A new oral history of “Elf” reveals that the 2003 holiday hit once belonged to Chris Farley, and that Will Ferrell arrived only after the film’s first producers lost control of it. Andy Richter, who played a small role in the movie, details the origins in “Elf Unwrapped: Behind the Scenes of a Modern Christmas Classic,” written with Aaron Karo. The Hollywood Reporter published an excerpt this week, and the book reached shelves Nov. 3.
Screenwriter David Berenbaum wrote the script in 1993. Early drafts kept both of Buddy’s parents alive, a choice that demanded far more exposition. The Motion Picture Corporation of America optioned the material and signed Farley, then fresh off “Saturday Night Live,” as the first actor attached to play the human raised by elves. Berenbaum began reshaping scenes around him and was due to meet the comedian to go over the pages.
Berenbaum has said the producers wanted to build the film around Farley’s persona, and that the result would have been a different movie. He made the point on the Netflix series “The Holiday Movies That Made Us.” Jim Carrey also circulated as an early candidate for Buddy.
The project stalled for years. When the script reached Jon Favreau, then a director with little track record, he found it “much darker” than the film audiences now know and pushed for rewrites. Scot Armstrong, Chris Henchy and the team of Adam McKay and Ferrell all contributed.
Ferrell recalls in the excerpt that the project first reached him through a call from an assistant in manager Jimmy Miller’s office, who described a script about a human raised at the North Pole who travels to New York and said it probably needed work. A review of the book notes that backers considered Ferrell a gamble. He had left “Saturday Night Live” only recently, and “Old School,” his first lead film role, had not yet opened.
The book draws on interviews with Ferrell, who wrote the foreword, along with Zooey Deschanel, Favreau and Berenbaum. Its publisher says no studio wanted the screenplay when it first circulated in Hollywood. Farley died in 1997, years before the film finally went into production. Richter appears Nov. 19 at a Los Angeles Live Talks event to discuss the book.
