Will Ferrell, left, and Christina Applegate aren't breaking the mould in Anchor Man 2: The Legend continues. Source: AP
ORIGINALLY, Ron Burgundy, cinema's favourite anchorman, wasn't so loved.
That is hard to imagine given how willingly the news media now plays along with Will Ferrell's retrograde 1970snewsreader.
Ferrell is slightly agog.
"We're getting the same question from journalists: what advice would Ron Burgundy have for me?" he says, smiling. "And we're just laughing. Why would you want advice from Ron Burgundy? He's a horrible journalist!"
When the original film starring Ferrell, Paul Rudd, David Koechner and Steve Carell as a witless news team chasing a panda birth in San Diego, screened in 2004, I invited some Sydney newsreaders for a screening. Most refused; the couple who came - and remain prominent on air - were slightly amused yet mortified. Television's not like that, they said.
"We had the same reaction back in the States," Ferrell says. A New York reporter showed it to local anchors and they all watched glumly and said it was mildly amusing and, of course, completely inaccurate.
"Now, all I hear is TV journalists saying honestly that it's the most accurate depiction of how it was like," Ferrell says, laughing. "It's funny the revisionist history on it."
But director and Ferrell's long-time collaborator Adam McKay acknowledges: "No matter what profession you're in, if you get a ribbing you sort of enjoy it."
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy built, though largely due to the multiple variations of the film that were later released on DVD. And catchphrases that once played dead to audiences - "Stay classy, San Diego", "It's kind of a big deal", "I'm in a glass case of emotion" - are now part of the cinematic vocabulary, for better or worse.
The sequel, Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, was a long time coming, in part because its popularity was a slow burn. And, in part, because the team thought a Broadway musical version was the logical next iteration.
"That was completely serious if Paramount gave us a solid yes," Ferrell notes of his studio. "They gave us a 'Huh, maybe'."
Ferrell and McKay knew it was outside the box to have a stage production that would then lead to a sequel but they'd enjoyed their Broadway run with Ferrell's one-man show, You're Welcome America: A Final Night with George W. Bush.
The duo told Rudd, Carell and Koechner: "The good news is it'd be really fun and different; the bad news is it's going to be two years of your life."
Ferrell then saw Matt Stone and Trey Parker's hit musical, The Book of Mormon, and was blown away by its humour and music.
"It was really the anti-musical musical and that's what we were going to do in a way," he says. "Uh oh, they kind of did it."
A Broadway version would have had to satisfy certain conventions. And the joy of the two Anchorman films is they are, comedically at least, unconventional, full of non sequiturs, surrealism, improvisation and idiocy. So much so, the sequel will be re-released on Blu-ray with the same plot structure but a new joke replacing every joke in the theatrical release. McKay counts it at nearly 400 gags.
Of all Ferrell and McKay's feature collaborations - Step Brothers, The Other Guys, Talladega Nights - Anchorman is the freest of comedy formats.
One of the sequel's enduring lines, at least to this writer, is unhinged and unrelated to anything else in the movie, as a blind Burgundy asks plaintively: "Is that you, Cher?"
"That's a perfect example of, if we have a style, our style," Ferrell says, smiling. "What? Did he just say that? And then it blows by and then we're wrestling a shark."
Ferrell says he and McKay, since they met on Saturday Night Live, "shared the same belief of 'why not?' ".
After working in the SNL environment dominated by writers and their rules, Anchorman was the duo's release, he adds, "born out of this thing of like, we don't want to follow any of the rules and why can't a film go into an animated sequence for no reason?
"The best thing you can have in comedy is the ability to surprise.
"You never want to know what's happening in comedy, you want a certain degree of unpredictability. We do it with all of our movies to some extent, there's always some sort of left-field heightening or surrealism.
"Step Brothers and Anchorman are the two most unhinged and, oddly, they're the two with the biggest, most rabid fan followings."
The star argues the irony of the sequel is it has a stronger story than the original. Again, Ron and the team have their internal political battles with workmates and management in Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues although its scenario is moved to the 1980s at the cusp of cable news, tabloid journalism and vocal media moguls.
"We hadn't seen the original for a while, and of course we were laughing, but another part of us was going: 'Wow, it's a very thin story'," Ferrell says, laughing, of the original.
"The big headline was the battle of the sexes but it just ends up being about going to cover a panda story and fighting bears, which at the same time is the beauty of it. But it's rickety at points, lovably so."
Certainly, the world knows the sequel is coming. Burgundy has been the focus of a furious amount of marketing, communications and viral activity, including specialised messages for the key markets of the US, Britain, Ireland and Australia. So much so, Ad Week magazine claimed the film has "changed the way movies are marketed".
A campaign McKay and Ferrell created for the Dodge Durango car lifted sales by 60 per cent. They had creative control and chose to promote the Durango, after being approached by more than six major US products, because it was an old American car and "it sounded the funniest".
But Ferrell says their success is "a problem".
He sighs, saying a precedent has been set for other studios wanting the same on his next projects.
"But this lends itself to doing stuff in character," he says. "It's fun for me but it's also effective. If I do my next film and I'm playing more of an average guy, I'll be telling them: 'No, it's not applicable.'
"Every time you see Ron do 30 seconds, it's a treat," he adds. "While it's groundbreaking, it's very unique, and you need to be able to steer it, which we've been able to do, to make sure it's funny."
Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues opens nationally tomorrow.
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