They came to talk about “Anchorman,” but Will Ferrell and his collaborator Adam McKay might just as easily have been sitting down with the Daily News to talk about the highly anticipated “August Blowout 2.”
Unfortunately, the first script by the two comics — submitted a decade ago when they were both full-time “Saturday Night Live” employees — was rejected by Paramount. Ferrell had yet to break through with the 2003 one-two punch of “Old School” and “Elf,” and McKay had exactly zero directing credits on his résumé.
So what did audiences miss out on with “August Blowout”?
“It was ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ meets a car dealership,” explains McKay, referring to the David Mamet drama about real estate salesmen.
“I was ‘Jeff Tanner’ — the best goddamned Ford salesman there was,” adds Ferrell, laughing. “You had all these guys who worked at the dealerships who had these sordid pasts.”
It doesn’t take long for the pair to slip back into pitch mode:
“There was a whole ‘New York, New York’-style song called ‘Anaheim,’ ” says McKay, breaking into the chorus, which seems to just be the name of the California city.
“In the montage, we had planned four shots of Denny’s, and one of the shots was a mattress coming off a car on the highway.”
There was a scene — the memory of which causes both a fit of laughter — of the Tanner character waking up at the home of a redheaded bombshell after a night of passion, going to the kitchen for a drink and finding a Nazi flag on the wall. “I told you I was a Nazi,” she says.
“Nooooo, you didn’t say that,” Ferrell replies in a whispery impression of the character.
“It was a funny script,” says Ferrell. “We actually did a read-through, a last-ditch attempt to get it going that [‘SNL’ producer] Lorne Michaels organized, on the soundstage where they shot ‘Soul Train.’ ”
They even got actor Harry Dean Stanton to read — and watched him chain-smoke through the whole thing, his voice getting lost in the cavernous soundstage on the Paramount lot.
“We left going, ‘There’s no way this is getting made,’ ” says Ferrell.
It didn’t. But things turned out okay for them and for us: Ferrell and McKay also had a crazy idea about a ’70s-era news team ...
I remember seeing a title of an article a few days ago basically saying 'Remake for Naked Gun with Ed Helms has it wrong every way possible' I let out a sigh and smirk then moved on. Leslie rolling over in his grave.
