'Candy. Candy canes. Candy corns.'
And...'Elf' gets the treatment
Happy Holidays and thanks for a great year. In keeping with our annual tradition, here’s a bunch of stuff you possibly never knew about a classic holiday film. Your Paid subscription kept things going this year — we appreciate you.
When ‘Elf’ hit theaters exactly 20 years ago, its director, Jon Favreau, only knew the movie he wanted to make. You’re never sure until it plays for audiences what movie you actually did make. But Favreau had grown up loving the old Rankin/Bass stop-motion specials like ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ (the Abominable Snow Monster one) and ‘Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town,’ (the Winter Warlock/Burgermeister one), and he knew he wanted to capture that kind of old-time feel and hint of magic, wherever and however he could place it in a contemporary film. He wanted to at least try to make a movie that could take its place with those old classics.
Favreau was also a native New Yorker who was still processing 9/11 when the scouting for locations and filming of ‘Elf’ commenced. “Having grown up in New York, it was so sad to me that people thought of Manhattan in how it related to 9/11,” the director later told Rolling Stone. “It was a city in mourning. And to go and make a movie about Christmas, where the Empire State Building was something Buddy had dreamed about from a snow globe, and his father worked there – it was almost like reclaiming Manhattan.”
So — yeah. That’s a lot of idealism, ambition and civic healing to load into only the second movie Favreau had ever directed. To see now how well it all worked is to be reminded that you don’t have to be an expert at something to have an amazing moment. Go do it.
Here’s some of what you likely don’t know about the making of Elf:
It sat for a decade.
The original script was written by David Berenbaum, but it essentially got passed around Hollywood for 10 years — not uncommon in the movie world, but not exactly encouraging. Then the manager of Favreau’s friend Judd Apatow, who also handled Will Ferrell, handed Favreau the script, saying they were looking for someone to rewrite and possibly direct it so that Ferrell could star in it.
Favreau found the original version of the script funny but dark — too dark, he said. For example, part of Buddy’s motivation to find his dad lay in the fact that the other elves were making fun of him. Mean elves? In a Christmas movie? Favreau instead reimagined the North Pole where Buddy grew up as a place very much like the one in the Rankin/Bass specials, full of wonder and naive happiness, and off Favreau went rewriting the story.
This was supposed to be another guy’s movie.
Again, this goes back to the 1990s, when the script had been written and Hollywood producers were thinking about which currently hot comedian could take the Buddy role. And the consensus was…
Jim Carrey was starring on In Living Color and had just made the first of the Ace Ventura movies, so he was an obvious choice — in 1993. But 10 years later Carrey was a superstar and constantly booked out. That opened the door for Ferrell to make the movie his own vehicle.
It seems like a big deal now, because Elf went on to gross more than $225 million on a $33 million budget, and of course it certified Ferrell as a comedic actor who could carry a movie and in many ways launched him in Tinseltown. But Carrey didn’t get shut out. He had made How the Grinch Stole Christmas in 2000, so he’s got his piece of Christmas movie blockbuster territory.
All the stuff in New York was real — sort of.
Favreau wanted to connect Buddy’s sense of wonder with the reality of life in New York City — but he didn’t want New Yorkers to come off as jerks, especially not in the 9/11 aftermath of 2003. So for the scenes of Buddy encountering the big world of Manhattan, the director a couple of crew members mostly just followed Ferrell around the city with cameras, filming him doing bits in front of New Yorkers who sometimes had little or no idea what was going on. (“Congratulations! You did it! World’s best cup of coffee!”)
That guy in the red suit, whom Ferrell excitedly taps on the shoulder and calls Santa? He was a real New Yorker who happened to be crossing the street when Ferrell and crew roamed into the area. He was clueless — hence his reaction on film.
Will Ferrell really ate all that junk.
The spaghetti with syrup and Pop-Tarts? It happened. You may remember the stomach-churning dinner scene, or perhaps the stomach-churning breakfast scene. Ferrell was all-in on both, no matter how many times they needed to be re-shot.
“I ingested a lot of sugar in this movie, and I didn't get a lot of sleep,” Ferrell told The Sun. The actor experienced severe headaches and sugar highs, and he often couldn’t come down in time to get an actual night’s sleep. “I constantly stayed up,” he said. “But anything for the movie, I'm there.” Yuck.
There’s a Christmas Story easter egg.
Buddy’s ongoing inability to keep up as a toymaker elf is recorded by a closely watching Ming-Ming, leader of the North Pole elfin crew. But Ming-Ming has a secret back-story of his own: He’s played by Peter Billingsley, aka Ralphie from the classic A Christmas Story.
Billingsley and Favreau, it turns out, are longtime friends, and Billingsley has gone on to produce several of Favreau’s movies and television shows. His cameo in Elf is uncredited, so it took a few years before people began to figure out why Ming-Ming looked at least a little bit familiar.
Will Ferrell totally broke James Caan.
The production folks desperately wanted Caan for the role of Buddy’s dad, because he’s so serious and his filmography alone screams out, “Don’t mess with this guy” to an average viewer. But they had to work on Caan for a while before the actor agreed to take a flyer on the role. (Remember, there was no known market for Elf, and it had been kicking around Hollywood for a while.)
Caan turned out to be a perfect choice precisely because he didn’t need to break character. He remained serious and even semi-hostile, while also clearly bearing the strain of a man dealing with a job and workplace that was weighing him down.
However…
Ferrell finally got Caan to break on the set, during Buddy’s visit to the doctor’s office. (The doctor is played by Jon Favreau, by the way.) When Buddy gets his finger pricked and begins to scream, keep your eyes on Caan — he has to turn away from the cameras so that he doesn’t ruin the scene because he’s laughing so hard.
It was real, but it wasn’t exactly a burp.
There is someone in Hollywood for just about every job. In the case of Buddy’s blowout belch, the someone is a voice actor named Maurice LaMarche. (Which is an awesome Hollywood name.)
LaMarche is best known for the vocals of Brain from Pinky and the Brain, and he’s done work on The Simpsons, Rick and Morty, Scooby-Doo Guess Who? and Mr. Big in Zootopia. As for the epic blast in Elf, “It’s not a real burp,” LaMarche said. “It’s an effect that I do and I don’t know how to quite explain how I do it. It’s just that I kind of turn my tongue inside out and I do like a deep glottal rasp while I turn the tongue inside out.”
Coulda fooled us.
There won’t be a sequel.
In the end, Jon Favreau got the present he was hoping for — and a lot more. Favreau did indeed make New York look kind of sweet and even forgiving, and, hey, New Yorkers manage to save Christmas by breaking into song, although who wouldn’t if they were asked to do so by Zooey Deschanel. Even James Caan figured out what really mattered in the end.
Elf and the Christmas-themed Love Actually made their theatrical debuts on the same day, Nov. 7, 2003, and the New York Times recently wondered if those’ll be the last two Christmas classics we ever get, since almost nothing worth remembering in the genre has been made since. Elf was an immediate hit. Will Ferrell’s career launched. Jon Favreau’s career launched. A lot changed in a short amount of time.
But Ferrell says there won’t be an Elf 2, even though he at one point was offered $29 million to play Buddy in a sequel. “I just think it would look slightly pathetic if I tried to squeeze back in the elf tights,” he said. “Buddy the Middle-Aged Elf.” Let’s be honest: We’ve heard worse sequel titles. But it’s nice to see somebody say that the first one was good enough.
Merry Christmas !!