The “bizarre” scene Harrison Ford was keen to delete from history: “It’s clearly unreleasable”
Having been a household name for almost 50 years, if Harrison Ford appears in a movie scene and suggests that it wasn’t worthy of making the final cut, there’s a chance that it won’t.
He may not have followed the path of countless other superstar actors by diversifying into producing, with three executive producing credits on K-19: The Widowmaker, Extraordinary Measures, and The Staircase, the only behind-the-scenes credits of his career.
However, because he’s Harrison fucking Ford, he still carries plenty of sway on every production he works on. Not necessarily when he’s a day player, though, with the veteran suggesting he wouldn’t have been too devastated if a gratuitous cameo he filmed for a comedy sequel was left on the cutting room floor.
This being the gruff and grizzled icon who’s turned misery into an art form, there’s a distinct chance that he was kidding. On the other hand, it can be pinpointed as the exact moment that the movie in question disappeared up its own arse, so it wouldn’t have been the worst thing in the world to leave it out.
After the first instalment became a slow-burning cult classic, Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues put forward a decent case for why not every popular film needs to be revisited. It wasn’t a disaster, and didn’t quite besmirch the beloved name of the original, but there was a stench of self-service about it.
In trying to up the ante from the opener’s brawl between rival news crews, Adam McKay and Will Ferrell brought in some seriously heavy hitters, with Ford, Will Smith, Sacha Baron Cohen, Liam Neeson, Marion Cotillard, and Kanye West all being brought in for no apparent reason other than to show how many big names could be lured into Anchorman‘s world.
Having recently played an anchor in another newsroom comedy, Ford was trepidatious about his scenes. “I hope it’s a little different,” he explained. “One hates to repeat themselves. They asked me to do it before they knew that I had done Morning Glory.” Even after he’d shot it, the Indiana Jones icon wouldn’t have cared if it was scrapped, summing up the experience in three words: “It was bizarre.”
“It’d be easy enough to cut out,” he suggested. “I don’t think it’s critical.” It wasn’t, and it was distracting more than anything else, a sequence designed only to replicate a moment from the first flick except bigger, which Ford hadn’t even watched. “I never saw the original Anchorman,” he confessed. “I got there, and I had no idea who those guys were, and I still don’t know who they are and what they think they’re doing, because it’s clearly unreleasable.”
While there’s clearly an element of sarcasm, Ferrell did say about Ford’s involvement in Anchorman 2 that “it’s stupid why he would want to do it,” and after playing his minor part as Mack Tannen, maybe he felt the same way.
