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An interesting thing about Marvel Studios is their willingness to give comedic writers and directors a crack at their iconic heroes. It’s paid off handsomely so far: Captain America: The Winter Soldier was helmed by former Community directors Anthony and Joe Russo, and of course, Guardians of the Galaxy was the work of dark comedy master, James Gunn.

Well, Marvel is going to give another comedic writer/director a shot, as word is that Anchorman and Step Brothers director Adam McKay will helm one of their next wave of movies. This isn’t McKay’s first brush with Marvel Studios; he co-wrote Ant-Man and was approached to direct the movie when Edgar Wright dropped out.

No word yet on which movie Marvel wants McKay to direct. Of the announced Marvel Studios movies, only Black Panther, Captain Marvel and Inhumans are still without directors. Marvel will probably want a female director for Captain Marvel, and Black Panther will likely have a more serious tone, so that makes Inhumans the most likely bet. I could definitely see McKay giving the lesser-known Inhumans a lighthearted, GotG-like touch.

What do you think? What Marvel property would you give McKay? Do you think he should be directing a Marvel film at all? Sound off in the comments.

via The Playlist

With all these comedians burning Justin Bieber tonight, someone found the will to stand up and say, “Enough!” That person was Ron Burgundy, who took to the dais and set everyone straight about Bieber’s “crimes.”

He also told everyone what Bieber was really made of:

And for more you may have missed on the web…

It’s a trick exactly as old as all those Anchorman quotes we’ll never stop beating into the ground. A news anchor is known to faithfully read whatever the teleprompter puts in front of his face, so his co-anchor conspires with the production team to slip something silly into the scroll, and the next thing you know: an “I’m Ron Burgundy?” (or worse: “Go f*ck yourself, San Diego.”) moment is born.

The meta twist to this prank: The swapped-in line comes from Anchorman itself. Surely NBC26’s Brian Niznansky is familiar with the iconic comedy that lampoons his profession, but that didn’t stop him from pulling a Ron Burgundy.

(Via FreshX, H/T The Daily Dot)

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Seems as though Marvel Studios has a bit of an Adam McKay infatuation. Last we heard, the director of Anchorman and co-writer of Ant Man may direct an upcoming Marvel movie. Speculation was that Inhumans was the movie Marvel wanted him for, but it turns out that McKay may have the pick of the superpowered litter.

Collider recently asked Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige which Marvel movie Adam McKay might be in the running for, and he gave a surprisingly broad answer…

“Adam McKay is in the running for everything. Adam McKay is a great, great writer and director. He did an amazing pass on the Ant-Man draft with Paul Rudd for us, and I didn’t know him before then. And we got to know him through that and liked him very much, and have met with him a number of times trying to find something else, so we’ve talked about a lot of characters with him.”

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Now that we know McKay is in the running for literally everything Marvel-related, what project would you put him on? You don’t have to restrict yourself to currently announced movies. Personally, I’d be pretty into a McKay-directed Devil Dinosaur. Just leave Will Ferrell out of it. I don’t want to bring up and Last of the Lost flashbacks.

via Collider

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A hefty majority of the humor in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues comes from the channel 4 news team. While they all had a shared sense of male entitlement, the members of the KVWN boys club all brought a different aspect of the stereotypically macho mentality of the 1970s to the big screen.

Ron (Will Ferrell) was a textbook alpha male, Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd) was the womanizer, and Champ Kind (David Koechner) was a bit of a burly brute. But, for many, the standout of the crew was Brick Tamland (Steve Carell), who often displayed the mental fortitude of a broom handle.

Even though the rest of the news crew felt a collective responsibility to keep Brick out of harm’s way, they also had a lot of fun at his expense through his impulsive actions and willingness to do whatever they said. But that’s also led to a whole lot of laughs.

Enjoy some of the laughs from the Anchorman films once again by looking at Brick Tamland’s best quotes.

“I’m Brick Tamland. People seem to like me because I am polite and I am rarely late. I like to eat ice cream and I really enjoy a nice pair of slacks. Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48 and am what some people call mentally retarded.”

We all know that one kid that ate glue back in elementary school. Brick Tamland is an example of what happens when teachers don’t care enough to make that same kid stop. But modern day science and I.Q. scores tell us that he could’ve benefited from a little extra help.

“I DON’T KNOW WHAT WE’RE YELLING ABOUT!”

Brick was often clueless and just did whatever he felt was right at the time, which was often the least expected thing imaginable. In this scene, he felt the best thing to do was just to follow everyone else’s lead and make “LOUD NOISES!” even if he didn’t know what anyone was yelling about.

“I would like to extend to you an invitation to the pants party.”

Brick’s that one friend in the group that’ll do whatever you tell him to for a good laugh. That’s all fine and dandy until he butchers his lines and becomes his own punchline. Sadly, he wasn’t quick enough on his feet to avoid taking the rest of the team down with him.

“I love lamp. I love lamp.”

Love is a complicated concept that many of us fail to understand. So you can’t really blame Brick when he tried to fake it and ended up looking more foolish than usual. But given how insistent he was, you may have to take his word for it. When a man says he loves lamp, he really might just love lamp.

“Yeah. There were horses, and a man on fire, and I killed a guy with a trident.”

The fight scene in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy is one of the go-to classic moments. After the KVWN team headed back to the station to lick their wounds, they recapped just how out of hand things got.

“Behind me is the miracle of birth. Soon, a stork will fly overhead delivering a baby panda. Let’s me see if I can get a look at what’s going on there. Oh God! No… I don’t understand!”

There’s a reason that we can’t tell children where babies really come from. To serve as an example of what could happen, Brick, who has the emotional maturity of a child, has his belief in the stork completely destroyed when he gets a glance of a panda giving birth.

“Hey, Ron! I’m riding a furry tractor!”

At the end of Anchorman, the crew ends up in a bear pit to save Ron. Somewhere in that adventure, Brick went from being in danger of being eaten to riding a grizzly bear, bareback.

Note: If you never knew how big a bear was (they’re huge, by the way), this scene adds some perspective.

“Brick was a great man and I will miss him so much and I will not rest until I find his killer. It’s hard for me to believe that he is gone. [cries] I feel like I just saw him yesterday. When I got the news I didn’t even know how to make sense out of it. Why?! Why?! Why did you take him from us?! BRICK IS DEAD!”

It usually takes real skill and a lot of hard work to fake your own death. But something tells me that probably wasn’t the case with Brick. Which would explain why he showed up to deliver a eulogy at his own funeral in this hilarious scene.
“A black man follows me everywhere when it’s sunny… I call him Leon.”

It’s actually not surprising that Brick isn’t bright enough to know the difference between black people and shadows. It’s not his fault. It just sucks that he has a bad habit of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. (Let’s be honest though, there was never a “right” time to say this.)

“I can’t hear you, Ron!”

Brick got sent out of the station – not sure whose decision that was – to give a weather report and thought it would be clever to act like he couldn’t hear Ron back in the studio… by answering all of his questions. This may have been a practical joke that went way too long.
“Ron I don’t have any legs!”

The invention of the green screen was probably pretty shocking when it first hit the scene. Meteorologists all over the world had to learn to point at an empty space and imagine something being there. And they also had to learn to not wear anything matching the color of the screen. Which is apparently a lesson Brick missed out on.

“Ron, you’re a good man. But you’ve fallen victim to your own ego and your own hubris. And before others can forgive you, you must learn to forgive yourself… I’m wearing two pairs of pants.”

[Gasp] In Anchorman 2, Brick surprised everyone by having a seriously out of character experience when he was able to reach deep down and deliver the moral of the news team’s latest drama. But it was so short-lived that he immediately followed it up with an ordinary Brick-like statement.

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Adam McKay has a new film, The Big Short, coming out. Our own Mike Ryan called it a “smart, infuriating look at the financial collapse,” starring the smart, pleasant to look at, Ryan Gosling. Despite the dissimilar subject matters, The Big Short and Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, which was written by McKay and Will Ferrell, actually have something in common: They’re both satires, although I doubt the former has a scene where Tina Fey and Amy Poehler threaten to kick Kanye West’s butt. Unless it does?

Anyway, McKay told Yahoo Movies, “I was really surprised when [Anchorman 2] came out that not that many people talked about it, but that was literally the reason we made the movie: To talk about how [the emphasis on] ratings and for-profit [news] destroyed broadcast journalism as we know it.” The director and Funny or Die co-founder also discussed the possibility of Anchorman 3: The Legend Continues to Keep Continuing (it’s a working title).

We talked about doing one that was about the rise of the new media. I also thought there was something to the idea — and who knows, maybe we will do one some day — I also thought it’d be cool to have Ron Burgundy get embedded in the Iraq War. We kicked around that idea. But we’ve never got that serious about it, but it would have to be the next stage of what the media has become. And I think you’re right, I think it’s the internet. The only thing is by then Burgundy would be getting pretty old. So maybe it’s a movie we make in 10 years, when Will’s aged up and it actually makes sense that you can set it in 1997. (Via)

That sounds great, actually. Ron Burgundy inventing listicles — 5 Reasons Scotch Goes Down My Belly — makes almost too much sense.

(Via Yahoo Movies)

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It’s been 12 years since Ron Burgundy wowed us all with his machismo and his mustache, but besides his glorious mustache, his mad flute skills, and his affinity for scotchy scotch, what do we really know about the man, and by extension, his film, Anchorman? With that in mind, we decided to go back and remind you of some surprising details about the film. So read up and stay classy.

1. Ron Burgundy is a Jethro Tull super fan. Burgundy loves the Tull and his nightclub performance scene has several tributes to Jethro Tull flutist, Ian Anderson. Besides blurting out “Hey Aqualung,” and playing a delicious riff from the title track of Jethro Tull’s 1971 album, Burgundy finishes his performance by turning to the side and lifting up his leg, imitating the band’s logo.

2. The restaurant that Veronica and her female coworkers visit, is a health inspector’s nightmare. The restaurant is called “Escupimos en su Alimento” which translates to, “We spit in your food.” If only Yelp had been around in the 1970s.

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4. DreamWorks was initially resistant to join Team Burgundy. Adam McKay and Will Ferrell had to pitch the idea to DreamWorks execs 20 times before the suits finally gave it the okay. The studio was doubtful that McKay and Ferrell could make a solid comedy based on reporters in the 1970s. It wasn’t until after the success of Elf and Old School that the studio finally realized the film was “kind of a big deal.”

5. Champ Kind is likely a fan of British sci-fi comics. Champ’s line, “I will take your mother, Dorothy Mantooth, out for a nice seafood dinner and never call her again” sounds like an incredibly polite insult, but is a reference to a 1950’s British comic book character, Dan Dare. Dan’s nemesis in the series makes the same threat against Dan’s mother, Dorthy Dare.

Eagle Comics/Dreamworks

7. The movie has several references to another famous broadcasting legend, Mary Richards. Anchorman gives a few nods to the newsroom sitcom classic, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, naming Ron’s dog Baxter after Tex Baxter and newsroom boss, Ed, after the newsroom head on Mary Tyler Moore, Lou Grant, played by actor Ed Asner.

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8. Jon Hamm and Adam Scott sorta have cameos. Despite not being in the movie and being relatively unknown actors at the time, both Jon Hamm and Adam Scott are listed in the movie as writers during the newscast credits on the in-studio monitor. This is likely thanks to Paul Rudd, who was roommates with Jon Hamm at the time and had known Adam Scott since the early 1990s.

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10. Brick Tamland was nearly cut from the script. On film, it’s clear that Brick Tamland is an essential — and yes, incredibly strange — piece to what makes Anchorman funny, but on paper he just comes off “insane.” The studio wasn’t sure about the character of Brick Tamland at first, as explained by Adam McKay:

“The studio initially asked if we needed this Brick character? They wanted us to cut him. Because if you read it on the page, it reads insane. He has no relation to any scene or storyline. I told Steve, “You have no rules. You can literally walk out of the scene if you want.”

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11. Ron Burgundy is the most satisfying character Will Ferrell has ever done. Out of all the characters Will Ferrell has ever played, Ron Burgundy remains his favorite. “Ron Burgundy is probably the one that sticks out the most, because it was so hard for us to get that movie made.”

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12. Anchorman 2 is actually part of a trilogy. The movie will be the the third installment in McKay and Ferrell’s “Mediocre American Man Trilogy,” with Anchorman being the first and Talladega Nights being the second. All three were written by McKay and Ferrell, with each movie focusing on an arrogant central character that has become somewhat of a local legend.

*Bonus* That’s producer Judd Apatow who remarks that the Sex Panther cologne, “Smells like a turd with burnt hair.”

Sources: Wikipedia, IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, YouTube

This article originally ran on December 16, 2013

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A few nights ago, Warner Bros. hosted a very canny event that our own Louis Virtel attended at the Playboy Mansion, a screening of “Entourage” that may have felt like virtual reality for those who attended. While I doubt being surrounded by scantily clad bunnies influenced Louis one way or another on the film, it's likely you'll see a number of reviews that are perhaps more enthusiastic than they would otherwise be, and it'd be hard to blame anyone who fell for it.

One of the reasons the setting seemed so right for that particular film is because much of the charge of “Entourage” is watching the core ensemble swagger their way through Hollywood, doing whatever they want and rarely if ever facing any consequences as a result. It's always presented with a wink and a smile, just a case of boys being boys. We live in a world right now where that doesn't really mean what it used to, and I wonder how much longer this sort of movie is viable.

Warner Bros. certainly has a vested interest in getting this right. Look at how much money they made around the world with the “Hangover” series, which is pretty much the perfect big-studio of one of these films. The entire promise of that series is “these guys got so ruined that they don't even remember the night they had, and they have to put it back together.” It's an irresistible premise, and it's amazing how much mileage they got out of it. I'm sure they would love to see “Entourage” turn into a film franchise, and if this first one performs the way the first “Sex and the City” film did, then they may well get their wish.

In the meantime, if you're interested in seeing more films in the same vein, then we've got some suggestions for you, some of which are fairly similar to “Entourage,” some of which might stretch the general idea, but all of which depend on ensemble casts and that one basic idea: left to their own devices, boys will be boys.

“Very Bad Things” (1998)

Peter Berg has managed to build a fairly respectable career as a filmmaker, but his kickoff to his directing career is about as far from respectable as possible, and by design. The film jumps off from the “joke” that is so often made about killing hookers, something that should probably be explored at some point. There is some seriously dark pathology at work in any society where people can routinely joke about that particular thing because of the value we place on the lives of sex workers. The reason “Very Bad Things” works as well as it does is because it doesn't try to downplay how horrible all of these people are, and it doesn't try to redeem them. Instead, Jon Favreau, Leland Orser, Christian Slater, Jeremy Piven, Daniel Stern, and Cameron Diaz are all taken on a guided tour of Hell by their own making. They earn every terrible thing that happens to any of them, and it serves as a nice refutation of the basic idea that boys behaving badly is a good thing or excusable as a simple part of human nature.

“Swingers” (1996)

Two years before “Very Bad Things,” Favreau wrote and starred in a movie that helped define young male swagger for at least a decade afterwards, making stars of both Vince Vaughn and Faveau in the process. What made “Swingers” so canny was the way the film put real value on the bond between young men and the also deflates the empty bluster of Vaughn's character. It is a movie that respects the importance of having your group of friends and the danger of buying into conventional roles blindly. It's an inviting world that Doug Liman paints with this one, and even today, its place in pop culture remains prominent. Just say “Vegas, baby, Vegas” to a room full of dudes and watch the reaction. It's downright Pavlovian. Or Favreauvian, as the case may be.

“Super Troopers” (2001)

Here's how you know you've made a lasting impact with one of these movies. If any phrase or action from your film becomes commonly quoted by guys, then you've done it both right and wrong. I'm aways amazed by how things get recontextualized as they enter the lexicon, and some of the worst behavior of these boys being boys becomes downright celebrated over time. One of the reasons I like “Super Troopers” so much is because even though the lead characters in this comedy have a healthy disregard for authority, there is a playful silliness to most of it that keeps even the most potentially distasteful thing seem downright charming. Whether they're having a maple syrup chugging contest or playing the “meow” game or offering stranded motorists mustache rides, there's something downright joyous about this misbehavior.

“A Hard Day's Night” (1964)

Richard Lester brought a great rowdy energy to this film, but the undeniable appeal of it is simply watching The Beatles at the absolute height of their fame goof around and play and be silly. It's a reminder of just how young they were, and it was also an unusual response to the sort of instant iconography that they encountered. They could have steered into celebrity and made themselves unknowable and removed from the public, protected, but they went the other direction. “A Hard Day's Night” made them seem human and accessible and audiences felt a connection to them that, real or not, made the Beatles into so much more than just a band for an entire generation or two or four.

“National Lampoon's Animal House” (1978)

Delta House may be disgusting and crazy, but they are loyal, and they take care of one another. Part of what I found so appealing about the boys of Delta House the first time I saw the film was the sense that they had each other's backs, and whatever bad ideas one of them had, they would all do their best to realize those ideas and join in. There's something celebratory about that kind of friendship, and it's little wonder the somewhat dying Greek system came blazing back to life after this film was released. The movie made fraternity (the idea, not the organization) look fun, no small task.

“The Wild Bunch” (1959)

Boys will be boys, even if they're dangerous old cowboys in their 70s. The outlaws in “The Wild Bunch” have spent their lives living by their rules, refusing to bend to anyone else's will. It's the thing that defines them, and when the modern world threatens to take their version of the Old West from them, they react the only way they can, by burning it all to the goddamn ground. The last third of this movie is a long sustained howl of pain and anger, an existential line in the sand drawn in blood and tears, saying “This is who we are, and this is how we live, and you can kill us, but you can never change us.”

“Reservoir Dogs” (1992)

Quentin Tarantino burst onto the scene with his ferocious debut, and so much of the appeal of his entire filmography can be summed up in the first scene in his first film. As a group of professional thieves and killers sit around a table, killing time, their conversation reveals each of them and how they deal with the world. It's tremendous character writing, and an example of how clearly men reveal their natures when they are at their most relaxed. At the end of the scene, as the guys walk out in slow-motion in one of the most iconic shots of the '90s, they cut the exact figure that any group of guys walking together believe that they are presenting, coiled danger and calculating machismo incarnate.

“Fandango” (1985)

Five guys. A road trip. An uncertain future. That's all it took for Kevin Reynolds to make a powerful first impression with a movie about a group of friends struggling to make peace with the future they're fairly sure is going to crush them all. Told in the shadow of Vietnam, there's a great easy energy to the ensemble here, and this is where Reynolds first encountered Kevin Costner, who has been the source of great success and great distress throughout the course of his entire career as a filmmaker. While the film isn't great, what makes it work and what gives it lasting power is the easy chemistry Reynolds captured, and the very knowing insight into the way friendship can give you strength but also make you vulnerable in ways you wouldn't expect.

“Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy” (2003)

The greatest secret to this film's success is the casting of the action news team working around Will Ferrell's Ron Burgundy. Steve Carrell, Paul Rudd, and David Koechner are all absolutely perfect for their roles, and their chemistry as a group explodes in one of the greatest moments of the film, the rumble they have with all the other news teams in San Diego. These guys feel like actual friends, and I think it's easy for people to see themselves and their friends in these guys. I just wish I didn't have the nagging feeling that I am every group's Brick Tamland.

“Deliverance” (1972)

John Boorman was fascinated with films about people who were tested by some extraordinary circumstance, and “Deliverance” may well be his masterpiece. Even if they hadn't run into a couple of unfortunately randy rednecks, this trip down the Cahulawassee River would have pushed Ed, Lewis, Bobby, and Drew to the breaking point. Jon Voight, Ned Beatty, and Ronny Cox are all great in the film, but as their alpha, Burt Reynolds practically melts the cameras. He is pure animal power in the film, and it's small wonder he became a huge movie star as a result.

“Bottle Rocket” (1995)

When I walked out of “Bottle Rocket” the first time, I was convinced that Owen Wilson would never top his performance as Dignan, who is practically a Bad Idea Generating Device. I look back at it now, and there's such a sunny sweetness to this film that it almost doesn't feel like the same Wes Anderson who's been making films since then. Dignan is the perfect embodiment of that friend we all have who is always coming up with terrible ideas, but who is able to explain them in a way that makes it all seem perfectly normal and reasonable.

“The Last Detail” (1973)

Hal Ashby and Robert Towne collaborated to spectacular effect on this film about two Navy men who are charged with delivering a young recruit to military prison. Before they do that, though, they decide they're going to give him one perfect night of manhood to remember. Jack Nicholson and Otis Young are awesome as Buddusky and Mulhall, the MPs, and as soon as they get a look at Meadows, played by Randy Quaid, it's clear that he needs the guidance of more experienced men. We learn our own individual definitions of manhood from the men in our lives, and when your guides are this profane and this caustic, it's a rough ride.

“Down By Law” (1986)

I'm not sure there is any stranger group of men on this list than the stars of “Down By Law,” Jim Jarmusch's crazy story of the bond that is formed between three men in a Louisiana prison. Roberto Benigni, Tom Waits, and John Lurie are the guys, and they each have such a radically different comic persona that it's sort of like getting whiplash listening to the conversations between them in this film. That's the charge of it, though, and despite seemingly originating on three different planets, eventually these guys find some common ground, and that recognition of the things that bind them is what makes this comedy work.

“The Hot Rock” (1972)

Donald Westlake's books should have generated way more movies than they did, but every now and then, someone got it exactly right and realized that his crime novels aren't about plot… they're all about behavior, and this Peter Yates film perfectly nails that. With a cast including Robert Redford, George Segal, Ron Liebman, Paul Sand, and Moses Gunn, this story of a whole bunch of thieves all chasing the same diamond is very wise in the way men measure themselves against one another, and the lengths that will drive them to.

“Ocean's 11” (2001)
“Ocean's 12” (2004)
“Ocean's 13” (2007)

The real appeal of this series isn't the heists, but rather the notion that you're getting a chance to hang out with this big fun group of movie stars, the same notion that drove the original film. In that case, the Rat Pack were already thought of as a celebrity group of friends, but here, that friendship was basically whipped up by Steven Soderbergh. People were willing to show up every few years to watch George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Elliott Gould, and Bernie Mac hang out and plan some bad behavior. And, yes, in the case of this series, Julia Roberts is absolutely one of the guys, and that is part of the appeal. Watching how the films would shift to make room for new people in each movie was part of the fantasy, because anyone can imagine themselves becoming the new member of the group, joining them for the jokes, the good times, and the grand-scale larceny.

“Diner” (1982)

Finally, no list like this would be complete if it did not pay due respect to Barry Levinson's ode to a group of friends fighting as hard as they can to hold adulthood at bay. While it may have been set in 1959 Baltimore, “Diner” felt universal to me as soon as I saw it, and as I've gotten older, the film only seems more and more true, more and more accurate about the shifting sands of friendhood, especially when people are on the cusp of something as profound as the end of adolescence. I would urge people to seek out the far less well-known “Tin Men” by Levinson as a great portrait of the ugly side of male competition, but “Diner” will always be his gold-standard classic. Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Kevin Bacon, Paul Reiser, and Tim Daly are all great in the film, and the friendship between them feels completely real. No matter what the year, no matter how things change in the fine details, the truths of “Diner” remain true, and Levinson's movie echoes through any group of guys you've seen since, arguing over inanity, exchanging insults as currency, and busting balls for the sheer sport of it.

“Entourage” arrives in theaters June 3, 2015.

In theory, “Entourage” seems like a better fit for movies than TV: The characters are broad, quippy, and ridiculous, and you wonder how tough it would be to sustain that level of mania for seasons at a time. Nonetheless, the Mark Wahlberg-produced series defied the odds and became one of HBO's biggest shows of the last decade, lasting eight seasons and 96 episodes. 

Finally, the show is making the jump to the big screen in a swift, cool film version that comes out in theaters June 3. To celebrate, we're reflecting on some of our favorite ensemble comedies ever. Join us as we reflect on the greatness of Ron Burgundy, Mrs. Peacock, and Darth Helmet.  

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The first and most important thing that happened as a result of the staging of “Sticks and Stones” at the Met Theater as part of the Act One Festival was that Scott Swan and I got our first agent.

Barbara Baruch worked for Ambrosio/Mortimer, a smaller boutique agency at the time, and from the moment we met her, she seemed like what I imagined an agent to be. She was nurturing, she was a cheerleader, she was a ballbuster, and she was always, always, always in our corner. Our time with her was unfortunately too short, and by the time the agency imploded in accusations of embezzlement, we were already repped by Gersh out of New York. Barbara was first, though, and she was the first one to start pushing people to come see our show and to read our work.

The strangest thing about those early days is that Scott and I had spent so much time working on scripts that were, truth be told, deeply derivative genre exercises, and that's really not what people were expecting when we walked into the room. They would see “Sticks and Stones” onstage and expect us to come in pitching certain types of projects, and then these two 25 year old “Star Wars” nerds would roll in talking about giant monsters and other such nonsense.

There was one milestone that mattered more than any other though…

11. Adapting “Sticks and Stones” for Showtime

… and that was joining the WGAw.

The day I was able to call my parents and tell them that I was a member of the Writers Guild of America was the day I felt like I had truly accomplished stage one of the goals I set for myself. At that point, I wasn't just telling people I was a writer. There was an entire guild that I belonged to that PROVED I was a writer.

The reason we were able to join was because we were hired by Showtime to develop a feature-length version of our play, with Jerry Levine attached to direct it. We were thrilled by the opportunity, and we felt like it was an easy thing to do, at least conceptually. There was plenty of story to be told by expanding the play, and we chose a way that meant breaking up the one act into three big sequences set inside Klein's office, three scenes where we'd pretty much include the entire text of the play within the larger film.

What happened was educational in so many ways. It was our first time taking notes from executives, and we got some doozies. One of the executive producers on the film was best known for producing the Barry Manilow TV movie “Copacabana,” so he was obviously the right guy to produce a piece about race language and police violence. I remember sitting in his office and having to struggle to contain comments about his notes. At one point, he got hung up on a plot point. There was an old woman in the script who was stabbed after withdrawing money at an ATM, and the executive got hung up on the idea that the old woman pulled a $20 bill out of the machine.

“Would she really pull that much out? I mean, she's an old woman. She's probably poor. Maybe she's just got a couple of ones. That's even sadder, right?” I tried to explain to him that, for the most part, the smallest bill you could take out of an ATM was a $20 bill. His reply? “Oh, really? I've never used one.” These are the people who give writers notes on scripts. This is a person who never used an ATM, and yet he's giving notes about what is or isn't realistic and what does or doesn't ring true. That's just an example, but it was like that every single time we turned in pages or a draft.

Looking back at the experience now, I wish I'd understood the studio process better. Because we were writing about race language, Showtime was nervous. The LA riots were still fresh in everyone's minds and the OJ trial was in the news, and we found ourselves writing draft after draft, getting shuttled from a white executive to a black executive and then back again. We learned a lot about the language of writing contracts as well, because none of those drafts were “accepted” as “delivered” because the network wanted to make sure it got its “full input” on the record before we turned in the script. We were contracted for two drafts and a polish, the standard deal at the time, but because of the way they handled things, we did at least six drafts before we turned in. It was our first time being paid, and everyone told us over and over, “This is how things are done.”

I also wish I'd had Jerry Levine's back more. He had real faith in us, and he was determined to get the film made. At 25, I was sure that every single creative battle was worth winning, and that it was important to make sure that everyone was creatively pure. Compromise was for pussies, and I wasn't having it after a certain point. In my defense, we were at least seven or eight drafts deep when Jerry was at our place one afternoon for what seemed like the thousandth conference call. This time, Jerry Offsay was on the call, a reaction to our first official turn-in, and some comment was made that had been made in about eight hundred of the previous thousand calls, and Jerry told everyone it was a good point, and then we hung up. And in that moment, it felt like we were back at the start and Jerry had sold us out and I just… snapped. And on the other side of that snap, Jerry was in the hallway outside, our work on the feature version of “Sticks and Stones” was done, and I had set us back in a huge way for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

I've run into Jerry a few times since then, and he's always been perfectly lovely, but what he said as he was walking away from our place that afternoon is always in the back of my head. “Hubris, buddy. You've got hubris.”

No one has ever accused me of having my own best interests in mind when I act, and as we get further into this series, you'll see a pattern emerge, I suspect.

12. Avalon Films and our New York adventure

There was a second year of Act One, the theatrical festival, and we were asked to submit another play as well as be part of the steering committee. We were determined to work with Willie Garson, who almost played Alan Klein for us in “Sticks and Stones,” and we wrote a role with him in mind in a play called “Broken Bones.” Because of the ease our first submission made it through the process, we figured the same thing would happen in the second year.

There was nothing easy about “Broken Bones,” though, and the play was better in the end because of it. We wrote about a moment of domestic violence, and when we went to the first meeting of the steering committee after turning it in, people started opening up about their own personal experiences. We heard some fairly harrowing stories about actual incidents, and it was a stark reminder of how privileged our perspective was as 25 year old white dudes. Don McManus signed on to direct the script for us, and we started rehearsals with Willie Garson, Michelle Joyner, and Ming Na-Wen. By the time the play opened, Ming Na-Wen had to drop out because of a family thing and Debra Jo Rupp stepped in.

At the same time we were doing this, we were writing drafts of “Sticks and Stones” as a feature, and we were starting conversations with a couple of guys who seemed sold on the entire idea of the Drew McWeeny/Scott Swan brand.

During the first year of the Act One festival, Michael Cerenzie was heavily involved in the production end of things, and we got a chance to know him a little bit. He took off, though, heading back to New York, and it seemed like a pretty sure bet that we'd seen the last of him. He showed back up, though, with a new partner in tow named Domenic Casillo, and they told us that they were starting a new company to produce independent films. Michael asked us what other one-acts we had or finished screenplays and said they were actively interested in gearing up quickly.

What happened next was a blur, and I think one of the reasons I felt like I could indulge my hubris with Jerry and with Showtime was because we had these other things happening. Very quickly, they optioned one of our one-act plays from us and signed a deal that would have us adapt it ourselves. They wanted it to be a New York movie, and to that end, they told us that they would bring us to New York to research the film and write it.

You know that thing they say about “if it seems too good to be true, it probably is”? Yeah, well, that. We went to New York. And we researched and we wrote. And at the time, it was amazing. After all, we spent our days working at an office on the top floor of the Tribeca Film Center, with a wall that we had in common with Robert De Niro's private office. We put up pictures of De Niro on what we officially dubbed the “Wall Of Bob.” At night, we would move our base of operations to the Silverado, a strip club that Casillo co-owned at 20 W. 20th Street, halfway down the block from the infamous Limelight. When you're a 25 year old guy and you're given a stack of funny money by the owner of the club, it is very different than just walking into a club and paying for things out of your own pocket.

The script took place over one long dark night as two characters lead a third one through an increasingly ugly tour of New York's underbelly, and part of the research process involved Domenic setting us up with a bodyguard, a car, and various tour guides to take us to bondage clubs, after-hours speakeasies, peep shows, and things I'm still fairly sure I'm not allowed to legally mention. Little by little, we got a sense of just how crazy New York could be, and the more we saw, the more we added to the script.

Even before we were done with that project, though, we pitched them another script called “Odeon Pope,” and this time, they signed a deal with us to both write and direct. It felt like we had found our patrons, the guys who were going to underwrite every crazy thing we wanted to do. And make no mistake… those projects were crazy. By the time we locked our script for “Behind The Eyes,” it was almost 150 pages long, and it would have been impossible to make as anything less than an NC-17. If anything, “Odeon Pope” was set to be even crazier.

The longer we stayed in New York, living in hotels on the company dime, taking Domenic's private car everywhere we went, the more we started to believe that we had already become the filmmakers we wanted to be. After all, we were living the high life all the time. We worked at the strip club so often that it actually got boring. To 25-year-old guys. We'd been accepted into Casillo's home, into his private life, and Cerenzie talked constantly about where we would all be in two years, in five, in ten.

We started meeting with directors for “Behind The Eyes,” and for a little while, it looked like Abel Ferrara was going to do it. One small problem I saw was that Abel was completely insane. We went to the west coast premiere of “The Addiction” as his guests, and for the first half-hour of the film, he talked loudly over everything, chattering away at a million miles an hour about everything but the film being shown. Finally, someone in front of us turned around and ordered him to shut up. Abel began spitting obscenities at the person, and by the time I realized we were face to face with Madonna, she was spitting obscenities right back at him. It was so surreal that the only logical reaction was to start laughing.

Eventually, we approached them and said we wanted to direct the film ourselves, and they committed on the spot. So of course, shortly afterwards, the company folded. We were talking with them at the time about writing a third movie and we had just done a quick pass on a possible HBO pilot about the Silverado strip club, and then we were informed that they simply weren't going to be able to keep the dream going. Casillo had made all of his money in other ways, and filmmaking was something he saw in very romantic terms. He and Michael made a genuinely passionate team, and if they'd started with just a little more money and just a little more momentum, they might have made a real go of things.

I ran into Michael years later when he was one of the producers on “Before The Devil Knows You're Dead,” and I see him around from time to time at the cigar club on Canon where we used to meet. I don't begrudge those guys anything, but that experience and the sudden collapse of all of those projects left us reeling.

It felt like that hubris that Jerry Levine warned me about had landed after all.

13. The birth and rise of Ain't It Cool

Oh, boy.

How do I even begin to encapsulate one of the things that most clearly defines who I am today? How do I tell a story as big as the story of Ain't It Cool?

I could tell you about how I first met Harry Knowles. We had just upgraded to our own computer for the house, complete with internet access, and from the first time I heard that screechy tone as we signed on, I was hooked. Newsgroups were my first passion, and I found it hard to believe that I could talk to people all over the planet about whether or not Deckard was a replicant. It really was that simple. “Oh, my god, there are other people who are just as nerdy about this as I am. Yay!”

I remember coming across a newsgroup post where some guy was talking about how great the script for “Independence Day” was, and how it was going to be a huge monster hit and amazing and just wait and see, and my first reaction was, “Who is this dumb-ass?” I had read the same script, and I had also read the shooting script for “Mars Attacks!”, and it was clear to me that “Mars Attacks!” was going to be the weird, fun, insane version of the dull, familiar “Independence Day.” I fired off a response to the guy, he fired one back, and we had ourselves a righteous little flame war.

And that was Harry.

I could tell you that when a friend of mine gave me a VHS copy of the very first trailer for “Star Wars: The Special Editions,” that release was still just a rumor. I was so blown away by seeing the first new moving “Star Wars” footage in 13 years that I decided I had to find a way to get that footage online. By that point, Harry had started the very first early version of Ain't It Cool News, the single page that you would just scroll down to see all the stories at once. We figured he might know how we could get the video online, and he steered us to a contact of his in Australia who was willing to post the footage in hopes of avoiding US copyright law.

It was the Wild West. And considering my feelings about the industry and the increasing dissatisfaction I felt towards parts of it, Ain't It Cool seemed like an exciting way to stick it to “the enemy” and tell some truth that simply wasn't being told at that point. My own experiences around the test screening process had convinced me that Joe Farrell, the owner of NRG, which handled those screenings, was a very bad man. He loved to tell the story of how he was the one who saved “Fatal Attraction,” and I saw the way he would lie to a filmmaker in favor of the studio, over and over and over. When I saw how angry test screening reviews got the studios, I made the decision to be a professional pain in Joe Farrell's ass. Ain't It Cool was a tool to that end at first.

I could talk about what happened to me the first time I went to Austin. We drove 24 straight hours, and the moment we got to town, we went straight to the Alamo Drafthouse and straight into a Quentin Tarantino-programmed double feature. It was the promised land, and by the time we drove home a week later, I left my heart there. I loved the people. I loved the food. I loved the film culture. And year after year, that has remained true. There will come a point where I no longer live in LA, and I am sure it's Austin where I'll land. I'm not sure how soon or how long that will be, but it will happen, and it's because of Ain't It Cool that I ever visited the city in the first place. Some of my best friends live in Austin, and I never would have known them if I hadn't started sending in bits and pieces of information to this movie website.

In the early days of Ain't It Cool, I wasn't paid at all. I also wasn't working as a screenwriter as much. We'd done a little rewrite work, we were still members of the WGAw, but after Avalon imploded, we found ourselves in a slow period. We'd taken meetings all over town, and it as clear that people expected us to be interested in writing totally different things than we were actually interested in writing. It was hard to find that next good fit like we'd had with Jerry or with Michael and Domenic, and I ended up going back to a day job. Or, to be more accurate, a night job. I got hired as a closed-captioner by a company called VITAC, working the midnight shift in their Burbank offices. For about two years, that was my every day routine. I became a vampire. I would go to a test screening and then go straight to work. I was miserable. I had just broken up with a woman I was going to marry, and I had moved in with a married couple in Hollywood. I felt like I was back to zero on a personal level. Meanwhile, I wrote for Ain't It Cool and slowly got more and more invested in the mythology of being “Moriarty.” It was nice to be feared. It gave me a sense of having some impact on an industry that felt like it was passing me by in some ways. The movies I wanted to see weren't being made, and when they were, they were being made in ways that tied me in knots.

It was the spring of '99 when Harry asked me at the last moment to go to ShoWest, the annual theater owner's convention in Las Vegas. I had enough vacation days built up that I was able to negotiate the time and I went. I had to stay in the shittiest, cheapest motel I could find, I had no idea what I was doing, and I'd never really worked an official press event before. At that point, my identity was still a secret, technically, which made getting my credentials a strange process. In one of those moments of odd synchronicity that sort of define every era of AICN, the guy who was in charge of handling all of the press at ShoWest was a guy who later became Hercules The Strong, a role he still fills on the site today. Over the course of that week, I ended up side by side with far more experienced press, and I saw that some of them were excited by what we were doing, just as some of them hated what we were doing. What was apparent was that all of them were aware of it. Whatever Ain't It Cool was, people were reading, and it really hit me during that trip. I got back to LA, I served my notice at VITAC, and I decided I was going to make Ain't It Cool into something more, a real job, a chance to build something I believed in.

14. Aaron Kaplan, my patron saint

I got an e-mail from a UTA address, something that was not uncommon in the early days of Ain't It Cool. I'd set up an e-mail address specifically for people to be able to reach me, and it was amazing seeing who reached out. Filmmakers, agents, executives… there were people who wrote to me who I knew as Drew, and they had no idea they were contacting me when they wrote to “Moriarty.” It was thrilling to have a secret identity.

When I opened the UTA e-mail, I had no idea I was being introduced to someone who would change my life. Aaron Kaplan was, at that point, a junior agent, working for someone else, and starting to cultivate his own client list. He asked me point blank if I was also a screenwriter. “The way you talk about things, I get the feeing you've worked or that you are working. Who are you with?”

As it happened, when Aaron reached out, Scott and I had just finished a script that we felt made the case for who we wanted to be moving forward as writers. “Amusements” was designed to be a big summer movie that would allow us to do some horror, some action, some big stuff, some little stuff. It was all built on the idea of a theme park so high-tech that visitors could not tell how any of it was accomplished. They simply stepped into these amazing other worlds. Our main character was hired by competitors to figure out how the Park worked. That was it. More than anything, it was a chance to write a bunch of different types of set pieces within one structure. We wanted to write bigger films than we'd written in the past, and we looked at “Amusements” as our chance to do that.

Aaron was the first person to read it, and he decided to get behind it. When the script went out as a spec, it went to several different places at once, the first time we'd ever been part of that kind of process. It didn't sell, but it opened doors for us immediately, and it was clear that Aaron was someone we were going to want to work with, someone we could trust.

When he left UTA, it wasn't to join another agency. Instead, he started a management firm with his friend Sean Perrone, and they asked us to join them in their first batch of clients. At the time, UTA was the biggest agency we'd ever had represent us, but we believed in Aaron. We believed that he would work his ass off to get our scripts in front of people, the right people. We pitched him our next script, and we started work on it, our first time taking notes from him as we went through the process. It was such an easy back and forth that by the time we were happy with “Noel,” we knew he was, as well.

As of right now, Aaron's still my manager. Scott and I aren't currently working together as a writing team, and it's been a while since I've had something new to give to Aaron, but his ongoing interest and belief has kept me sure that there will be a next thing. Every major success I've had since meeting him, I feel like he's been a key part of making that thing happen. His real gift is figuring out who to put in a room with his clients, like when he introduced us to David Goyer. We had a pitch we wanted to take to all the studios, and Goyer signed on as a producer. It was an incredibly easy working relationship, and it was one that Aaron believed would work. When we were having trouble with our own pitches, he put us together with Todd Komarnicki, a writer who was amazing in a room and who did a great job of teaching us how to best represent our material.

Even when scripts haven't sold or haven't worked, Aaron was there to help us figure out when it was time to let something go. And when I've shot myself in the foot… and we'll get into that in tomorrow's piece in a major way… Aaron was there to tell me that we'd figure it out and keep working. I've given up on myself at times, but Aaron never has, and in this town, there is no greater currency than the sort of deeply felt loyalty that has always defined our relationship. On the short list of the people who have made this 25 years of my professional life worth living, Aaron Kaplan sits very near the top.

15. “Anchorman” and “Inland Empire”

Today being the actual anniversary of my arrival in LA, I've found this particular installment of this series to be particularly bittersweet. I've made plenty of mistakes along the way, and I have plenty of regrets. There have been periods of my life here in this city where I've been so unhappy about where I was in my career or in my personal life that I have become self-destructive, and I've absolutely taken it out on others, too. There are good women who I have hurt in the years I've lived here, and there are people who have hurt me as well. There are broken friendships that I feel terrible about, and there are people I hope I never encounter again in any context. I was twenty when I moved here, which means I've lived more of my life in this city now than I lived before I came here. Who I am is defined largely by Los Angeles at this point, and there is plenty of sweet and sour in the mix.

So let's end today on two stories that make me purely happy.

When I read “Anchorman,” it was at the insistence of Kevin Biegel, now better known for his shows “Cougar Town” and “Enlisted.” Kevin was a contributor to Ain't It Cool when he was still in college, and when he first moved to LA, he enjoyed some really great experiences while starting to build his own writing career. He and I went to Sundance together in 2001, and it was one of the best trips of my life precisely because of how off-the-cuff it was and how it felt like we were just running on a pure movie high the entire time we were there. That is still the reason I'm here, still the reason I do any of this, that amazing feeling when you find something you love and you want to share it with someone else.

With “Anchorman,” Kevin couldn't get over how insane the script was. “No one will ever film this,” he told me when he gave it to me. And when I read it, I was pretty sure he was right. It made laugh like a maniac, but I couldn't imagine any studio giving Will Ferrell money to make something so pure, so lunatic. I wrote a piece about the script, mourning the fact that it seemed to have stalled out in development, and thought that was that.

But the real magic of what Ain't It Cool could do in its best moments was that simple passion for movies could make things happen. It could get people's attention, and sometimes, that's all it took. In this case, Adam McKay and Judd Apatow and Shauna Robertson were all still working to get the film made, and that article created just enough of a spotlight at a moment when they were already gaining some momentum, and suddenly the project roared back to life and Dreamworks ended up having to buy it back from themselves in turnaround. I didn't know any of those people at that point, and I've written before about how I later ended up on the set of “Elf,” only to learn all of this from Will Ferrell. I am in no way responsible for “Anchorman,” but I am responsible for writing something that nudged someone that made someone else decide yes instead of no, and in some small way, when I see the enormous ripple that “Anchorman” has made in the 11 years since it came out, it makes me feel like all of that energy spent at Ain't It Cool was a good thing.

A friend of mine named Jeremy Alter worked on “Anchorman,” and later worked as a producer on another project. He called me about it one afternoon. I had just had a roommate move out, and my soon-to-be-wife was moving in, and for a few days, there was one empty bedroom in my Hollywood apartment. “Is that bedroom still empty?” he asked. I told him it was. “Can I bring someone by to see it?” he asked. I told him I'd be home. And I really didn't think about it again until there was a knock and I opened the door to find David Lynch standing there.

Jeremy introduced us, and then the two of them walked into the empty bedroom. I was stunned. I can't really quickly sum up what Lynch's work means to me, but he was suddenly just walking around my apartment. They walked out a few minutes later and David asked if I could wait two day before doing something with the room. “Sure. Absolutely.”

Two days later, he showed up with a small crew and a small cast, and when I say small, I mean him, two guys, and his wife and editor Mary Sweeney. Laura Dern was one of the actors who showed up with him, which just made the whole thing even more surreal. In the finished film, “Inland Empire,” there are about three minutes of footage from the shoot that they held in my apartment, and it's just Dern and a few Eastern European women talking. They shot for about two hours, and for much of that time, Sweeney sat on the couch in the living room, watching “Pretty Woman” with my girlfriend, totally unfamiliar with the movie. It was impressive to see how loose Lynch was, trying totally different things with the cast before finally wrapping for the evening.

I've got a “Special thanks to” credit in “Inland Empire” as a result, and again… I didn't do anything to actually make the film, but being able to have a filmmaker whose work is part of my DNA suddenly in my apartment, directing a scene that ended up in something he released, is one of those moments that makes me realize there's nowhere else I would have wanted to live these last 25 years, no matter how hard it's been, no matter how hard it still is. I fell in love with movies living thousands of miles away from where they were made, sitting in the dark, imagining all these worlds these movies gave us windows into, and somehow, I pulled a “Sherlock Jr.” and stepped into that screen.

But no matter what, I remained frustrated, working as a writer but with no finished film to show for it, just as I remained frustrated on a personal level about where I was going. Both of those things were about to change in major ways, and we'll pick up there tomorrow with “'Masters Of Horror,' Revolution, and getting Foxed.”

Check out part two, “'Sleepwalkers,' 'Shawshank,' and 'Sticks and Stones'”

And make sure you read part one, “Gene Hackman, Eazy-E, and Albert Brooks defending a film”

After a long history at the fringes of film wardrobe, this weekend the long-sidelined turtleneck takes its place front and center at the multiplexes.  In both of this weekend's major releases – “Steve Jobs” and “The Walk” turtlenecks not only adorn the leading men, but are brought up as significant plot points in their heroes' journeys.

For Apple chieftain Jobs, the switch to turtlenecks represented an effort to put forward a gentler face that distinguished itself from the corporate suits of the tech world. For French tightrope walker Phillipe Petit, his very identity as a performer was bound up in his red turtleneck.

And coming up: look for a turtlenecked 007 in next month's “Spectre.”

So let us pay tribute to the turtleneck and it's long journey to fame. Here are our rankings of the greatest to grace our screens.

Good idea, Hollywood.

“Bad Moms” began life as a film with Leslie Mann set to star and Judd Apatow producing, but that's changed now. Instead, writer/directors Jon Lucas and Scott Moore of “The Hangover” have managed to move the film from Paramount to STX Entertainment, and they've got Christina Applegate, Kristen Bell, and Mila Kunis all set to star.

That's as strong a trio of comic performers as any male-driven movie you can point at in development right now. One of the best set visits I've ever been on was for “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” Yes, part of that is because the film was shooting in Hawaii at the Turtle Bay Resort, and we stayed at the resort for the week I was there watching them work. That helped. But part of it was also because it was a group of people who all seemed determined to prove just how smart and funny they were while telling a story they genuinely cared about, which is an energy that is positively electric when you're around it.

On “Marshall,” I watched Bell work quite a bit, and she totally changed my mind about who she was as an actor. I had “Veronica Mars” in my head before watching her work, and I had a hard time imagining her playing something else but that sort of spunky wise-ass, which is simply a testament to how well she made the character feel like it was really her. The Kristen Bell I got to watch work was great at improvisation and unafraid of any joke or any scene, as long as it was honest and funny. She and Jason Segel were so interesting together, and I was impressed by how often she'd be the one who would push a scene to some unexpected place, some darker note. Not because she's a “she,” but simply because I hadn't seen her do that kind of work before. No one else had cast her that way. No one else had given her the room to be that person.

The same thing was true when I was watching Christina Applegate on the “Anchorman” set. She was given the exact same room and respect by Adam McKay as the rest of the cast, and that was essential if she was going to be able to play Veronica correctly. She had to be able to fight back no matter what Will Ferrell or David Koechner or Paul Rudd threw at her, and she never blanched once. And Kunis struck me on “Marshall” as someone who has been doing this for so long tha she's completely at ease now, whether working closely to the script or totally playing fast and free. She's obviously willing to joke about anything, as even just a look at her work on “Family Guy” over the years would prove.

When I see guys melting down over the Paul Feig “Ghostbusters” remake because of the woman-driven cast, it baffles me. Comedy, no matter what Jerry Lewis says, is not gender-driven. It's comedy. It's about observation and invention and all sorts of things, but it's not based on gender. No one owns it, and while I saw some hand-wringing over the weekend about what the box-office failure of “Jem & The Holograms” means for movies aimed at girls or women, I think that's missing the bigger picture right now. There are more and more films being driven by a larger and larger talent pool, and the audiences are responding. It's frankly surprising that it took this long for someone to make a “Hangover” for moms, because I guarantee that audience will go if the film works.

More than that, though, I no longer believe that a male audience will stay away because they're threatened or they're upset. I think a very small and oddly vocal slice of the audience might stay away, but the death of the idea that movies have to driven by men to interest men is one of the most welcome developments of the last few years, and I think it's only getting more accepted and entrenched, not less.

One Thing I Love Today is a daily column dedicated to putting a spotlight on some pop culture item worth your attention. After all, there's enough snark out there. Why not start every day with one quick shotgun blast of positivity?

When I wrote my 25 Years In LA series last year, one of the things I talked about was my experience with the screenplay for Anchorman. When I read it, the film was stalled out in development, and I thought it was ridiculously funny. I couldn't imagine what kept the executives in charge from pulling the trigger and making the movie.

By far, the hardest I've laughed reading a script since then was when I read Olympic-Sized Assholes by Harris Wittels and Aziz Ansari last week.

I've had the script for a while, but only just got around to reading it, and it struck me as a sad coincidence that only a few days later, I saw Ansari and Chelsea Peretti and other friends of Wittels mentioning that it's been a year now since we lost him.

Actually, scratch that. We didn't lose him. We know where he is. He died, and that really, really sucks. I'm guessing based on his work and the words he put out into the world that he hated phrases like “we lost him.” He didn't dance around language. He jumped into it with both feet like a kid in a puddle, and he loved how messy and crazy it was. Hell, how many people ever truly devise a word? Wittels created #humblebrag, and in doing so, not only named but shamed a very specific sort of social media presence. It was just one little thing for him, but it's a genuinely lasting contribution, an idea that I think it amazing in its simplicity. There is a joy in the blunt and the direct in his sense of humor that appeared in his Twitter feed, his stand-up, and in this script, and I wish this film had happened. I wish Wittels was alive and working right now. I have a number of friends who knew him and worked with him, and the loss they experienced seemed to be a profound one. I don't think you can ever overstae the value of someone who is just plain to-the-bone funny, and Wittels certainly was.

Olympic-Sized Assholes tells the story of Kevin and Forest, who were written to be played by Aziz and Danny McBride, apparently. Best friends, they are determined they are going to sell their million-dollar idea, and in the first few pages of the script, they put a plan in motion to make a presentation directly to the Hanes Underwear company. Once they have everyone in place, they make a Powerpoint presentation that is just plain madness. In case they ever make the film, I won't really give away the joke here, but let's just say the gap between the impression they hope to make and the impression they actually make is vast, and they are escorted out of the building by security.

They're convinced that all they need to do is get the right person to back their product, and they'll be rich, and they get the idea to go to local celebrity Spence Treadwell, who is a decathlete and a star. The only thing he has yet to do is win an actual Olympic gold medal, and he's on track to finally do that. When Forest and Kevin meet Treadwell, they think at first that he's going to help them. Instead, he sleeps with both their girlfriends and kicks off a war with the two guys that is absolutely ridiculous. I laughed at least once a page, pretty much continuously as I read it. It is consistently filthy, and I loved that every time I thought I knew where the story was going, it simply refused to go there because the characters are such complete and utter dorks.

It's strange, though… I think maybe the moment passed. Ansari's Netflix show Master of None was smart and sophisticated, with moments of real maturity alongside some of the same sort of absurd observational stuff that has been part of Ansari's stand-up. I'm not sure I would want to see him play this kind of stunted man-baby at this point, even if the script is hilarious. The same is true of McBride. I think this feels like a script that was written at a particular moment, and should have been made at that particular moment. I'm not saying I wouldn't see the film if it got made; I'd be eager to see it. But artists grow and change, and Ansari is so sharp and smart on film that it would feel like a step backwards in some ways.

Even so, reading it made me deeply miss Wittels, and I wonder what else of his is out there, unproduced but still potentially able to be made. I hope audiences have yet to enjoy their final laugh written by him.

One Thing I Love Today appears here every day.  Except when it doesn't.

First of all, please disregard the text in the tweet. “The ‘Anchorman’ news team watches the @Cubs win the World Series.” If you’re like me, you thought the Funny Or Die people got the cast of Anchorman together to make some fresh jokes about Game 7 of the World Series. That’s not what’s in that video. It’s clips from a 12-year-old movie spliced into highlights from a weeks-old game.

It should also be noted that some of the clips in the video appear to be from Anchorman 2, a movie you could not pay me to see. I don’t recognize a couple of Champ’s “whammys” so I assume it’s from the sequel nobody wanted.

This makes no sense. Anchorman is set in San Diego, so why the hell is Ron so heavily invested in the outcome of a Cleveland-Chicago World Series? Why not grab clips from a Chicago-based movie, like The Fugitive or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? You could have a clip where Joe Buck rambles for 45 seconds then cut to Tommy Lee Jones saying, “I don’t care.” After the final out, you can cut to Matthew Broderick leading the downtown parade.

Can’t you cut Anchorman clips into anything? Literally anything? “Donald Trump has won Florida.” [cut to Ron screaming NOOOOOOOO on the bridge in San Diego]. “Girls has been renewed for another season.” [cut to Ron Burgundy screaming NOOOOOOOO on the bridge in San Diego]. “Seth MacFarlane announces third Ted movie.” [cut to Ron Burgundy screaming NOOOOOOOO on the bridge in San Diego].

Thanks for the content, Funny or Die.

DreamWorks Pictures

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy is a modern comedy classic, and many, including Ron Burgundy himself, would call it Will Ferrell’s best film.

“The one that stands out as the favorite, and it’s a hard choice, is Anchorman,” he told host Bill Simmons on Friday’s episode of The Bill Simmons Podcast. “Because of the journey that it took. And it’s kind of the Cinderella story of the movie no one wanted to make.” Ferrell and Adam McKay (who also directed) started working on the script while they were both employed at SNL, although it’s virtually unrecognizable to the jazz flute-playing, furry tractor-riding, trident-throwing, milk-drinking movie we know and endlessly quote today.

“The first version of Anchorman is basically the movie Alive, where the year is 1976, and we are flying to Philadelphia, and all the newsmen from around the country are flying in to have some big convention,” Ferrell said. “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. 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 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.”

It’s an idea so out out there that even Paul Thomas Anderson, who told Ferrell and McKay that he “would shepherd it for you and kind of find out how to make it,” thought it was “a little too weird.” Remember, this is guy who made a movie about the Golden Age of Porn and another involving frogs raining from the sky. But Chinese star-throwing orangutans? That’s over the top.

Listen to the entire podcast here.

(Via Entertainment Weekly)

As if the umpteen thousand different Dodge Ram commercials weren’t obvious enough, Will Ferrell and Co. are doing everything they possibly can to monetize Anchorman: The Legend Continues before its release on December 20, because the original wasn’t exactly the biggest cash cow that you might have thought. The comedy classic only earned $90 million in theaters during its 2004 run, which is why it was strangely difficult for Ferrell and Adam McKay to get a green light for a sequel.

But here we are, less than two months away from what will certainly be the most quoted movie on any college campus for the next two years, and Ferrell isn’t stopping with just a movie and commercials. He also has a faux autobiography (a fauxtobiography?) being released for Anchorman’s lead character, Ron Burgundy, entitled, “Let Me Off at the Top: My Classy Life and Other Musings.” And like most books these days, there’s a trailer for it so Ferrell can talk us into doing something as dumb as reading.

So you know those Dodge Durango commercials starring Will Ferrell in character as Ron Burgundy from Anchorman? The ones he supposedly made 70 of? Yeah, those. According to AdAge, they are helping Dodge move a crapload of SUVs.

Sales of the re-engineered Durango climbed 59% in October to 5,120 units and are up 50% for the year. Edmunds.com analyst Michelle Krebs said shopping for the Durango “soared on Edmunds.com after the ads launched” on Oct. 5.

Dodge brand boss Tim Kuniskis said: “We’ve seen almost an 80 percent increase in Web traffic alone since the campaign launched.” […]

Mr. Kuniskis said: “Durango sales have been very strong this year, and the Ron Burgundy Durango ads are absolutely building on that momentum.” [AdAge]

Please make a note: As of today, the correct answer to the question “How can American manufacturers compete with their foreign rivals in an increasingly competitive global marketplace?” is “Have Will Ferrell yell at a horse.”

In a brilliant but arguably overbearing bit of cross-promotion, Will Ferrell recorded some commercials for Dodge as Ron Burgundy, his beloved main character from the upcoming sequel, Anchorman: The Legend Continues. In fact, Ferrell was so good at winging it with his ridiculous Burgundy banter, that he recorded 70 different ads for the car company. And instead of combining some of them or simply cutting the least funny videos of the bunch from the rotation, Dodge decided to run with all 70 of them. So far, we’ve only seen nine on TV, but apparently they’re working quite well.

According to Ad Age, once the ads debuted, web interest in the Dodge Durango immediately spiked and sales followed soon after. All because of the fictitious newsman from the Whale’s Vagina.

Sales of the re-engineered Durango climbed 59% in October to 5,120 units and are up 50% for the year. Edmunds.com analyst Michelle Krebs said shopping for the Durango “soared on Edmunds.com after the ads launched” on Oct. 5.

Dodge brand boss Tim Kuniskis said: “We’ve seen almost an 80 percent increase in Web traffic alone since the campaign launched.”

Mr. Kuniskis said: “Durango sales have been very strong this year, and the Ron Burgundy Durango ads are absolutely building on that momentum.” (Via Ad Age)

Of course, as we all know, one character’s incredible success only means that we can plan to soon see other characters spouting their catchphrases ad nauseam, and my money will be on Derek Zoolander for Volkswagen circa late 2014.

As we hit on not so long ago, Ron Burgundy pretty much took over Conan last night, finally making Conan O’Brien a man and paying sweet, sweet flute tribute to crack-smoking Toronto mayor Rob Ford. Now full video is available so I’ve compiled them all together here in easily-digestible fashion in case staying up late and/or operating a DVR aren’t exactly your strong points.

I realize many of you are suffering from Burgundy/Anchorman fatigue, but Conan and Will Ferrell’s friendship/chemistry trump all of that. Each segment is half-improv and Conan over and over again sets up Ferrell just as expertly as you’d expect. I mean, they pretty much immediately start gloriously undermining the Dodge Durango campaign for the sake of comedy. If you can’t get behind that then there’s nothing left for you.

When you’re already setting Durango-selling records I’m almost certain hilariously trashing the car on late night televison will only help the cause. Take notes, marketing execs.

Here are some helpful prison riot survival tips straight out of Ron’s book (because of course he has a book). Not to ruin it but everything about babies is the best part.

“A comb with a baby tooth on the end of it.” = The deadliest weapon.

Amazing hair. Hot breath. Sex with Bruce Lee.

Here’s a reveal of Ron’s Dog Fancy cover (first human ever!) and his pyramid of animal intelligence. Seems legit.

And in case you missed it, without a doubt the finest flute performance of Loverboy’s “Everybody’s Workin’ for the Weekend” in tribute to an insane Canadian politician you ever will see.

Team Coco

We thought a sports anchor doing his entire report in character and a tandem bike ride with Daft Punk were gonna be the most absurd sports-related Ron Burgundy happenings as we prepare for the release of Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, but nope, Ron Burgundy is headed to Winnipeg to do color commentary for the Tim Horton’s Roar of the Rings Canadian Olympic curling trials.

I’m not sure this movie can even live up to its marketing. Via the Winnipeg Sun:

Ron Burgundy, the legendary broadcaster who made the 2004 movie Anchorman a runaway hit, will be coming to Winnipeg, according to a YouTube video leaked Sunday morning and confirmed by TSN. Burgundy will be called upon to provide his unique perspective to TSN’s curling coverage at the Roar of the Rings on Dec. 1 at MTS Centre.

TSN teased viewers with a press release on Saturday saying Burgundy, played memorably by comedian Will Ferrell, would be taking on a role with the sports network in December. Details of those duties were to be announced during Sunday’s Grey Cup coverage, but the news got out earlier than expected. Shortly after the video leaked, however, it was converted to a private video until TSN made the announcement official prior to the Grey Cup kickoff.

In case you’re wondering if this is all for show, here are two commercials currently airing to promote the appearance. This is real, and I’m not sure how it could be better.

This is going to end terribly.

We’ll keep you up to date on Burgundy’s appearance, and to the severity of shock we have being interested in the Tim Horton’s Roar Of The Rings.

[Thanks for the tip, Jeremy]

I don’t watch my local news for several reasons, with the most notable being that I live in Florida and every newscast starts out with something like, “A local man is in critical condition this evening after getting his genitalia caught in…” and then the anchor names something ridiculous like a toaster or a rare mammal’s mouth. But if my local news teams had the same kind of spirit and charisma as the gang from the WTKR First at Four broadcast in Virginia, I’d definitely be a lot more willing to at least give them a chance.

Barbara Ciara and her cohorts cut this 1970s style promo as a pseudo-tribute to Anchorman, but it’s more of a throwback to the all-around awfulness of the disco decade, and I love it.

In case you’ve been living under a rock behind Dorothy Mantooth’s house, Paramount and Will Ferrell really, really, REALLY want us all to go see Anchorman: The Legend Continues when it’s released on December 20, so they’ve been marketing this sequel relentlessly. For example, the film’s stars got together to deliver a special rendition of “Afternoon Delight” to a packed theater in Australia, while Ferrell is even calling some curling matches in Winnipeg in character as Ron Burgundy. If that’s not enough, Ben & Jerry’s made a limited edition Ron Burgundy ice cream flavor and Ferrell has been selling the hell out of some Dodge Durangos.

Product endorsements and viral marketing aside, there are finally some new clips available to let us know what we’re all getting into with the News Team again, and if there’s anything to take away from this, it’s that James Marsden is very handsome.

The “Anchorman” sequel certainly hasn’t been shy about announcing itself these past few months. From Dodge Durangos (which are apparently selling like gangbusters!) to a limited edition batch of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, Will Ferrell’s character Ron Burgundy has become the spokesman for quite a few products. But what if you’re lactose intolerant or morally allergic to trucks? We’ve come up with 12 “Anchorman”-branded products we would totally buy from Mr. Burgundy.

Last week, just before the holidays arrived and distracted us from what is truly important, we shared with you the biggest sports story of the year: Anchorman Ron Burgundy was headed to Winnipeg to do color commentary for the Tim Horton’s Roar of the Rings Canadian Olympic curling trials. Today we have video of that event. No, I don’t have a massive erection. It’s the pleats… the pleats in the pants. It’s an optical illusion. I was just about to take them back… to the pants store. Oh, this is embarrassing.

Burgundy’s visit to the “Paris of Canada” included an attempt at curling, a feud with (and then an apology to) everyone in the booth and at least one question about what would happen if a stray dog ran out onto the ice. It’s wonderful, and TSN has a two-minute highlight reel for your enjoyment:

If you’d like to watch the full 30-minute broadcast, you can do that over at TSN. If you guys really want to know what love is (more than anything in the world), check it out. So many great jokes, so many furious little brooms.

Oh, and this infographic:

Stay classy, Winnipeg.

[h/t to Jeremy S.]

Forgive me if I’m feeling a little festive so early in the month of December, but I’ve been on a quest to find the best possible Christmas present for my postal worker, and I think that I can finally stop searching. Thanks to Etsy shop “LoveTheSqualor,” my mailman, and anyone in the world for that matter, can now take his love of Will Ferrell’s classic comedy Anchorman to the next level with this unofficial coloring book that lets us use our favorite Crayola colors to reimagine Ron Burgundy and the Channel 4 News Team.

According to the artist who created this book, there are more than 50 pages for us to doodle and draw on, including the movie’s best moments like “Baxter, Poop Mouth, Jazz Flute, I Love Lamp, Sex Panther, Bigfoot’s Dick, Whammy, Glass Case Of Emotion, Whale’s Vagina… and so many more!” All of this just in time for Anchorman: The Legend Continues.

But maybe Anchorman isn’t your Santa’s bag. That’s cool, LoveTheSqualor has another coloring book that might interest you – It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. There’s a little magic for everyone this holiday season.

In case you don’t own a television, haven’t spoken to another human being in at least a year, and you never ever leave your home, you might not know that Anchorman: The Legend Continues opens on December 20. Otherwise, chances are that you have seen no less than 8 billion marketing efforts involving the main character of Anchorman, Ron Burgundy, from his Dodge Durango ads and his own brand of Scotch to his Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor and him calling Canada’s curling trials. There is absolutely no doubt that Paramount wants everyone on planet Earth to spend $12 to see this movie, and the studio will stop at nothing to make sure that Ron and the Channel 4 News Team haunt our dreams.

Next up? Will Ferrell and David Koechner will stop by the 6 PM ET edition of SportsCenter tomorrow night to serve as hosts. It won’t be the first time that Ron Burgundy has teamed up with ESPN, and if this movie makes hundreds of millions of dollars as expected, I’m sure it won’t be the last.

UPDATE: It turns out that Ron Burgundy’s gig on SportsCenter has been “cancelled in light of the potential implications of any news from the State Attorney’s press conference in Fla.,” according to David Scott from ESPN. That of course refers to the expected announcement regarding the sexual assault accusations against Florida State QB Jameis Winston.

Hey Paramount, you know what else I’d like to see Ron Burgundy in? Anchorman: The Legend Continues. You know, before I’m so ridiculously overexposed to him that I have absolutely no interest in the sequel by the time it opens.

I would have guessed that Steve Carell’s original “Anchorman’ audition, done back when he was nothing but a lowly “Daily Show” correspondent, was amazing, but it’s still nice to have that fact confirmed. This is the birth of Brick Tamland, people! Please send onesies and blue balloons to the Ron Burgundy house.

(via Splitsider)

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Now that Will Ferrell and David Koechner won’t be able to co-host tonight’s 6 PM edition of SportsCenter because of that whole Jameis Winston mess at Florida State (ew, sports, am I right?), we need to look elsewhere for our reminder that Anchorman: The Legend Continues is a movie that exists and will be in theaters on December 20. What’s that? Nonstop commercials and Dodge Durango ads? I guess our bases are covered then.

But if you don’t own seven TVs like the average American, you can simply watch this clip from Steve Carell’s audition for Brick Tamland that was released along with the “Rich Mahogany” edition of Anchorman on Blu Ray yesterday. I bet he says something really ridiculous in it.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a movie more vehemently marketed to sports fans than Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues. It doesn’t even open until December 18 and already we’ve had Will Ferrell in-character hosting Canadian Olympic curling trials, an Anchorman interview with Peyton Manning and a planned hosting gig on SportsCenter that got canceled when awful things happened in real life. Just yesterday, Andrew Roberts posting a picture of Ron Burgundy standing on a street corner holding donuts and a 40 for ‘The Dan Patrick Show.’

Here’s the good news: that wasn’t the only thing Dan Patrick is contributing to the incessant Anchorman 2 media blitz. Here he is laughing in the background and failing to use Yes And while Ron Burgundy reads (and improvs over) some of the greatest sports broadcasting calls in history. Doug Flutie’s hail mary? Check. Kirk Gibson’s home run? Check. Mankind being thrown off the Hell in a Cell?

Okay, they’re not all in here, but it’s pretty great.

Tomorrow: Ron Burgundy spends the entire ACC Championship game making jokes about Jameis Winston out of spite. On Sunday, every Cleveland Browns player has Ron Burgundy’s face digitally replacing their own.

Almost lost in the neverending rush of viral and mainstream marketing for Anchorman: The Legend Continues – as if we’re not going to see this movie – was this appearance by David Koechner on “Colin Cowherd’s New Football Show” this past Sunday. Koechner stopped by in character as the sports anchor Champ Kind, and he delivered his trademark catchphrase “WHAMMY!” with some of the college football season’s best highlights.

Most importantly, he offered up UCF freshman running back William Stanback’s trucking of Rutgers freshman Anthony Cioffi, which is my favorite play of the year, mainly because I barely remember any of the college football I’ve watched this season.

What’s amazing is that for as much of a cartoon as Champ Kind is, he’s still not nearly as ridiculous as Cowherd. That intro music is the most “cookie cutter sports talk show” music that has ever been recorded.

If you’re like us, you’re probably looking forward to catching up with Ron Burgundy and the rest of the Channel Four News team in Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues. Though technically, it’s the third film in the Anchorman series. There’s actually a little-seen “lost” sequel that predates Anchorman 2 by nearly a decade.

Released as a DVD extra in 2004, Wake Up Ron Burgundy is a “spiritual sequel” to Anchorman created from deleted scenes and alternate takes. Of course, the improv-heavy comedies from the Adam McKay/Judd Apatow factory are notorious for leaving tons of stuff on the cutting room floor. But Anchorman dumped an entire plot line involving a team of wannabe revolutionaries called The Alarm Clock who rob banks and kidnap Veronica. So McKay added new narration and stitched all the  footage together into a narrative that is actually pretty good. If nothing else, it serves as a fun companion piece to Anchorman, sort of a “what if?”movie that features some of today’s biggest comedy stars in early roles. Here’s why you should give Wake Up Ron Burgundy a look before seeing Anchorman 2.

It’s basically a sequel.

The plot of Wake Up Ron Burgundy picks up right where Anchorman leaves off, with Ron co-anchoring the news with his lady love Veronica Corningstone. Ron and the news team still like to party, but now they face a new threat in the form of The Alarm Clock, a Weather Underground-esque group of bank robbers who can’t quite figure out what they’re rebelling against.

While some scenes are alternate versions of ones you loved in the first film, the movie flows far better than you might expect. Sure, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense that Ron and the news team would haze Veronica a second time, but comedy sequels are notorious for rehashing scenes and gags that worked the first time out. Wake Up Ron Burgundy feels like the kind of quickie sequel we would’ve gotten had Ferrell and McKay jumped right into Anchorman 2 instead of waiting nearly a decade to bring the characters back. Basically, it’s the Wayne’s World 2 of the Anchorman series — you get a lot of what you’ve seen before, but with some memorable additions.

The Alarm Clock is filled with familiar faces.

Besides Maya Rudolph — who hilariously channels Pam Grier as a would-be revolutionary named Kanshasha X — The Alarm Clock counts Chuck D (Malcolm Y), Tara Subkoff (Mouse), and Kevin Corrigan (Paul) among its members. The scene where the members argue over what their message is is enough to make us want an Alarm Clock spin-off movie.

Amy Poehler has a great cameo

Poehler, an SNL cast member at the time, turns up as a bank teller who questions the point of the random masks worn by the Alarm Clock members. (“Do you hate Lincoln?”) Since the Alarm Clock plot was dropped, Poehler was unfortunately left on the cutting room floor.

Justin Long plays Fred Willard’s son

One running joke in Anchorman involves producer Ed Harken (Fred Willard) dealing with increasingly distressing phone calls about his teenage son’s troubling behavior. In Wake Up Ron Burgundy, we get to see the son, who is played by Justin Long in a fun cameo.

Mr. Rosso from Freaks and Geeks plays a creepy fan.

Dave “Gruber” Allen, who played the hippie dippie guidance counselor on Freaks and Geeks, turns up as a skeevy guy who interrupts Ron and Veronica’s dinner to ask about their bedroom skills and offer up his boudoir photography services. (Eagle-eyed viewers will spot Dave Allen as a diner in the restaurant scene in the theatrical cut of Anchorman.)

Chad Everett as Jess Moondragon

Yes, we get to meet Ron Burgundy’s mentor in Wake Up Ron Burgundy. Watch him describe the filthy things he’d do to Mother Nature in the clip above.

The line “I’m having a fondue party. In my pants.”

Laura Kightlinger is briefly seen in Anchorman as Donna, the news team’s tape girl. She gets an entire scene in Wake Up Ron Burgundy, where she awkwardly flirts with Veronica and utters the above hilarious pick-up line.

“Rip the Lid Off It”

Ron tries to get more serious with his hard-hitting segment “Rip the Lid Off It.” (Of course he steals Veronica’s lead in the process.) Still, Ron is a natural at the “running up to a subject and shoving a microphone in their face” style of reporting.

More Brick Tamland

While most of the strongest Brick moments ended up in Anchorman, the news team’s dumbest member still has some good lines in Wake Up Ron Burgundy. (Brick after a party: “I ate a whole bunch of fiberglass insulation. It wasn’t cotton candy like that guy said.”) There’s also a scene where he eats a used coffee filter filled with cigarette butts, which you should watch above.

You haven’t heard every joke a million times.

As much as we love Anchorman, watching it now is admittedly a bit underwhelming considering that every joke has been rehashed verbatim by friends, annoying coworkers, on Reddit threads, in every meme, etc. Just think — now you have a whole new movie filled with quotes to run into the ground once you get tired of Anchorman 2.

You can watch Wake Up Ron Burgundy on the Anchorman “Rich Mahogany Edition” Blu-ray or right here until it inevitably gets yanked.

Cats reenact some of the best moments from Anchorman.

I have no idea how much of this amazing scene between Steve Carell’s Brick Tamland and Kristen Wiig’s Chani was improvised, but my instincts say probably a lot of it. How does that background actress in the red turtleneck keep from laughing? Is she a robot?

She must be a robot, who survived the wreck of the Tintanic. 

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Ron Burgundy’s mustache might be the most important part of him. But I was curious. What would Ron Burgundy look like with other famous types of facial hair? Would he still be so suave, so manly, such a big deal? Lets find out.

Let’s start with the Classic Burgundy…

The sheer face of manliness

Now the Hairless Burgundy…

Hairless Burgundy. Still suave, but missing that key ingredient.

The Goateed Burgundy…

Goatee Burgundy. If Ron Burgundy wasn’t confident enough in his chin.

The Wilford Brimley Burgundy…

Wilford Brimley Burgundy. Anchorman man of distinguished taste, and dedicated to giving you the latest updates on your insulin levels.

The Burgundy Pubestache…

The Burgundy Pubestache. The only way Mr. Burgundy was able to make sure he was never taken seriously again.

The Burgundy Handlebar…

The Burgundy Handlebar. For news from the back of his Harley.

The Burgundy Professor…

The Burgundy Professor. He’s tenured, in news.

The Burgundy Roosevelt…

The Burgundy Roosevelt. The most badass president, the most badass anchorman, and a terror to animals everywhere.

The Burgundy French Villain…

The Burgundy French Villain. He has all ze veapons, you would be wize to listen to hiz demandz.

The Burgundy 70s Sideburns…

The Burgundy 70s Sideburns. For quick news updates on Staying Alive.

The Burgundy Internet Neckbeard…

The Burgundy Internet Neckbeard. Delivering news straight from the friendzone to your TV

The Burgundy Beard Contest…

The Burgundy Beard Contest. For when he simply has nothing better to do with his life.

The Burgundy Dali…

The Burgundy Dali. No one is really sure what the point is.

The Burgundy Hunger Games…

The Burgundy Hunger Games. Delivering all the news from the capital to your poor and run down district. Worship him like the slave you are.

The Burgundy Filmstar…

The Burgundy Filmstar. Yeah. Charlie Chaplin. That’s who you thought of first right? It better be.

And just for the hell of it, have a gif of all of them...

Christina Applegate deserves credit for helping shape the character of Veronica Corningstone in the first “Anchorman.” In the early drafts I read of the film, she was just as big a weirdo as any of the Action News team, and there was no real reason why her character ended up being the one to break the glass ceiling of San Diego local news.

Applegate was undervalued as a comic actor for the first leg of her career, no doubt because she was a blonde teenage girl and “Married: With Children” played up her hair-band-music-video-goddess appeal, but even on that show, she displayed positively deadly comic timing. Like Paul Rudd, she got reborn thanks to “Anchorman” showing off just how far out there she could push things, and in a film that was dominated by boys having a good time, she more than held her own.

When we spoke last weekend, she was both under the weather and missing her daughter, but I thought she was very frank when talking about how hard it was for her to get a handle on stepping back into the character for “Anchorman 2.”

I was actually surprised to hear someone admit that it wasn’t just an automatic process, and I thought she was very honest about how it didn’t really make sense to her at first. After all, it’s been a decade since she played the character, and most of the comedy work she’s done since then has been way more grounded and based in reality. The tone of the Adam McKay films is so particular, and the world he created is so barking mad that it’s sort of amazing they got as close as they did when they came back to try it again.

That’s always the biggest trick with sequels, and it doesn’t seem to be a skill set that every director has. There are plenty of times I’ve seen people return to the well and simply get it wrong, like they never understood what it was that people liked in the first place. I know it seems like Hollywood automatically makes sequels to anything that makes money, but it’s always seemed to me like an enormously risky proposition. The upside if you get it right is obvious, but the downside is when you get it wrong, everyone knows it immediately. Think of a sequel you saw where you just didn’t feel anything that you felt for the first film. It’s awful.

Thank goodness the entire team of total lunatics behind “Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues” were able to tap back into whatever madness it is that fuels McKay and Ferrell when they collaborate. The film is open in theaters everywhere now.

I’m not going to lie, when Danger alerted us yesterday to the entire Anchorman news team appearing on last night’s The Daily Show I imagined an entire program devoted to Paul Rudd dancing and a Burgundy-Stewart anchor offs. Alas, it was a bit of a disappointment when Will Ferrell, Paul Rudd, Steve Carell, and David Koechner only appeared for the guest portion (although Carell and Stewart did jump into that playful banter hinging on Steve being a bigger star than Jon now, which I always find delightful).

But at least the whole thing made almost no sense, was completely unscripted, and ended in what was essentially a battle royal with the Anchorman team leaving Jon Stewart a broken, disheveled mess of a man after giving all his things to the audience.

Oh, and they did crash the Moment of Zen…

The Daily Show

The endless publicity tour for Anchorman 2 is finally winding down, a contradiction of a statement that still feels accurate. Is there a TV show or magazine Will Ferrell & Co. haven’t appeared on over the past three-to-four months? I’m pretty sure I even saw Baxter on a special episode of Dog with a Blog. Last night, Christina Applegate dropped by The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, not to plead for Up All Night to rise from the diaper-y ashes, but to discuss how she learned how to play the Clash’s “Police and Thieves” on mandolin for Anchorman 2.

Of course the scene was tragically cut, but I’m sure it’ll be available as a special feature on the DVD, the marketing for which should begin in about five minutes.

Opening Everywhere: Anchorman: The Legend Continues, American Hustle, Walking With Dinosaurs, Her

FilmDrunk Suggests: Obviously, you should go see Anchorman because otherwise you won’t qualify for Obamacare and you’ll have to gay marry the Duck Dynasty guys. At least that’s what my Facebook feed tells me.

Anchorman: The Legend Continues

Rotten Tomatoes Scores: 75% critics, 76% audience

Gratuitous Review Quotes:

The whole thing goes down like a second, giant tumbler of scotchy scotch scotch: familiar, comforting and, ultimately, numbing. – Christy Lemire

This is the kind of movie where most people know what they want and are pretty sure what they will get, that being “more of the same, please.” – Andrew O’Hehir, Salon

Armchair Analysis: I don’t know what’s more surprising about those scores, that so many critics like it or so many moviegoers dislike it. Either way, I read a few reviews that shared the same notion of “There wasn’t anything special about the first Anchorman” and those people need to be pushed into a bear pit at the zoo. All of the bitching about promotional material and marketing aside, Anchorman is a national treasure and we’re lucky to be alive for this sequel.

American Hustle

Rotten Tomatoes Scores: 95% critics, 87% audience

Gratuitous Review Quotes:

Ambitious even as it studies, exploits and explodes ambition, “American Hustle” is as good as any American film this year. It’s also a lot of fun. Don’t miss it. – Tom Long, Detroit News

American Hustle is a movie built on that cornerstone of the American Dream, reinvention. If you’re not happy with who you are, or who people think you are, then go ahead and become somebody else. Anything to survive – and thrive. – Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer

Armchair Analysis: I imagine the only complaint about this film is “Not enough Jennifer Lawrence.”

Walking With Dinosaurs

Rotten Tomatoes Scores: 24% critics, 61% audience

Gratuitous Review Quotes:

You could write “Walking With Dinosaurs” off as harmless filler for the under-5 set, except that the only female dinosaur, Juniper, exists solely to moon over Patchi, who as a hatchling lost part of an ear to a winged predator. – Lou Lumenick, New York Post

Collee piles on references to such distinctly human concepts as ninjas and ballet, while 21st-century expressions (“Worst migration ever!”) and a forgettable selection of pop tunes feel instantly biodegradable. – Peter Debruge, Variety

Armchair Analysis: I don’t know why this movie is being so poorly reviewed, so I’ll just assume it’s because Justin Long is involved.

Her

Rotten Tomatoes Scores: 92% critics, 90% audience

Gratuitous Review Quotes:

It’s hard to imagine any actor of his generation who could have carried off the lead role in Her other than Joaquin Phoenix. – Dana Stevens, Slate

What gives the film a significant upgrade is Mr. Jonze’s gift for understated poetry, with intimations of philosophy. Lyrical flashbacks illuminate the love its hero once had, and lost. – Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal

Armchair Analysis: I normally can’t stand Joaquin Phoenix, but this looks like a fun movie. Maybe he’s benefiting from Shia LaBeouf out-Joaquinning him.

Last we checked in with German DJ and YouTube personality Flula Borg, he was having a hard time figuring out why us Americans call football football and helping Dirk Nowitzki give us the latest great Dallas Mavericks music video. This week, Flula was able to sit down with the cast of Anchorman: The Legend Continues for the standard promotional movie pressers, and it’s safe to say that Will Ferrell and Co. might have enjoyed this one a little more than the others.

Using just a few random sounds and syllables from Ferrell, Christina Applegate, Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, David Koechner and Meagan Good, Flula offers up a pretty fly techno banger. Am I saying that right? Fly? Whatever, I’m dope.

“I just want everyone to know I’m currently #1 on the Reddit homepage which is amazing, thank you! However, I’m a little bit disappointed because I was led to believe this was for Red Book magazine. Does that magazine even exist anymore?” – Will Ferrell

From Keanu Reeves to George Clooney to Jerry Seinfeld, all manner of A-listers have been getting in on the Reddit AMA game as of late, and the latest big name to take part is “Anchorman” star Will Ferrell, who can always be counted on for a few good chuckles to brighten up a gloomy day. Below you can find a list of his greatest answers from today’s session (in support of the non-profit Cancer for College), including why he hopes to take over from Jennifer Lawrence in the “Hunger Games” franchise, who his favorite “SNL” co-star was and what part of Daniel Day-Lewis’s anatomy made an unheralded contribution to the 2007 comedy “Step Brothers.”

1. @chumanfoo asks: Is there any movie role, outside of comedy, that you wish you could have landed?

@_WillFerrell answers: Yes. It was down to me or Tobey Maguire for Spider-Man and they harshly told me I was too fat for the suit. That having been said, every time I watch Spider-Man I still think I was the better actor for the role.

2. @joec_95123 asks: Were the testicles you rubbed on the drum kit in step-brothers based on your real ones?

@_WillFerrell answers: Those were not based on my testicles. However, Oscar winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis allowed his balls to be examined for the prosthetic balls to be made.

Side note: Those are, no joke, $10,000 worth of prosthetic balls that you see in that movie.

3. @TomRalphio asks: Given the fact that Jennifer Lawrence’s voice sounds a lot like yours when slowed down, can you take over the Hunger Games franchise? That, and maybe all her future roles?

@_WillFerrell answers: I approached the producers of The Hunger Games franchise and asked them exactly about this. They said, “That’s a ridiculous proposal for you to think you could take over her role Katniss Everdeen. However, we are thinking about using you to re-voice her for future Hunger Games movies and you will definitely get to star in our Hunger Games McDonald’s campaign.”

4. @RD1207 asks: I love SNL, and was just wondering, what was your favorite skit that you were a part of? Also who was your favorite cast member to work with?

@_WillFerrell answers: I will say that off the top of my head, the two favorite sketches that I was a part of had to have been the Harry Caray space show with Jeff Goldblum and, of course the cowbell sketch with Christopher Walken.

My favorite cast member to work with was Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

5. @Here_Comes_The_King asks: ayy Will, imma need some more cowbell on tha next album, u game?

@_WillFerrell answers: Of course! I’m absolutely game, Snoop. I’ve also got some beats that I want to run by you. I’m warning you now, they’re not good.

edit: In fact, I just talked myself out of it. I’m not going to show them to you.
 

6. @musicus77 asks: What was the craziest hollywood party you’ve ever been to?

@_WillFerrell answers: Craziest Hollywood party was probably at the house of Dave Coulier right at the height of the Full House madness. This would’ve been ’92. I was 2 years out of college.

7. @Ericzander asks: Do you and John C. Reilly do activities together in real life?

@_WillFerrell answers: Yes. Often times we build model sailing ships and go to the park and sail them. We also like to hunt cats with bb guns, which I know is not a craft.
 

8. @gertron asks: Did Pearl ever follow through on her threats to evict you?

@_WillFerrell answers: Yes, she absolutely did. I lived in an abandoned bus for 6 months behind a casino in the City of Commerce. She’s a hateful person.

9. @b33fm8 asks: Who has the best butt in the industry?

@_WillFerrell answers: Well, according to Top Industry Butts Magazine we all know Bill Gates has held the top spot for 3 years running.

10. @April81972 asks: So how cool/weird is it that you’re now a Lego minifigure?

@_WillFerrell answers: It is fantastic to have my own Lego of President Business/Lord Business. Now my children actually will talk to me. Prior to this moment, they really wanted nothing to do with me. And that’s not a joke.
 

11. @deadspell18 asks: Does Mark Wahlberg smell nice?

@_WillFerrell answers: Yes, it goes without saying. His scent is a pleasing combination of vanilla and leather.

12. @tombobbin asks: How often do people come up to you with Ron Burgundy quotes, or any other movie quotes?

@_WillFerrell answers: Zero times. It has never happened. Sadly I’m still waiting for it to happen.

13. @_WillFerrell states: It has been acknowledged many times that myself and Chad Smith, drummer for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, share a resemblance to each other. A lot of people think that it’s me playing for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But that would be an insult to Chad Smith. The truth of the matter is there is no Will Ferrell. Only Chad Smith.

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Will Ferrell turns 47 today, and now's a good time to announce that he's enjoying a phenomenal career. He was a valuable “SNL” cast member during his entire seven-year run, his movie career is endlessly successful, and he's the reason we have Funny Or Die. Oh, and he was a Broadway star for a second. He's doing well.

That brings me to today's topic: What's the most underrated moment in Ferrell's career?

You might say that his role in “Stranger Than Fiction” deserves another look. Perhaps you think he was spot-on as Bob Woodward in the bizarre pseudo-gem “Dick.” But today I'm advocating for a Will Ferrell movie that represents a bygone part of his career — his “SNL” streak as really, really dorky characters. The movie? Is “Superstar.”

In this box office dud from '99, Ferrell plays Molly Shannon's Catholic school crush. He's cool to her and hilariously weird to us. He also manages to play Jesus during a fantasy moment, and let's get one thing straight about Will Ferrell: He is really good at playing Jesus. 

Was “Superstar” a good movie? Not really. Was Molly Shannon effing perfect as Mary Katherine Gallagher, the repressed, weird, and Catholic “Rewind Girl” at the local video store? Yes. She was astoundingly perfect. And she and Ferrell were a great team of aggressive nerds.

So happy birthday, Ricky Bobby. What does everyone else select for his most underrated moment?

Warner Bros. Pictures

This is beautiful. Wu-Tang Clan's aptly-named 1995 single “Wu-Tang Clan Ain't Nuthing ta F' Wit” has been covered by an all-star lineup including Gandalf, Patrick Bateman, O-Ren Iishi, Ron Burgundy, Luke Skywalker and Black Widow, and guess what: they totally nailed it. (The involvement of Elsa and Ratatouille is admittedly questionable, however.)

Can you name all the movies?

(via Uproxx)

UNIVERSAL PICTURES

What would a great comedy be without a memorable villain? Nothing I tell you! More often than not, villains offer some of the best quotes and scenes in the movie. They must maintain a level of cruelty which makes you side against them, while maintaining a heightened level of absurdity, making them easy to laugh at. What would Happy Gilmore be without Shooter McGavin? Or Zoolander be without Mugatu? Here we take a look at the greatest comedy movie villains of the past 20 years!

Derek — Step Brothers (2008)

The over-achieving, “Sweet Child O’Mine” family singing, perfect older brother, Derek is every bit more grown up than his brother, and new step brother. But there’s just one thing about him, he’s a total tool! He resorts to telling you how much money he makes every year, and unbeknownst to him, he can’t satisfy his wife for squat.

Bill Lumbergh — Office Space (1999)

Lumbergh represents all things corporate a**hole, from the belt AND suspenders he wears, down to the Porsche he drives with the vanity  “My PRSHE.” Not to mention he spouts off nothing but unenthusiastic detached corporate jargon: “What’s happening?” “Mmkay,” and “That’d be great,” all of which just heighten how little he actually cares about his employees.

Wes Mantooth — Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004)

Lead anchor of the KQHS Channel 9 news, Mantooth is the rival of Ron Burgundy. He is rather insecure of his second in the ratings position, and overly protective of his mother, Dorothy Mantooth, which makes for great comedy, because he is the one who initiates the infamous anchorman battle.

Lois Einhorn (Ray Finkle) — Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994)

“Einhorn is Finkle, Finkle is Einhorn!” As viewers we spend the majority of the film believing that Einhorn is the head of the police investigating a murder and the disappearance of Snowflake the Miami Dolphins mascot. We later discover that she is in fact Ray Finkle, former Dolphins kicker, who’s out for revenge after failing to make a potential Super Bowl-winning kick all because Dan Marino doesn’t know that you hold a football “Laces Out!”

White Goodman — Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (2004)

Goodman is the over-the top leader of the Globo Gym Purple Cobras who won’t allow himself the pleasure of junk food. With his band of American Gladiator-style men: Blade, Laser, Blazer, and Michelle, he is set out on making sure no one gets a piece of the pie. Literally.

Marvel Comics

(CBR) Adam McKay recently revealed in an interview with Crave Online that his involvement with Marvel Studios might entail more than just doing an “Ant-Man” rewrite. The “Anchorman” writer/director/producer teamed up with “Ant-Man” star Paul Rudd to cook up a new draft of the 2015 super hero movie; McKay even flirted with sitting in the director”s chair before Peyton Reed filled the void left by departing helmer Edgar Wright.

But could the man behind such oddball comedy movies like “Talladega Nights” and “Step Brothers” really direct a hard-hitting action movie for Marvel? The pairing may seem a bit odd at first, until you remember that “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” was directed by Joe and Anthony Russo – two guys previously best known for directing dozens of episodes of “Arrested Development” and “Community.” The timing and precision needed to make jokes land on film apparently helps jokes land too; McKay doesn”t seem like such a weird choice for a Phase Three film now, does he?

If McKay signs up for more Marvel action, here are the movies we want to see him make:

I’M IN A GLASS CASE OF NOT SELLING EMOTION!

John Cena has been crowned the New King Of Comedy by Hollywood’s funny illuminati, so it makes sense he’d apply that to his Halloween costume. Here’s John as Ron Burgundy doing quotes from Anchorman alongside Nikki Bella.

Unless The Rock dressed as Alan from The Hangover, this wins pro wrestling Halloween.

It’s a good costume. And hey, he’s already mastered a different aspect of the character:

Via GIF

Before watching the above video from Australia’s SBS 2, I had no idea who Lee Lin Chin was. Now I know that Chin is a beer-powered super warrior with a taste for blood who can take care of herself. In this Anchorman-inspired brawl between the assembled factions of Australian TV news, she does exactly that.

Chin also shoots a competing anchor in the head while an old man with a young hairstyle gets choked-out and a woman in a yellow dress eats a fallen colleague’s f*cking face off. If all of that isn’t enough, the video ends with a Dark Knight homage as Chin flees the scene. Because she’s Batman and the Australian news media is the best.

Can you actually imagine the US news media doing something like this? I can’t, but chances are it would be a lot more bloody. If history has shown us anything, it’s that you can’t put Shep Smith in a room and expect him to fight with kid gloves. The man has “No half-measures, y’all” tattooed on his back and he is a Krav Maga expert who trains Israeli Special Forces soldiers for three weeks each year in Haifa. He was also the inspiration for Patrick Swayze’s character in Roadhouse. “Pain don’t hurt,” but Shep Smith does, so it’s best that we keep him away from a fight.

Source: YouTube via BroBible

Dreamworks

Anchorman is arguably the most quoted since Caddyshack, which is to say that it’s pretty much damned near impossible to go a day without hearing one of your friends spouting off a piece of borrowed dialogue. So here, I’ve gathered all of the Anchorman quotes you’re likely to hear people using everyday conversation. Feel free to debate as long as you stay classy…

“You stay classy, San Diego.” — Ron Burgundy

“Milk was a bad choice.” — Ron Burgundy

“You know I don’t speak Spanish.” — Ron Burgundy

“Why don’t you go back to your home on whore island.” — Ron Burgundy

“I’m in a glass case of emotion.” — Ron Burgundy

“She has beautiful eyes, and her hair smells like cinnamon.” — Ron Burgundy

“You look like a blueberry.” — Veronica Corningstone

“I would like to extend to you an invitation to the pants party.” — Brick Tamland

DreamWorks

We can all pretend we had heard the myth before the movie Anchorman, but it became the true stuff of urban legends after Brick casually mentioned how “bears can smell the menstruation.” It was only a matter of time before science stepped in and took a massive bear sh*t on this awesome theory, and wouldn’t you know it, they finally have:

Due to widespread concern that menstruating women might be attacked by black bears (Ursus americanus), we recorded responses of 26 free-ranging black bears to tampons from 26 women and recorded responses of 20 free-ranging bears to 4 menstruating women in northeastern Minnesota.Menstrual odors were essentially ignored by black bears of all ages and either sex, regardless of season or the bear’s reproductive status. In an extensive review of black bear attacks across North America, we found no instance of black bears attacking or being attracted to menstruating women.

So while nature loving women everywhere may be breathing a deep sigh of relief that they stand no greater chance of being mauled by a bear than anyone else, I find myself saddened by the news. Saddened that another movie lied to me. What next? I find out chasing after a girl I love and delivering a powerful monologue in the rain won’t win her back?

Via DiscoverMagazine

Via PJ McQuade

Hodor (Game Of Thrones) card by PJ McQuade, available here.

On Monday, we brought you 20 geeky valentines, as is our tradition every year. Today we bring you almost 30 more valentines celebrating Valentine’s Day as it should be celebrated, with TV and movie references and plenty of puns and sarcasm. Will there be a dancing shark? Of course. Will there be special celebrity guests? Always. Are there ’90s TV show references? You know it. Hodor? Hodor.

Brick Tamland (Anchorman) card by PJ McQuade, for sale here.

Via PJ McQuade

Boy Meets World [via]

Via ifhy-b-ily

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Via notyourtypicalhumanbeing

Con Air [via]

Via Reddit

Leslie Knope (Parks and Recreation) card for sale here.

Via etsy

Friends card for sale here. [via]

Via etsy

Seinfeld card for sale here. [via]

Via etsy

Bob’s Burgers GIF card made by Claire. [via]

Via Claire

Bob’s Burgers card for sale here.

Via etsy

Doge card for sale here.

Via etsy

Doge card [via]

Via LATFG