorothy Fuldheim (Cleveland’s first female news anchor and a broadcasting pioneer). Ghoulardi’s mockery of authority and news pomposity almost seems like an entry point to Anchorman became.

The Studio wanted to cut The News Team Battle

According to a 2013 Vulture oral history, studio executives wanted to cut the now-iconic news team battle entirely, claiming they didn’t see the point. Producer Judd Apatow pushed McKay and Ferrell to “go further,” and they were eventually given just a couple of days to shoot what became the film’s most memorable sequence. The shoot required 30-40 setups in a single day, all tightly choreographed with stunt teams and A-list cameos.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a day like that, and we’ve done all kinds of crazy sh*t. To this day, that’s still the craziest day I’ve ever had. And that scene, more than any scene in the movie, became the signature thing, in the sense that you had the feeling that the movie could do anything. - Adam McKay

Tim Robbins insisted on the pipe and turtleneck for his character, and Ben Stiller was simply handed a whip and told to figure it out. TheThings Steve Carell was given the trident about three seconds before throwing it. But once they saw the it all put together no one said another word. However the real hero of the scene was prop master, Scott Maginnis, who laid out all the weapons, both modern and medieval, for people to choose the ones that seemed right for their character. Everyone put a lot of consideration into what their news anchor would be brandishing.

The News Battle Scene Inspired Real Newscasters

On the 10th anniversary of Anchorman, Australian television channel SBS created “Broadcast Battleground,” where news anchor Lee Lin Chin became the target of every anchor in the Australian news cycle in a recreation of the film’s battle scene.

Ron Burgundy and Lizzo Love Jazz Flute

According to director Adam McKay, the jazz flute concept came directly from Will Ferrell during a writing session: “One day while we were writing, Will blurted out, ‘Ron Burgundy has to play jazz flute, right?’ I immediately responded, ‘Of course he does.’” The solo was actually played by Katisse Buckingham, a Los Angeles-based studio musician. In 2019, even Lizzo recreated it in a video.

The Second Movie From the Deleted Scenes

Anchorman had so many deleted scenes that Adam McKay assembled them into a completely different film—Wake Up, Ron Burgundy: The Lost Movie released straight to DVD in 2004. The alternate film features a totally different storyline involving a revolutionary group called “The Alarm Clock” and includes scenes of the news team stranded on a mountain nearly resorting to cannibalism and we meet Fred Willard’s son. Check out these scenes:

IN THEIR OWN WORDS

Paul Rudd “It was a whole new way of working on a big-budget movie, and it was thrilling. We would always do what was in script, but then we’d start kind of messing around. Adam McKay creates this environment where you can do that, you can play around and anything is fair game.” Rudd also noted that McKay would yell out new jokes mid-scene, rewriting in real-time: “I would say, in most cases Adam McKay is the funniest guy in the room.”

Steve Carell: “It’s funny because people ask you to talk about character development, this movie in particular, it seems so pretentious and ridiculous to talk about character development for Anchorman.”

Christina Applegate: “This is not a group of improv-y guys with a lot of competition, I know that there’s a lot of big comedy guys out there who are very competitive and that’s the tone that they set, but this movie, it’s almost, ‘I’m gonna make you laugh,’ instead of ‘I’m gonna be funnier than you.’”

SOME INTERESTING FACES SHOWED UP TO THE PREMIERE

All the big names in comedy were at the premiere but their were a few interesting pairings as well, like Allison Williams with her Dad, Brian Williams. Newsman John Stossel as well as Eli Roth and Fred Durst.

Oh and Gywenth Paltrow

Gywenth showed up and she just apparently came from cupping

LOS ANGELES PLAYS SAN DIEGO

Though set in San Diego, most of Anchorman was filmed in Los Angeles particularly around Long Beach. The Channel 4 news station was a set built inside Seeley Furniture Warehouse in Glendale. The San Diego Zoo panda birth scene was actually filmed at the now-abandoned Old LA Zoo in Griffith Park.

The restaurant “Escupimos en su Alimento” (which means “we spit in your food” in Spanish) was actually the Dresden Room Restaurant in Los Feliz.

LEGACY…

Anchorman opened at #2 behind Spider-Man 2 and was met with lukewarm reviews, but has since been ranked #100 on Bravo’s 100 funniest movies, #6 on Time Out’s top 100 comedy films, and #49 on Rolling Stone’s 100 Best Movies of the Decade. What started as a silly satire of 1970s machismo and Action News format accidentally predicted the future: McKay went on to make political films like The Big Short and Don’t Look Up, with the satirical perspective established in Anchorman. The film’s skewering of news as entertainment, male workplace dynamics, and performative authority feels even sharper two decades later. Ron Burgundy was supposed to be a relic. Instead, he became a warning we didn’t heed wrapped in a burgundy suit, holding a scotch, playing jazz flute while the world burned around him.

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