2003's Elf has been around long enough to be a certified holiday classic.The film follows Buddy the Elf (Will Ferrell), who's not an elf at all and feels like an outsider in the North Pole. His adoptive elf father tells him his birth dad lives in the grand city of New York, so Buddy sets off into the "real" world, leaving his stop-motion animal friends behind in search of his origins in the rougher setting of Manhattan and high-power publishing. James Caan, Zooey Deschanel, and Mary Steenburgen also star.The film was a little bit of a surprise hit and a unique take on holiday family comedy that had a rough-around-the-edges quality, which resonated with viewers.In 2022, screenwriter David Berenbaum spoke with RadioTimes about how the film came about. - YouTube www.youtube.com Elf's OriginsHe said his original idea was a story called Christmas in New Jersey. It didn't ultimately go anywhere, but it put the holiday setting on his radar and got him meetings."It got me in the door with all sorts of people, and they said, 'What's next?'" he said. "And then I thought of the idea for Elf because I was surrounded by all this Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Rankin/Bass stuff. And I sort of thought it would be amusing to put a human into that sort of environment."Berenbaum stayed in that Rankin/Bass world (also looking to Tom Hanks' Big for inspiration) to write Elf, and the script went through the purgatory of development over the following years.It was...
Published By: NoFilmSchool - Yesterday