This writer’s first viewing of Anchorman was in a cramped press-screening room, usually the location for the films that aren’t blockbusters. Indeed, the screening room was only half full, but still early hopes were high given the film’s wacky trailer. Within a few minutes it was clear that this was a special but divisive film. A lot of the critics in the London screening room were audibly unimpressed, with the rest guffawing loudly. In fact, when the song ‘Afternoon Delight’ is sung in the office, some critics left, completely unsure of what they were watching. Their exit was barely noticed as the ones who were ‘getting it’ were in fits of laughter.

Will Ferrell plays Ron Burgundy, a chauvinistic local anchorman of the 1970s. It would be Ferrell at his greatest, a bumbling buffoon of a man imbued with a touch of vulnerability, as his cocksure approach subtly masks his insecurity. Anchorman was that rare breed from a SNL performer. While Ron Burgundy wasn’t a character that starred in the studios of 30 Rock, it could have been argued that there have been several prototypes of Burgundy, notably Will’s version of veteran crooner Rob Goulet. Thus the film retained the very best spirit of SNL. It was pure madcap madness, filled with the inescapable feeling that anything could happen. Sustaining that for a movie is a rare gift however, and there are few that can lay claim to such a success. The Wayne’s World movies could, as could SNL-cast-heavy Caddyshack or the early Steve Martin films like The Man With Two Brains or The Jerk. It’s a film packed with highlights, with people picking several different moments as their favourite – a sign of a great comedy. It features hugely quotable dialogue and scenes that just get better with repeated viewings, a film that practically begs more watches – another sign of a great comedy.

While it’s Ferrell’s film, he is more than comfortable to be surrounded by other great comedy actors – all bringing a different set of comedic skills. There is Paul Rudd’s male bravado tinged with insecurity, Tank with his over-the-top machismo, Steve Carell’s mastery of deadpan, the always dependable Fred Willard as the head of the news and Christina Applegate – the actress who not only plays the straight ‘man’ role with assured calmness but is also willing to get her hands dirty when it comes to the physical comedy. Throw in delightful cameos from Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller, Tim Robbins, Luke Wilson and you’ve got a film that just constantly surprises. It was a hit – if a slow-burning one. But due to word of mouth its popularity rose.

The film would be a huge launching pad for the actors involved. Carell’s performance as Brick would kick-start a hugely successful leading-man career – a path that was trodden similarly by Paul Rudd. Rudd had first found fame as the charismatically gentle stepbrother of Alicia Silverstone’s character in Clueless, and had followed it up with several romantic leading-man roles with diminishing results at the box office. However, his comedic turn as Brian Fantana saw him star in other comedies, such as Role Models, Knocked Up and Man, I Love You.

Anchorman was directed by Adam McKay – someone who worked with Will on SNL. McKay was on writing duties for SNL but showed his directorial ambition by bringing back SNL’s digital short films. Adam said: ‘I was going to quit the show. I had been head writer for a couple of years and there was all this stuff I wanted to try, but ultimately it’s his [Lorne Michaels’] show and I should politely move on. My manager said, “If you’re going to quit, make an unreasonable demand. What would you want in your dream world?” I didn’t want to go to production meetings. I didn’t want to be in the room for the actual show any more, which is actually no fun. I wanted a raise. I wanted a budget for short films. And I wanted to name my own screen credit. Lorne said yes. So for the last two years I was there, I was coordinator of falconry. That was my actual screen credit. Wow, some people were [ticked off]! I’m like, “Relax, this is a comedy show.”’ (Chicago Tribune, 28.4.2012)

One of the shorts that he filmed was The H Is O, aka The Heat is On, a memorable sketch show which featured Ferrell and Stiller in a bizarre sexual encounter. Said McKay: ‘To this day, I bump into people who whisper, “Hey, the H is O.” It’s like a secret club. And that was also kind of intentional. I never strove to make those shorts popular. It was more like I was going to film school. I had a crew. I had a budget. I shot 16 mm. I was shooting digital by the second year of this. I made a dozen films all together. I wouldn’t have known how to direct Anchorman if I hadn’t shot those videos. But also, some of them were just too crazy for the format. They were not as populist as what the guys at Lonely Island (Andy Samberg and Co.) are doing on the show now. Those guys grew up making shorts, like a lot of people we hire at Funny or Die. Digital is fluid to them – it’s a second language.’ (Chicago Tribune, 28.4.2012)

The idea for Anchorman came from a serious documentary that Will watched which charted the rise of women in the TV newsroom, and how they managed to break into the male-dominated news areas of the 1970s. He told the website LoveFilm: ‘I was watching a documentary on news programmes in the 70s, and at the point that I was watching it, this gentleman comes on talking about working with women for the first time in the 70s. He was very blunt about the fact that, although he had come a long way now, at the time, he wasn’t very nice to her at all. He kept on saying “You have to remember, back then I was a real male chauvinist pig – I hated women.” That statement just seemed so funny to me and it just went from there. The film is a comedy first, but as we pieced it together we started to realise that it’s still the same now, it hasn’t really changed that much. TV networks learnt early on about the possibilities of marketing and advertising as they realised that people were less reliant on papers and were using the TV news as their only source of information. So it’s interesting and scary really, whichever way you want to look at it, that this is a lot of people’s only source of information.’

Will added: ‘I called Adam with an idea to do a script about the petulant male-dominated world of the newsroom and how these men dealt with a woman for the first time, and he said “Great, let’s do it.”’ And in an interview with Index Magazine, Will said: ‘When I was a kid, I loved watching the news on TV. The news teams fascinated me because I thought they all hung out together. It certainly sounded that way from the stupid banter between stories – “Boy, Pete, that looks like your golf swing. Ha ha ha.” So I wanted to write a story about a male newscaster in the 70s, when the feminist movement was emerging, who has to work with a female newscaster for the first time. He’s a big fish in a little pond, and he’s really close to his news team. I was asking myself, what kind of petulant behaviour would result?’ After watching the documentary, McKay recalled: ‘There were all these interviews with anchormen of the day who were talking about how upset they had been that a woman had come in to work with them. We were laughing so hard at these guys with perfect ties admitting that they were completely freaked out by a woman coming into the news office.’

The pair would spend their days cramped in a hotel, with index cards, detailing their ideas, plastered over the walls. Will said to Index Magazine: ‘When we wrote the script, we holed up in a room at the Wyndham Village Hotel for week-long stretches. We started by brainstorming, just thinking of ideas – small ideas or big ones – for stories and scenes. We’d sit with a pen and paper and write them all down.’ They wanted to make a comedy that was incredibly broad, but still had enough depth that you cared about the characters. In an interview in Index Magazine, they cited the early classic episodes of The Simpsons as an inspiration:

Famed comedy director and writer Judd Apatow came on board as producer, with executive producer Shauna Robertson also helping to develop the screenplay. Judd was delighted to work on the film, as he had been a fan of McKay in the past, telling the film’s production notes: ‘Adam punched up a script that I was trying to develop. I thought he was truly one of the funniest guys I had ever come across. [And] I have been a fan of Will’s for years. I think he is hilarious and had always hoped that I would have the opportunity to work with him. Together, Will and Adam are two of the nicest guys that you could collaborate with. They are extremely talented and have a great time working together, and that becomes infectious and raises the level of everyone’s work.’ Robertson joked: ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if Adam and Will were twins separated at birth. They have the exact same sense of humour. It’s really random to find two people who work together so well.’

The film gets the 1970s period look perfectly. Discussing how he came up with the look of Ron, Will told LoveFilm: ‘He just kept on evolving, I knew he wanted a moustache and in terms of hair, well, we didn’t think my hair was good enough. We wanted it to be this big pouf of hair, held in place by loads of hairspray, so in the end we had to settle with a wig to achieve that one.’ Costume designer Debra McGuire added in the film’s production notes: ‘I loved the idea that his name was Ron Burgundy and decided that the colour burgundy would be a good place to start in his costumes.’ And talking about his character, Will revealed to Visimag.com in 2004: ‘It was such a fun era to look back on. We’ve kind of forgotten now what it was like because, for the most part, things have become more equal in terms of gender roles. But when you look back at the attitudes then, it seems so silly. It’s great to be able to play on the fact that these guys are male chauvinists. We are not glorifying male chauvinists, we are making fun of them. Ron thinks he is a lot smarter and more talented than he really is. He has somehow gotten by on his charisma and although he is – let’s face it – a terrible journalist, San Diego just loves him.’

The film charts the lives of the newsroom men and the moment that everything changes – the introduction of Veronica Corningstone, a woman who will break the male-dominated stranglehold in the newsroom. It would be a tricky character to play: a straight woman who could handle the jokes that flew past her – many improvised – but could also make sure she had such a presence that audiences would care for her. Christina Applegate was cast in the role – a veteran of comedy, with her famous role as the pretty daughter in Married With Children, a hugely popular sitcom in the 1980s and 1990s. McKay said about her casting: ‘We had to get the perfect person. Without exaggerating, I think we read more than 100 actresses for that role, but no one fit the bill. Then Christina walked in, and that was it. She’s such a good actress and so funny, and she can improvise, which is important when you’re working with Will, so we just had to have her.’ Applegate added: ‘When I got the script, I thought it was really hysterical, and I could see Will Ferrell as Ron Burgundy. The whole idea really appealed to me. If you look back at tapes of newscasters during the early 70s, they seem incredibly misogynistic. No offence to any of them, but it was a man’s world. You could smoke and even have your scotch while doing the newscast; it was just a completely different world run by these very macho men. So, that’s what Veronica steps into. They have their perfect world where they have everything under control, and in walks Veronica and turns everything upside down.’ (Cinemareview.com)

It was a perfect comedy, but not everybody expected it to be a hit, with Will admitting: ‘Of all the stuff Adam McKay has done, we’ve always said “I don’t know if anyone else will like it, but I think that’s funny.” The studio didn’t understand it. The head of marketing was openly telling the media, “I don’t get it.” We didn’t care, because we got to make exactly what we wanted to make, and we were happy, even if it was the last movie we ever made.’ (Den of Geek, 2.12.2010) While it may have been a struggle to market the film, there was such an appeal in Frat Pack films that the audiences would have come purely for the cast – the fact that it was a surreal, bonkers and way-out-of-there movie was just an added bonus.

The reviews were initially a mixed bag. Time Out said: ‘As Starsky & Hutch proved, 70s men are an easy comic target. They can be reduced to familiar stereotypes, while providing a source of guilt-free sexist gags. Such gags result when Anchorman Ron Burgundy Will Ferrell and pals get their flares in a flap about ambitious new employee Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate). No sooner has Ron wooed her than she’s stepping into his shoes. Will he accept her success graciously? No, he’ll bellow obscure insults from the rooftops and pound his hairy chest at the shame of being eclipsed by a female. In this world, being an anchorman is the ultimate masculine prize. As Veronica’s power increases, her male colleagues weaken. Their pride can only be reclaimed by rescuing Veronica from bears in a zoo (“We bears are a proud race. They must pay for their intrusion,” the creatures growl via subtitles, before grudgingly accepting newcomers as the anchormen do).’ The review added: ‘But plot isn’t the primary interest here: this is as flimsy as a sitcom, and it’s shot like one too. Like a Saturday Night Live sketch, it’s propelled by its absurd humour, from silly erection jokes to hilariously surreal exchanges (“What? … You know I don’t speak Spanish,” Ron admonishes his barking dog). This takes a joke and runs with it – sometimes too far, but usually long enough to wear you down and force you to submit to its craziness. With cameos from chums Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Luke Wilson and Vince Vaughn, the film smacks of self-indulgence, but throws enough comic talent at the screen to make it stick. This particular boys’ club isn’t facing extinction just yet.’

The Washington Post added: ‘It’s a skit, but so ingeniously constructed and convincingly executed that it manages to sustain its energy far beyond sketch length. It never becomes tedious and strained … It’s certainly the role that Ferrell was born to play: It caters exactly to his strengths – the hyper-exaggerated mannerisms of the Saturday Night Live sketch – and avoids his weaknesses, which would be something called “replicating believable human behaviour”.’ Peter Travers from Rolling Stone said, ‘Anchorman slaps a goofy smile on your face’, while Ebert noted: ‘If the movie simply focused on making Ron and his team look ridiculous, it might grow tedious, because that would be such an easy thing to do. But it has a kind of sweetness to it. Despite his weaknesses, Ron is sort of a nice guy, darn it all, and Veronica Corningstone, despite her desire to project a serious image, kinda likes the guy – especially when he reveals an unsuspected musical talent in a lounge one night, after he’s asked to “sit in on jazz flute”.’

The New York Post wasn’t as keen, saying: ‘Ferrell is funny spouting his weird stream-of-consciousness rants, but too often the plot leaves him hanging and he resorts to just Yelling Really Loud.’ The San Francisco Chronicle stated: ‘Though always sophomoric and sometimes bland, Anchorman is also intermittently funny, with just enough laughs (but only just enough) to keep an audience rooting for it. The movie’s strenuous pursuit of comic moments, in fact, becomes a comic strategy in itself. There’s a scene in which Will Ferrell, as the vain and empty-headed Ron Burgundy, is mourning the loss of his pet dog. He calls a co-worker from a pay phone, sobbing and shrieking, and it’s supposed to be funny, but it’s not really. But Ferrell keeps it going, sobbing louder, shrieking louder, flailing in the phone booth, taking the moment past exaggeration and past absurdity into some comedy version of outer space. He gets his laugh. Ferrell has to work this hard because Anchorman is a satire without much truth or perception behind it and therefore no satiric kick.’

Costing over $25 million, the film got its money back in its opening weekend, and went on to gross nearly $100 million in the US alone. And the film would grow even more, with repeated viewings sparking even more quotable dialogue and the film a regular inclusion in best-of-comedy film lists. At the end of 2004, the film has already built such a loyal following that McKay put together a follow-up DVD entitled Wake Up, Ron Burgundy, which comprised cobbled-together excised subplots and deleted scenes from the first movie. In the UK, Wake Up, Ron Burgundy was released as a newly-packaged DVD companion piece with the first film.

The slow-burning success surprised its stars. Applegate said: ‘When Anchorman first opened, I think everyone kind of went, like, “Oh, that’s a bummer.” But all of a sudden it just started to pick up steam. I remember watching from afar, going “wow”.’ Suddenly the actors would be greeted by flippant lines they delivered in the midst of hours of improv and messing around on set from crowds of people on the street. Suddenly Anchorman had become one of the most quoted movies of all time. Will said: ‘Someone sent me and Adam a photo of a troop transport carrier in Baghdad, in the days when the Iraq war was still pretty nasty. Ron Burgundy’s face was stencilled on the side and it said “Stay classy, Baghdad”. That was one of the craziest.’

Ferrell was becoming a regular on the big screen now, and he thrilled audiences by appearing as a cameo in Todd Phillips’ Starsky & Hutch – with Den of Geek stating: ‘I didn’t watch Starsky & Hutch episodes when I was a kid, so I can’t comment on how the movie compares to the TV series. I can safely say, though, this movie is more parody that a straight adaptation of the show. You’ll see occasional tips of the hat to the show like recreations of scenes from the series opening or cameos by the original Starsky & Hutch, Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul. But beyond that there’s not much similarity.’

With roles like Anchorman and memorable cameo appearances in Starsky & Hutch it was clear that Ferrell was a fully-fledged movie star. Talking about meeting his fans, he told Rolling Stone: ‘Meeting fans, I’ll be like, “Oh, hey, how are you?” And, literally, they’re like, “What are you going to do? Do something! Are you sure that’s him? He’s not doing anything!” Yes, I fear they’re horribly underwhelmed.’

But, befitting his new status, he was a regular on the big screen, appearing in six films in 2005. Will Ferrell had arrived.