The Origins of ‘Elf’: How Will Ferrell Came to Replace Chris Farley in the Christmas Classic

The following is excerpted from Elf Unwrapped: Behind the Scenes of a Modern Christmas Classic – Andy Richter‘s Oral History of the Making of Elf the Film That Became a Holiday Classic, by Andy Richter (who had a small a role in the hit 2003 comedy) with Aaron Kino.

The story of Elf begins like most Christmas tales do — with a Jewish kid from Philadelphia. In 1993, an aspiring screenwriter named David Berenbaum moved from Philly to L.A. with dreams of making it big. He had no connections, no experience, and for the most part, no clue how to make it in “the biz.” But what he did have was an overactive imagination and a brain brimming with fanciful ideas.

David was a cockeyed dreamer, as many of us are when we land in Hollywood, but David just felt completely out of his element. Compared to the East Coast, L.A. is just . . . weird. No one seems to have a real job here, but they all talk like they’re showbiz big shots. People act like they’re your friend but then look past you mid conversation, just in case someone better walks by. David was lonely, especially when the holidays rolled around — which are even weirder in L.A. Suddenly, it was an unholy eight- five degrees around Christmastime! To cope, he rented a bunch of Christmas movies on VHS so he could watch them over and over. He binged classics like It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer — anything to feel a bit more Christmassy. Feeling inspired, he sat down to write his first Christmas film: a screwball romantic comedy called Christmas in New Jersey, which centered on two people having the worst days of their lives, who decide to completely start over as if they had never been born (very It’s a Wonderful Life coded).

Fortunately for him, that script actually got optioned — which is when a production company or studio pays you a little bit of money for the “option” of one day making the movie and then paying you a lot of money. Unfortunately, 99 percent of optioned projects never get made, and that was the case with Christmas in New Jersey. The good news, though, is that it opened up a ton of doors for David. Impressed by the quality of his writing, the film executives he met with kept asking him, “Okay, what’s next?” “Next??” David thought. “Damn, I better come up with something else!” Luckily, he was still in that Christmas frame of mind when he started working on his next big idea: the script that would eventually become Elf.

When David first started writing Elf in 1995, he was writing on spec. In Hollywood terms, “spec” means “speculative” — in other words, no one was paying him to write this script, so he was doing the work for free, hoping that he’d be able to sell it down the line. And though he loved a lot of the holiday movies he’d been bingeing, it was ultimately a 1964 Rankin Bass TV special that really inspired this particular project.

For some background: Rankin Bass was this quirky little production company that basically dominated Christmas TV programming for a couple of decades. If you’re a fan of Elf (and holiday movies in general), you’ll probably recognize their stuff right away. They specialized in stop-motion specials, the kind where the puppets move one frame at a time. Their most famous production, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, has been on TV every December since LBJ was in the White House. But they also made Frosty the Snowman, Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town, and The Year Without a Santa Claus — basically all those herky-jerky yet very magical holiday staples that feel like fever dreams nowadays but absolutely shaped everybody’s idea of what Christmas looks and sounds like.

Rankin Bass’s rendition of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (adapted from a 1939 booklet published by the department store Montgomery Ward) follows the time-honored tale of Rudolph, a poor reindeer who gets mocked by all the other reindeer because of his glowing and very shiny red nose. After those mean bullies cast him out, he stumbles across a fellow misfit named Hermey, an elf who longs to be a dentist. Rejected by their peers at Santa’s workshop, they set out on an adventure, stumbling upon the Island of Misfit Toys and running into now-classic characters like the Abominable Snow Monster along the way. When they finally return home, Rudolph ends up saving Christmas by using his nose to guide Santa’s sleigh through a terrible snowstorm, proving that what made Rudolph different is exactly what made him special.

David knew what it felt like to be a misfit; after all, it wasn’t that long ago that he’d been working in a lingerie store, sweating in eighty-five-degree heat at Christmas. Essentially, he saw himself in Rudolph and wanted to create a character of his own that followed a similar sort of hero’s journey. Rudolph’s innocence also reminded David of Josh Baskin, Tom Hanks’s character in Big: a somewhat whimsical weirdo who doesn’t really fit in. Thanks to his wish being granted by a magical fortune-telling machine, Josh is quite literally bigger than all his peers, and this is also what sparked the idea of a giant (well, human-sized) elf named Buddy.

So, at this point, David has an idea with a great hook: a human who is raised as an elf in the North Pole. It’s a funny concept, it’s packed with potential for physical humor, and it also has this “fish out of water with a Christmas twist” angle that hasn’t really been done before. But as excited as he was in the moment, David knew he needed to flesh it out wayyyy more. He didn’t want it to just be a one-note gag. Plus, after watching all those Christmas movies, he realized the ones that really stuck around — the ones that reached the pantheon — had a little something extra.

In the original drafts of the script, when Buddy left the North Pole in search of his human family, both his mother and father were still alive. This presented a few problems — namely that it required a whole lot more explaining. It seems believable that a man might not know he had a kid, but what had Mom been doing for the past thirty years? Searching for her missing baby? Or just going on with her life, sipping margs by the pool and pretending nothing happened? Either way, it doesn’t exactly scream “jolly good fun.”

So David decided to follow in the footsteps of Cinderella and Snow White and pretty much every Disney movie and Grimm fairy tale ever — and killed off Buddy’s mom. Focusing the script around Buddy’s relationship with his dad made a lot of sense story-wise, but even more than that, it was a deeply personal choice for David. His dad had passed away when he was young, and this idea of Buddy searching for his father really resonated with him.

Ultimately, it was this emotional yet endearing through line that elevated Elf from a funny premise or silly sketch into a full-blown movie with the potential for real staying power. Before, the drafts felt a lot more jokey, but with that last piece in place, the script finally transformed into what he’d wanted it to be all along: a holiday comedy with a whole lot of heart.

DAVID BERENBAUM, SCREENWRITER: I just went back to what would be the most personal connection for me — my dad’s passing — so that’s why I made that choice. Once I found that, the writing became a whole lot easier and I had something that I thought was good. Plus, I thought, comedically, it’d be funny for Buddy to go, “I’m here, Dad!”

In 1996, after writing many (many, many, many) drafts of the script, David sold his screenplay for millions of dollars, and it was smooth sailing right into production.

Kidding!

Of course that’s not what happened. Instead, the film got stuck in “development hell,” the term for projects in Hollywood that languish with production companies and studios for years and never actually get the green light.

First, Elf was optioned by the Motion Picture Company of America (aka MPCA), a production company known for making critically acclaimed classics like the Academy Award–nominated Ulee’s Gold (starring Peter Fonda) and Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2 (starring George Lopez). It was while MPCA held the reins that the very first actor was attached (or in Hollywood speak, “verbally agreed”) to play Buddy: the one and only Chris Farley, fresh off Saturday Night Live. Once he was on board, David began refining the script with Chris in mind, and, at several points, was even scheduled to sit down with Chris himself so they could go over the new material. Alas, that meeting never materialized, and after a year, MPCA’s exclusive option period expired, relegating the what-if of Chris Farley starring in Elf to Hollywood legend.

Then, another production company optioned Elf, but after that endeavor didn’t work out either, the revised script earned David acceptance into the prestigious Disney Writing Program. This program brings in a couple of writers each year and has them rewrite whatever is in production at the time. It’s a trial by fire—Disney-style—but it’s also an incredible opportunity. David spent two years there, working on anything and everything they threw his way; in fact, one film he wrote there — The Haunted Mansion, starring Eddie Murphy—actually came out a few weeks after Elf. During this time, Disney also had the opportunity to make Elf, but alas, once again, for the innumerable and inscrutable reasons that most Hollywood projects die, it never came to fruition.

Luckily, the wait to bring Elf to life would soon be over, once a fairy godmother in the form of another SNL legend came along.

The people who eventually brought Elf to the big screen came from wildly different corners of Hollywood, from nobodies to legends, executives to improvisers, Comedy Central to Saturday Night Live. It was a jolly band of misfits, and the strange alchemy that united them — part design, part luck — would end up paying incredible dividends.

In 1999, a subversive sitcom called Strangers with Candy premiered on Comedy Central. Cocreated by a group of Chicago improv comedians (including Stephen Colbert and future Elf scene-stealer Amy Sedaris), the show was an offbeat, crass send-up of after-school specials — those preachy ’90s TV movies that aired right when kids got home from school and taught very obvious lessons about very serious issues. Strangers with Candy set out to offend audiences everywhere — and it did so brilliantly. There’s this truly unhinged episode in the third and final season in which Amy’s character discovers that she has Native American heritage and tries to learn more about her “roots.” I make a cameo in this episode, as does a tall, goofy up-and-coming SNL cast member named Will Ferrell. This was actually the first time Will and I worked on the same project. But more importantly (at least for the tale at hand), Strangers with Candy was produced by Comedy Central executive Kent Alterman, who would also go on to play a pivotal role in the Elf saga. So maybe the true reward of making weird television that doesn’t quite get its due is the friends you make along the way.

In 2000, David Berenbaum sat down with Jon Berg, a fresh-faced manager/producer who loved David’s Elf script — even if nobody wanted to make it, yet. Both Jon and David were nobodies at the time, but Jon was really impressed by David’s script and offered to become his manager. Before long, Jon and his producing partner Todd Komarnicki came on board as producers — essentially agreeing to hustle, unpaid, to try to get the movie made (and then get paid). Obviously, finding just the right Buddy would be crucial to getting this thing off the ground, and the two of them had a very specific person in mind for the role.

WILL FERRELL (BUDDY): The first time I heard about Elf was when I got a call from Julie Wixson Darmody in Jimmy Miller’s office. She was like, “Hey, there’s this script. The basic premise is a human raised at the North Pole who has to go to New York. It probably needs some work, but you should take a look.” I read it and I was like, “Oh yeah. I see what you mean. This could be something . . .”