'Anchorman': A Stealth Romantic Comedy?
"I'm in a glass case of emotion!"
That is a headline I never thought I’d write in a gazillion years. But during a recent rewatch of Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, I concluded that the ultimate Will Ferrell movie is a romcom in disguise, a battle of the sexes throwing back to the raucous screwball comedies from Hollywood’s Golden Age.
In one corner, we have Ron Burgundy (Ferrell), a pompous blowhard news anchor in 1970s San Diego, and in the other stands Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate), his fiercest competition for airtime and respect. She’s the station’s first woman broadcaster, and she’s whip-smart and funny and suffers no fools (except for Ron). When viewers back home begin to favor Veronica, Ron — who once serenaded her with a fiery flute solo — creates a hostile workplace and tries to sabotage her success. Veronica fights back, enacting her revenge in the most glorious, laugh-out-loud way possible. At his lowest point, Ron, sporting an overgrown Castaway beard, nurses his wounded ego at a dive bar. “She’s better than me!” he admits, to which the bartender (Danny Trejo) counsels: “You know, times are changing. Ladies can do stuff now. And you’re gonna have to learn how to deal with that.”
Ferrell co-wrote Anchorman with his SNL buddy Adam McKay, who also directed it. The cast is stacked. Steve Carell! Paul Rudd! Seth Rogen! Cameos by Vince Vaughn and Ben Stiller! And yet, Applegate, who had previously starred on the sitcom Married… with Children, stands out as the best foil for Ferrell’s scenery-chewing schtick, puncturing his man-boy bravado with sick burns that might have belonged to Katharine Hepburn circa 1938. As it were, Anchorman hit theaters in 2004 amid a second Golden Age of romantic comedies, several of which centered on childish men learning how to be grownups to earn the love of a good woman. My friend Saul Austerlitz, a professor of comedy history at NYU, explores the film’s unheralded legacy in his excellent new book, Kind of a Big Deal: How Anchorman Stayed Classy and Became the Most Iconic Comedy of the Twenty-First Century. Last week, Saul and I connected to talk about Ron and Veronica, and why they still matter today. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
Ron Burgundy has to be Will Ferrell's greatest performance, possibly tied with Elf. How did he create this character who very much took on a life of his own?
It seems to be a character who has life beyond the movies and people keep wanting to come back to him, whether it's through memes or real-life, in-person appearances by Will Ferrell as Ron Burgundy. I think that the character starts to take flight in a moment where Will Ferrell and Adam McKay had written a script called August Blowout, which was about used-car salesman in Anaheim, California, the home of Disneyland and not that much else. And it was a great script, and everyone liked it, [but] they couldn't sell it and nobody wanted to make it, and they felt really despondent and [like] maybe things weren't going to work out for them in the movies. Will Ferrell was home one night and flipping channels and came across an A&E biography special about the 1970s newscaster Jessica Savitch. And in the moment that happened to capture his attention, one of Savitch’s fellow newscasters, Mort Crim, appeared on the screen and made a kind of offhanded comment about how, “Well, it was the 1970s. And of course, all of us male journalists were a bunch of chauvinist pigs.” [Ferrell] said to himself, “OK, I think there’s something here that we can start to work with.” It was sort of a combination of the kinds of ludicrous, over-the-top characters that Ferrell became famous for on SNL, with a little bit of George W. Bush in there as an amiable, often well-meaning, fatally dim guy who kind of coasts by on people’s weird affection for [guys like that]. And then also this particular 1970s news inspiration — putting those pieces together created something special.
Ferrell excels in playing the pathetic, somehow endearing buffoon. (Editor’s note: How did he not earn an Oscar nomination for his comic wizardry?)
Even as we watch him do and say kind of appalling things, we still sense a kind of inner romanticism that's lurking under there. I think the movie is very carefully calibrated so that when he's fighting with Veronica Corningstone, she always gets the literal last word and the metaphorical last word. She always comes out ahead in their arguments. She always comes out ahead in their physical battles. But yes, I think Ron is somehow a character who does despicable things. We sense or hope that he can do better as well.
One of my favorite chapters in your book is the deep dive into the history of Jessica Savitch, who blazed a trail for women in media. She was the first anchorwoman in the South before going on to host Frontline and anchor NBC Nightly News on the weekends. Tragically, she died in a car accident at the age of 36. What is Veronica’s shared DNA with Savitch?
I got really interested in exploring this and found it to be really fascinating. My working theory here is that, in a way, Anchorman is a kind of shadow biopic of Savitch, with Veronica Corningstone being the kind of Savitch-esque character. I came across descriptions of Savitch and the ways in which she had to deal with male newscasters and cameramen at some of the early stations she was at in Houston. … [Veronica is] handed really kind of fluff stories rather than getting to do things that are more hard-hitting. In the movie, I think Veronica is clearly the only actual journalist that we see. Ron and all of his male cohort — everyone loves them, but we're not really ever clear why exactly anyone would like any of them. And Veronica is someone who we see doing actual journalistic work. There are somewhat darker parallels [to Savitch], which the movie mostly shies away from. Savitch was in a destructive relationship with an abuser who mistreated her really terribly, whose name was Ron. So, I don't know if that was on purpose or just a kind of accidental byproduct. But there are a lot of overlaps between Savitch’s story and Veronica’s story.
If Anchorman is a shadow biopic of Savitch — I love that! — then it gives her big-screen avatar the sunny ending she never had in real life. And toward the end, Ron voices a surprising confession: The “She’s better than me!” line.
One of the interesting things that ends up happening when you revisit a movie over time is that the movie stays the same always, but your perception of it or the way you relate to it changes. And one of the things that happened for me in coming back to this movie was realizing — as #MeToo was unfolding — that this is a #MeToo movie before we had that specific naming for it or that concept. It delves into the experience of what it is like to be a woman working in a hostile workplace that is dominated by misogynistic attitudes. What does it take to endure that or fight back against that? That's what Anchorman is about.
How did Ferrell and McKay end up choosing Christina Applegate to play Veronica?
They looked at a bunch of other performers, including Judd Apatow's wife, Leslie Mann, and Maggie Gyllenhaal and Amy Adams. And Christina Applegate, at first glance, didn't match the kind of experience they were looking for. She hadn't done sketch comedy, but she had been on the TV show Married… with Children for over a decade at that point. She shot literally hundreds of episodes of the show and proved herself to be someone who is really comfortable in what might be uncomfortable comedic situations, where you have to adapt on the fly or be surprised by something unexpected that one of your co-stars is doing. And I think Applegate proves herself to be someone who's a really kind of surprisingly gifted comedian and able to hold her own in a role that’s partially the straight man and partially also the romantic heroine of the story.
Which Anchorman scene or quote makes you laugh the most?
I have a particular fondness for the scene where Ron and Veronica get into a physical fight in the newsroom. I love it because it’s just so eye-poppingly over the top, with Veronica throwing a typewriter at Ron. And Ron accidentally spraying himself with the mace from Veronica's pocketbook. And I think for me, the best part of it comes at the end where Veronica starts whipping Ron with the television antenna that she's ripped off one of the TVs in the newsroom, which is just a wonderful, hilarious moment and also feels like a kind of symbolic representation of everything in the movie — that here's Veronica, who's literally beating Ron with the tools of their own trade. So that's a moment that always stands out for me.
I mean, that's a Katharine Hepburn movie right there. That's screwball comedy.
It has a Hepburn-Tracy kind of feel. Totally.
Anchorman. Mean Girls. Bridesmaids. Knocked Up. Those big, zeitgeisty comedies have basically disappeared from the multiplex. What’s going on there?
I have a couple of theories about that. I think that most of it has to do with business. Over the last decade, we've seen a kind of acceleration of a concentration on IP. On movies that are based on intellectual property, whether it's Marvel or Star Wars or Jurassic Park or Indiana Jones or any of these familiar franchises where you slap the name on a poster and you know that people are going to go see them. And as these movies grow more and more expensive to make, the studios are increasingly dependent on international box office — if you make a Marvel movie, you can feel confident that it'll be able to play in Europe and in China and wherever else. Whereas if you make comedy, there's not so much in the way of intellectual property. It's just harder to make that happen. And at least historically, comedy doesn't travel as well. Jokes that are hilarious in the U.S. might not translate literally or symbolically elsewhere. So, I think both of those things have kind of steered studios away from making as many comedies as they used to. And as a result, we still have lots and lots of tremendously gifted comedic performers, but for the most part, they've either gone into standup or mostly they've gone to television, which offers them more room to experiment and more room to try things out and just more opportunities to make things. When we think about “Who are the film comedy stars right now in 2023?,” we're still kind of thinking of the same list of people that we had 10 years ago: Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, Melissa McCarthy, Seth Rogen.
Anchorman: The legend lives on…
Buy Saul’s book HERE! Speaking of books: I’ll be signing copies of No Crying in Baseball at Book Soup on Wednesday, and on Saturday, September 30, you can find me at the Chelsea Piers batting cages in Manhattan. From 5 to 7 p.m., I’m co-hosting a fun, interactive batting clinic for kids of all ages — including me: A very big kid! —with NY Girls Baseball, an all-girls baseball organization based in the New York metro area. If you're around, I would love to see your smiling faces! (Go Yankees! Or Mets!) “Don’t you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies,” EC.