A few weeks ago, I got to visit the editing room of director Adam McKay's Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues with a few other reporters.  While we only got to see a few selected scenes from the beginning of the film, I'm happy to report they looked fantastic and everyone was laughing non-stop.  Shortly after watching the footage, McKay and his editor, Brent White, answered questions for about thirty minutes and revealed a lot of cool information.  Here are a few highlights:

  • The first assembly cut was over four hours.  The first test screening was two and a half hours and, according to McKay, it played extremely well.  However, the final release will be around two hours.
  • McKay and White are developing an alternate version of Anchorman 2 that has a completely different set of jokes (around 240).  They’re going to test screen the alternate cut and hope to release it on either movie screens (after the original's release) or VOD/DVD/Blu-ray.
  • The film has a couple of musical numbers and one big love song at the end of the movie.
  • Will Ferrell and McKay originally intended the ending to the sequel to be a ridiculous bit about an underwater glass hotel that failed, with water coming through the windows and sharks coming at people.  They changed their minds.

Hit the jump for more highlights from the interview followed by the full transcript.  Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues opens December 20th and stars Will Ferrell, Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, David Koechner, Christina Applegate, Kristen Wiig, James Marsden, Dylan Baker, Greg Kinnear, and Harrison Ford.

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Here are more highlights from the editing room interview:

  • While the first film dealt with the issue of women in the workplace, McKay says this one deals with a lot more: race, Scientology, more women in power, issues with a child, etc.
  • Anchorman 2 depicts the shift in the 1980s of news moving towards watered-down infotainment, and Ron Burgundy is smack dab in the middle of the new trend.
  • They don’t feel a lot of pressuring following up the original Anchorman, because the film is so absurd, and the shooting environment is all about everyone making each other laugh.
  • McKay and White consider Brick to be the “Harpo Max” of their film – where rules don’t apply – and they put a lot of effort into not over using him.
  • White has a state of the art editing system where he can click on different places in the script, and what the film takes from their catalogues will come up for the selected clip.
  • In the filming process, the actors typically do one or two takes of the original script, and then improvise on the scene for about an hour to see what other material they can come up with.
  • In order to pick the best jokes from their material, McKay and White do lots of different screenings with recruited audiences, friends, family, etc.
  • anchorman-2-legend-continues-poster-kristen-wiig
    While doing different screenings to pick jokes for the final cut, they did screenings with “A” jokes and “B” jokes. If a “B” joke got a huge laugh at the screening, it would turn into an “A” joke.
  • Ron’s line “I’m kind of a big deal,” in Anchorman was not very popular at the screenings, but McKay and White liked it so much that they kept it in the final cut. Now, it’s one of the most quoted lines from the original.
  • Because there were so many delays to production with the film, McKay and White feel they had a lot more time to refine the script, storyline, and jokes this time around.
  • During part of the writing process for Anchorman 2, the movie was intended to be a musical.
  • McKay and White spent a lot more time working together to compile the right takes, so that when they got to the edit room, they were much further in the process than in the first film.
  • White uses a script tool program in Avid to recall different takes directly from the script.
  • The Winnebago scene was incredibly difficult to shoot.

Here's the full transcript.  Again, Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues opens December 20th.

Question: With the first film, you had so much material left over that you made a whole second feature, "Wake Up Ron Burgundy".  How long was the first cut of this one? Sixteen hours?

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Adam McKay: You're not far off! The first cut was four and a half hours.  Then our first cut where it all kind of tracked was about three hours.  It played.  It played like a real movie with a beginning, middle and end over three hours.  I think we screened our first cut at two and a half hours.  It was the best screening we've ever had at that fat length.  Normally, when we throw it at two and a half, three hours, the audience gets exhausted and starts yawning.  This time it actually played throughout the whole thing.  We probably shot a million and a quarter feet of film. 

Brent White: It's hard to say now because everything is digital, but it's probably that length easily.

Have you ever thought about doing a comedy like "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World"? Something that lives at that length and can be screened?

McKay: This is pretty long.  This is 153 minutes right now without credits, so this'll end up being two hours, which is by far the longest we've ever done.  We usually do 90 minutes and then, tack on credits, so it's about 140 minutes.  I don't know if I can quite go epic. It's not It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, but it's very long compared to what we normally do.  But it's good.  It doesn't feel long when it plays.  You guys will have to let us know.  But it feels like the energy carries throughout the whole thing.  But we talked about it.  When we screened the two and a half hour version, we asked, "Should we do It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World?”  We looked up what the longest comedies were and the longest was Blues Brothers at two and a half hours.  We were like, "We're not going to do that."

What about a Peter Jackson-style extended edition on home video?

McKay: It's funny you should say that. Brent was editor on the first Anchorman with me.  I went into the editing room and he said, "I think you've got a whole second movie here."  Brent actually cut the Wake Up, Ron Burgundy version, and obviously we refined it and put in voiceovers.  This time I came to the editing room and I went, "Well, Brent, do we have a second movie?"  Brent goes, "Actually, you don't have a second movie, but you have a whole other movie with all-new jokes."  I go, "What do you mean?"  He goes, "You can replace every single joke with a different one."  They're all quality alts.  That was crazy and, sure enough, we're doing it right now.  I think we're at, what, 250 alt jokes?

White: It's like 240.  Something like that.  If you saw the movie and then they said, "Hey, come back and see Anchorman 2 again with 240 new jokes, would you pay cash and go see the movie again? 

Yes.  Even if there were five new jokes.  I don't think anyone has ever done anything like that before. Effectively, everyone would be very interested.

McKay: That's what we were saying! If someone told me it was Pulp Fiction with all new story turns and new Sam Jackson monologues, there's no way I'm not going to see that.  The question is, does Paramount release that in the theaters?  Is it midnight screenings or just VOD and DVD?

Not every film can do it, but the difference here is that, when you talk to people and you see how deeply it has soaked in for the fans of the film -- it's not just a film they like -- it's their favorite movie.  It's the movie they know every word of.  That kind of thing.  That's why I think you could do it with this ,and people would happily say, "250 new jokes?  I'm going back immediately."

McKay: I hope they do it.  Even if they only did it on like 200 screens or something, just to see it play.  We're going to actually test it.  We're talking about putting it in front of a crowd.  The advantage you get in that these jokes don't have to pass by an audience is that you get some stranger jokes.

White: You can really go out on these tangents.  We couldn't quite put the in the movie because it has to be PG-13 on the box or whatever it is.  There's a little bit of open ended stuff that, because of timing or rhythm or whatever else, we could put in this version and let it be a little bit fat. 

McKay: Translation: More crazy shit.

Who goes out on the furthest tangent?

McKay: There's a run where Ron Burgundy and Brian Fantana talk about breast implants and all the alternatives they're using to silcone now, like nickels and taco meat.  It's just this long, insane run that we tried at one point.  Test audiences were like, "no thank you." But it still makes us laugh.  That's part of the fun.

That was a big part of what “Wake Up Ron Burgundy” was, was just tangents.  Like the car scene for example, that goes so much further than you’ve ever taken a movie into breaking reality.  But in that version of it, that’s a great Champ Kind moment, and it’s such a Koechner run, so…

McKay: Yeah.  I’m actually glad that didn’t end up in the final movie, ‘cause that would have been – that almost popped the Koechner game.  Like, he said it so tangibly, whereas we still get to bat it around a little bit in this one, but in that one he just says it right to his face, “I love you,” so (laughter)…Will and I were talking about it, we were like, “Kind of happy that didn’t make the final cut.”

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Meagan Good, what’s the story behind her character?

McKay: So she’s the manager of the whole new network – she’s not the owner, but she’s the day-to-day kind of manager of it.  And she’s an ass-kicker.  She’s brilliant.  She went to Columbia School of Journalism, and typical kind of thing in the sense that she’s, you know, overqualified for the job, but of course, because she’s a woman, because she’s a minority, these idiots can’t, get around that at first, and then she kicks their ass so badly that they have no choice but to accept her.  So she’s awesome in the movie.  She plays really, really well and funny as hell and beautiful, and she was a great addition to this cast.  Seeing Burgundy struggle with, you know, the issue of race was just really funny. And you forget, the early ‘80s was really when you saw this big leap happening – you had The Cosby Show coming and certain music was mainstreaming, so it really is the point at which, you know, people like Ron Burgundy would have been dealing with issues of race.  So it was a really fun kind of relationship for us to have in this movie, and it felt new enough and different enough – she’s such a different energy for the movie that it really worked well.

Do we know where Veronica is…?

McKay: We do know where she is.  Yeah.  You’ve got to see (laughter).  We’re giving you guys a lot!

Did you guys sort of, on the first few days of filming, did you sort of feel any pressure?  Were you like, “Man, we’re playing with something that people really love here,” you know?

McKay: You know, I was thinking about this before.  The spirit of the movie is so much, “Who gives a fuck?” that if you had pressure, it would nullify the whole premise of the movie.  Like, you know, it’d be like the Sex Pistols having to worry about if their guitars are in tune.  Like, you kind of have to not give a shit going into it to do it.  So you actually don’t think about that at all when you’re doing it. You’re just purely trying to make each other laugh, trying to come up with crazy shit, and that’s really the game of the set.  And then at the end of the day, sometimes you go like, “Oh wow, that was a good day,” or “Hey, this could be good,” but in the moment, we’re always just trying to make each other laugh. That’s the engine of the entire thing, so no, not really.  Now that it’s done, you’re kind of like, “Hey, I wonder what people will think of this,” but in the moment, we’re just purely laughing around.  It’s Paul Rudd in underwear, posing with an underwear model.  It’s these guys flying around in a Winnebago on a giant gimbal for like half a day.  Those are the days.  It’s pretty hard to have standards while you’re doing that.

We’re in a time now where race is such a hot topic issue, and it seems in the trailer and this that it’s actually a big part here.  Were you worried about, were you conscious of, this is gonna push some buttons, this is gonna offend some people, while you were writing it?

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McKay: Yeah, you know, we were aware there’s a fine line.  I mean, these guys are so dopey that the subject of race is not like we experience it in the news now.  They’re so innocent and so stupid about it that it’s never really mean or pointed.  I mean, you’ll see in the whole movie that they really just don’t get it, and then they start to.  They never fully get anything, but they a little bit get it by the end of the movie, so…and they deal, in this movie, with five or six issues.   In the first movie it was just the idea of a woman in power, in this movie now its race, there’s another woman in power, there’s scientology, there’s issues with a child.  There’s all this different kind of stuff they have to deal with and obviously fame and money that they’ve never seen before.

You mentioned a Gimbal in the Winnebago scene, what was the process like to shoot that.  It seemed like a pretty effects heavy scene for a comedy.

MCKAY: Yeah it turned out to be a giant pain in the ass.  We wrote just at two in the morning laughing like idiots and then suddenly we realized, “Oh god, we’ve got to do all this.” So it was a huge gimbal with the Winnebago.  It was them hanging from a green screen.  It was stunt doubles inside the Winnebago; it was then the plates you had to get from the inside.  Then it was all the objects you had to get, then you had to have fake bowling balls, and real bowling balls.  It was probably a total of three days of shooting to get that silly little sequence.  Don’t tell anyone that.  That wrecks the fun (laughs).

WHITE: You can feel the work and the money behind it, yeah.

MCKAY: It took us an hour.  It was easy.

Watching this footage you have a lot of character that offer a lot of different types of humor, but Brick especially is a guy who can say anything and its funny, the more obscure the better, is there ever a tendency to over abuse that, and to have too much Brick?

MCKAY: That’s a good question.  Brent and I talk about this all the time.  He’s definitely the Harpo Marx of the team in the sense that he has no rules whatsoever to him.  He can step out of scenes.  He can comment on scenes.  He can look at the camera.  SO he’s got this magical power.  And then rhythm-wise, he can just get laughs.  He has one line in the movie that’s not even a joke and it gets a huge laugh.  He just says something and the crowd goes crazy.  We actually did a pass where we would go through and look at Brick and take out anything that’s mediocre or-

WHITE: Sweaty.

MCKAY: Sweaty, and we’re like, it should only be high quality when it’s Brick…

WHITE: Absurd and just something that actually says something, too.  That comments in a very odd way on what’s going on.

MCKAY: Yeah, it’s got to be a fresh premise.  It’s got to be like the one you saw in the Winnebago of him not understanding what reminiscing is (laughter).  I’ve never seen that joke before so Brick gets that.  You are right though, it’s very tempting because you literally put him in any scene and get a laugh.  You have to be very careful with it.

What was the writing process of the movie?  How did you decide what jokes to keep?

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MCKAY: We come in with a script that’s been pretty beaten up.  We do a lot of table reads with it.  We do punch-ups.  We rewrite constantly.  You want to have a script that’s working really, really well so then you always know you’re getting the written script and then on the day we usually do a coupe takes where you get the written script and then we’ll start messing around.  We’ll start trying.  I’ll throw out some lines, they’ll throw out some stuff.  And then eventually you’ll kind of discover an area like, “Oh that’s funny” and you’ll do a whole take on that.  You know, you have the digital so it’s longer now.  So, the really quick answer to what I’m telling you is basically, he has to make sense of it all.

WHITE: That’s another reason why there’s so many options, so many alts because there’s the joke idea, and so, I would cut different versions of every scene.  So, some of these scenes there’s 3 or 4 or 5 different versions of every scene and they’re all completely different.  They still do the same job in the movie, but they all have different joke runs in them.  And then from there, we can cherry-pick and find the ones that really make us laugh, or put them up in front of people and see which ones-

MCKAY: And you remember the good ones.  Brent and I will dig into a scene for like, a whole day so when you’re looking at that scene its bringing back all the memories of shooting it and I’ll go to Brent like, “Hey we did this one really funny bit,” and he’s got this whole cool cataloguing system, where he can just call up the lines.  Can you show them that script thing you have?  This is the coolest thing.  So, he’s actually got the script and then you can click on it and take will show up.

Adam McKay Talks ANCHORMAN 2: THE LEGEND CONTINUES

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Are there times where the guys ad-libbed and took it off-script?

McKay: Oh, god, yeah.  That's mostly what we do.  We do a couple of takes where it's the script, and then we just start screwing around.  We try different lines, we try different takes, different attitudes.  There was one scene where Will gets punched, and we did five different versions of him reacting poorly to a punch.  One version was that his whole sense of orientation was off, and he couldn't speak or even stand up. So that was a whole version. Another version was where he tried to act tough about the punch and tell the guy who hit him, "That didn't bug me."  But while he's doing it, he's fighting back tears and his voice is cracking.  Then there was another version where he goes on at great length about all the people that have hit him harder than that, and it's women and children.  And I'm forgetting a few more.  That was a thing that, in the script, was maybe one line of dialogue, and we ended up improvising on it for an hour, and were laughing so hard we had tears in our eyes.  And then it's not in the movie!

With lines like that or takes that are so much better than the last one, how do you pick your favorites?

McKay: You screen and screen is what you do.  You keep putting it up in front of people, whether it's friends and family or whether it's a recruited audience, you just want to see all these jokes you liked when you shot them to make sure either they work or they don't work.  So you're constantly kind of flipping them in and out.  On this movie, which we've never done before, we did A and B screenings. We were doing two screenings every night.  So, you had one whole rack of jokes in the A screening, and you had a different rack of jokes in the B screening, and we were constantly screening.  The B screening was like the minor leagues.  So if a joke got a big laugh at the B screening, we would then bring it up.  If a moment worked or if there was a cool shot, we would then move it into the A cut.

Are there any arguments, like, "I really want that line in the final cut, and it didn't make it!"

McKay: You know what we do? Despite everything I've just said, at the end of the day, we do go through it and go, "I just want that line [in the movie]."  There are some lines the audience never... like the joke where he opens his mouth and goes, "The only way I can stop saying that is to just open my mouth" actually doesn't get a laugh from a regular audience, but we love it, and we're like, "Too bad, you're getting it anyway."  Because 80% of the time, it's a give-and-take with the audience, but sometimes... and on the first movie, we did that a lot, too, and it actually proved to work.  Like, "I'm kind of a big deal" never got a laugh, but we just liked it.  So we were like, "Too bad, it's staying in even though the audience was never laughing at it."  And it ended up becoming one of the big quotable lines.  We do that with all the movies. At a certain point we just put in ones we just like.  So it's a give and take that you're playing.

Has it been satisfying for you to see the way Anchorman has grown in stature in pop culture, and become this iconic film that actually led to the momentum to get this film made?

McKay: Yeah, it's been crazy.  We all kind of witnessed it slowly.  The first movie came out and it did pretty good, and we got pretty good reviews.  And we were like, "Hey, we got to make that crazy movie, and it was fun."  Then we're kind of going on to our next movie, Talladega Nights, and while we were doing it Halloween would happen, and we would keep seeing people dressed as Ron Burgundy.  We'd hear quotes, and I'd have friends calling me saying, "I just heard it quoted on ESPN."  I had a Google Alert, and it got to be so many I had to turn it off because they were quoting it [so much].  It went from this insane movie that made Will and I laugh to this thing that everyone connected with.  Yeah, it's definitely satisfying and exciting.  It made it harder to do the second one because a lot of the comedy has been co-opted in commercials and kind of other styles in other comedies.  We really had to write this script over and over again to make sure we had original things.  It made it a little harder, but at the same time without a doubt, it was great to know your 2 AM flights of fancy other people think are funny.  Things I used to get in trouble for writing at SNL, suddenly other people like it.  It was nice.

In what way did that help you refine what the story was going to be, since the first time around you essentially had two movies?

McKay: The first one was definitely like an unloading of material, because we'd waited so long to do it.  This one, because there were all these delays and because we could never quite get the budget right and the schedule right, we got really lucky that we got to keep refining the story.  We approached it once where it was going to be a musical, and then there was a delay again, and we went back to it. Because of those delays, we had time to test them and sleep on ideas, and see how they felt the next day.  We had some crazy idea for an ending where it was going to be an Irwin Allen thing.  The Underwater Hotel was being announced.  It was the most obvious setup for a disaster ever.  There was this glass dome over it, and Burgundy has ignored the story about how the glass manufacturers skimped on prices because [the network] advertises undersea dome glass.  Ferrell and I wrote this crazy ending and, there were like gushes of water coming through and shooting sharks at people.  It was absolute madness.  But we wrote the whole thing, and it wasn't bad.  It almost worked.  Then we took a beat, and were like, "That's not the end of the movie." It was going to be crazy expensive. I'm not sure it would've worked. But, yeah, we got those advantages of being able to work on the story and see how it felt as time went by.

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Image via Paramount

Without spoiling too much, you mentioned the musical thing. Did any of that make it into the movie at all? What was the musical going to be?

McKay: It was going to basically be the same storyline and the same kind of CNN 24-hour news/Fox News kind of thing, but just a musical.  We had four or five numbers written, and we did shoot them, so there are a couple of musical numbers in here.  But we had one big giant one that didn't quite play the way we wanted it.  It always worked.  It wasn't like it was bad.  It just didn't quite play story-wise, so we took that out.  But that having been said, there are still a couple of songs in there.  There's one big love song at the end of the movie that.  I'll wait. I don't want to give it away.

White: He’s tempted! 

McKay: I am so tempted!

You could just show us…

McKay: It’s such a fun sentence to say, what that love song is about.  But wait and see it.  You’ll see it.  Yeah.

How political do you allow yourself to get? Do you take any shots at the Tea Party or anything contemporary?

McKay: You’ll have to see. I mean, a lot of it’s about when you do 24-hour news, it’s so much about ratings, and it’s so much about for-profit news, that’s a lot of what the comments are about - just trash news and infotainment.  You know, 1980 was like a dividing line where they started going towards puffier, sugary news, so that’s a lot of what it’s about – and of course, Ron Burgundy is right in the middle of that change, and leading that change.  So, we did feel like with Anchorman more than anything we’ve done, it’s such a fun, colorful movie that we wanted to keep it pretty buoyant.  But some of the kind of commentary did lend itself to that, so yeah, there’s definitely some shots at our infotainment American media and how they oftentimes don’t talk about much beyond animals and breasts, so, yeah.

Since Ron learned about equality in the first film, did that handicap you in any way with the character in this?

McKay: He mostly forgot that (laughs).  I mean, we always laugh about the first one – what did he really learn?  Like, he learned just not to be a dick when your girlfriend gets a job, is what he basically learned, which isn’t really that much.  So, you’ll see pretty quickly in this one he’ll have to deal with some more success that she has, and he’s not equipped to handle it at all.  So, he’s a tad less of an a-hole than he was in the first one, but so small that it doesn’t really play.

Could we get a demo of the script thing?

McKay: Yeah, you guys have got to see it.

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White: So, basically each line of dialogue is tagged and so I can play it. 

Dialogue: [Meagan Good] “Can you guys get up off the floor?”

White: So I can literally get every ad lib, and every shot of any given ad lib. 

[Good] “Can you please take a seat on the sofa?”

White: These ones that are marked blue here, these are alternate jokes. 

[Ron] “Come on, guys. This isn’t Romper Room.”

White: So I go through and you can see… 

[Ron] “Come on, guys. On the furniture, she meant.  It’s not… sorry, Linda.  This isn’t circle time.”

White: So… 

[Ron] “Please, guys!  It’s a professional work environment.”

White: So I have all of the options, and every time we go through, we just, we can go, you know, we can just look and make sure that we have the best idea, the best joke, the best delivery, the best rhythm, etc.  Whatever it is, we want to make the thing work.  And this really helps us do that. 

McKay: And then the filing system for the alternate runs and bits is also in there. Can you show them that real quick, or is that hard to find?  So then he’s just got a bin that’s all titled just different runs and improv bits that we'd done, and this one also comes really in handy.

Is this something you developed yourself?

White: Over time working with McKay and Judd.  It’s just that this kind of improv-based comedy just needed a way that you could handle it, so you could get around all of the material, and just be able to find it on any given day.  Because like Adam says, he would remember the day he shot it, he would remember something he did, and now he says, “I know it’s in there, but it’s in there somewhere.  And I would have to like go in there and dig it out and in a fairly easy time, try to figure out what it could possibly be. 

Do you have a name for this system?

McKay:  It’s called the Brent White.  Brent designed the program, everthing, it’s all him.

White:  It was just something that’s in the Avid that we’ve actually used.  It’s called a scripting tool that’s in the Avid that we’ve just utilized in a way that’s probably different than a lot of people do it. We just go in and…I can open up this take and… 

McKay:  It’s really cool though, isn’t it?  Click on the script and see all the alts.  We just sit here all day and just look through em.  It’s really fun.

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White:  There’s a locator mark on all the different little pieces.  And I can look through them and I can see what each line said.  So I can just go through and pick them up.  So here... I mean, literally.  Everything that’s different in the scene is written up and textualized, so that I can find it in that way as well.  So if I’m looking for a specific line, I go ‘it’s gotta be on reel, it’s gotta be on one of these three sizes.’  Then I can go through it and and I can look and say, oh there it is, and I can find it like that. 

Who catalogues that? Is it your assistant editors?

White:  I have an amazing crew that are very patient and they spend a lot of time, while they’re shooting, we’re just getting all this stuff in the machine and getting it ready.  So, when we get back here and start cutting we can actually find stuff and get stuff together. 

How long was the editing process on this film compared to the first one and compared to some of your other films?

McKay:  This was actually shorter.  We had a little bit of a crunch time.  How many weeks was it Brent, 22?  Was our whole post?

White:  Yeah, because we have to be in theaters for Christmas so we just had to get everything done a little bit faster but even the fact there was so much material.  That’s the other reason why I cut, and the other guys around me cut, alternate versions of each of the scenes.  So, we’ve already kind of explored all the options, or just kind of laid them out so we can find different… 

McKay:  We did something on this movie that we’ve never done before too is we did pretty extensive notes while it was shooting on cuts he was sending me.  And I would, in the past, just lazily give some notes and go hey take it more in this direction, but we actually went back and forth like 3-4 times on certain scenes so by the time we got into the edit room, some of these scenes were like 80-90% there as far as a first pass.

White:  And it was the version of the movie he had in his head. 

McKay:  Yeah.

White:  So it wasn’t like, oh, we love this tangent, we’re in the cutting room we thought it was the funniest thing.  So we’d ignore that idea and this idea but put this idea and this idea together and then you’re…. 

anchorman-2-legend-continues-movie-poster

McKay:  Yeah it really helped us a lot in the sense they got a pretty playable cut really early on that we were able to do a friends and family screening.  One last thing that’s funny, on the friends and family screening Seth Rogen was there and he sat dead center.  We had 100 people there.  It was a 2.5 hour cut and the entire laugh track we recorded was completely wrecked because of Seth Rogen sitting in the middle going, “hauh hauh huah.”  One of the great laughs of all time, and also his comedy sense of humor is so good that you’re like I don’t know if other people will laugh at that.  I know Seth Rogen finds that crazy joke, so we were like okay, friends and family screening useless because of Seth Rogen.  I wish it would just play for 300 million Seth Rogens.  I don’t know what that would do to the world, but yeah.

Is he on the no-invite list for the next friends and family screening?

White:  No!  He’s actually a really great barometer of what we know to be funny.

McKay:  He just laughs at everything we laugh at.  That’s basically it.  And with the loudest laugh you’ve ever heard.  No better audience member than Seth Rogen.

White:  The other thing we do is record the audiences.  Let me show a pieces of this scenes... 

McKay:  Oh that’s fun, yeah…

White:  Here's the laugh track so you can see kind of what it was like. 

We hear the movie and Seth Rogen laughing.

White:  It’s just that that laugh is so distinctive. 

You should release a version just with him.

McKay:  That’s really funny.  Just release the Seth Rogen laugh track.  That’s really funny.  There should be a law for one whole year all laugh tracks are Seth Rogen for all TV shows.  The world would get ever so slightly better.

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