Gary Thompson: Ferrell cat

THOUGH HE'S ONE of the forces who's transformed movie comedy over the past decade, writer-director-Will Ferrell wrangler Adam McKay is ready to move on.

Sort of.

McKay and Ferrell have built a bankable brand around absurdist, free-form comedy - "Anchorman," "Talladega Nights" and now "Step Brothers" - a brand that could keep them gainfully employed indefinitely.

For McKay, though, creating a distinctive new style was the goal; repeating it endlessly was not.

"We've made these three big, fat comedies, and I think we've pushed as hard as we could, and been as aggressive with this thing as we could possible be. Now it's time to try something new," said McKay, a former "Saturday Night Live" scribe with local roots (graduate of Springfield High).

McKay is working on something a little less broad, maybe a little riskier. He's finished a script for a very dark sci-fi comedy called "Channel Three Billion," featuring live actors and treated/animated backgrounds, in the manner of "300" and "Sin City." He's about to start casting the story, about a TV-dominated society.

In the meantime, he's doing press for "Step Brothers," the last of a loosely arranged trilogy he'd planned to make with Ferrell, his creative and business partner (they've branched out into producing comedy for the Net, for movies and television).

It's a trilogy, he said, that almost didn't get off the ground - in script form, "Anchorman" was turned down by nearly every reputable studio, and had one memorable false start.

"We had a green light at one point, until one of the executives saw a short film that I'd done that had Ben Stiller being sexually assaulted by Glenn Frey. Thirty seconds after he saw it, he called to say he didn't want to be in business with us."

The movie eventually was made (after Ferrell "popped" in "Old School"), but McKay's out-there sense of humor took awhile to win over Hollywood, and critics.

"Some of the early negative reviews of 'Anchorman' are pretty hilarious," he said. "It's like people expected it to be 'Broadcast News.' "

Modest theatrical numbers gave way to a big DVD bounty (he credits DVD extras with helping develop the audience) and "Talladega Nights" raced past $100 million with ease.

McKay has often teamed with producer Judd Apatow, a producer on 2004's "Anchorman," who also had problems finding a home in Hollywood for his unique style of comedy.

He remembers "The 40 Year Old Virgin" being shut down for a few days when studio bosses saw early footage, and didn't understand what they were seeing. Of course, what Apatow ("Superbad," "Knocked Up") and McKay are doing wouldn't be groundbreaking if it were the kind of things studios grasped right away.

"Ten years ago, comedies were vehicles built around a star. When our movies found an audience, it opened doors for new ways of thinking, of making movies. You saw a return to ensemble comedies, with two or three people at the center. The studios eased up on the reins a little," McKay said.

McKay and Apatow use inventive actors, encourage improvisation and welcome the weird and eccentric. They're open to anything that gets laughs, and often shape their (heavily tested) movies around the footage that gets the biggest audience response.

"I think directors have caught up to the [digital-editing] process," McKay said. "Editing on film was labor-intensive and restrictive. We can do in one day what a really good film editor could do in a month."

Digital-age editors can work with footage that's been screened for laughs, preserving what works and finding a rhythm that resembles the pacing of stand-up comedy. The process yields movies with a bumper crop of laughs, but with much less emphasis on formal structure.

"It's true, you don't get movies with a classic arc and character development like 'Tootsie,' " McKay said. "But you didn't get a lot of that even back then. Remember, a lot of people tried to make movies like 'Tootsie,' and they were all bad." *