Adam McKay went from Ron Burgundy to Dick Cheney, and it actually makes perfect sense
LOS ANGELES: “Will ( Ferrell) and I joke that we single-handedly ruined Paul Thomas Anderson’s producing career before it started,” Adam McKay says, casually splaying his 6- foot- 5 frame across the couch, as though in a weekly therapy session.
The original script for his eventual comedy classic ‘Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy’ was so deliriously absurd that Anderson, the auteur behind ‘ Boogie Nights’, ‘ The Phantom Thread’ and ‘Magnolia’ – a movie that ends with a preposterous rain of frogs falling from the sky –threw up his hands and amicably bowed out of the agreement.
“He was, like, ‘I don’t know what to tell these guys, because I love this, but I know it won’t work,” McKay adds.
Of course, it did work – at least half a dozen lines from the movie are firmly entrenched in the greater American lexicon – and pretty much everything else has worked for McKay in the decade-plus since he brought Ron Burgundy into our lives.
As the market for mid- sizebudget traditional studio comedies has dried up over the past decade in favour of blockbuster properties and adaptations, McKay has quietly become a mogul in internet video, television and film. McKay’s latest, the tragicomic Dick Cheney biopic ‘ Vice’, leads the pack, with six Golden Globe nominations (including best picture, comedy), and McKay finds himself nominated for best director and best screenplay.
He’s one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, albeit so selfeffacing that you could never imagine him saying that with a straight face. At the movie’s midDecember premiere in L. A., all he could talk about with the Alist crowd was how proud he was of designing Amy Adams’ dress. ( He did not design Amy Adams’ dress.)
It’s an almost unrivalled comeup for the former head writer of “Saturday Night Live,” whose first cinematic opus was a dadaist disco-era lampoon that convinced a generation that San Diego means a “whale’s vagina” in German. A decade later, 2015’s brilliant ‘ The Big Short’ permanently altered his trajectory from go-to comedy guru into one of Hollywood’s most astute chroniclers of political and economic corruption.
Inspired by a Michael Lewis tome about the 2008 housing crash, the fourth-wall-obliterating parable of American greed netted McKay a slew of Oscar nominations and a win for best adapted screenplay. At age 50, the card- carrying member of the Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America has not only become one of the industry’s most sought after commercial filmmakers, he’s become an unlikely heir to ‘ 70s political satirist Hal Ashby – or perhaps the answer to the question, what if Mike Myers directed ‘All The President’s Men?’ And for this, you can blame Public Enemy.
“When Public Enemy hit, it changed everything,” McKay says. “Those songs stopped me from being a moron teenager and politicized me in a big way.”
He’s speaking nearly 30 summers after “Do the Right Thing” and its Public Enemy soundtrack sparked a political awakening in a generation of hip-hop fans. So maybe it’s a poetic twist that his best- director competition at the Golden Globes includes Spike Lee for ‘BlacKkKlansman’.
With his grey hair and spectacles, worn T- shirt and loosefitting olive pants, McKay looks more liberal-arts professor than Professor Griff. But hearing him talk hip-hop and politics affirms the carefully considered values of a longtime traveller.
In a National Review screed against ‘Vice’, right-wing firebrand Ben Shapiro claimed that Hollywood’s “leftist contempt” for conservatives led to President Donald Trump. He incorrectly attributes McKay’s critiques to a hardened ideology, rather than a caustic fury that takes widow-making aim at those who abuse power
He was, like, ‘I don’t know what to tell these guys, because I love this, but I know it won’t work. Adam McKay, director
and the public trust. “I believe in profit regulations, fair tax structure, clean air, clean water. These didn’t use to be crazy things, but now I’m considered a ‘ democratic socialist,’ “McKay says. “I remember people screaming a t me when I was protesting the Iraq War, saying I was anti-American, anti-this. I wanted to call them up and go, ‘OK, so that didn’t work. So, what am I? Am I still a liberal?’ I hate these tags you get whacked with. All I want to do is judge politicians and our government by their actions. Are they corrupt or not? Are they e ffective or not?”
The future creator of Ricky Bobby grew up in Malvern, a bluecollar exurb of Philadelphia that McKay remembers as “dirtbaggy.” Civic life at the time revolved around the town’s primary employer, the heavily unionized Deluxe Corp. McKay remembers his mom circulating petitions around the neighbourhood. She’s since become
an antifa-loathing conservative.
“I don’t know if it was the times or the place, but we just talked about that stuff,” McKay recalls. “Then I became a goofball idiot in high school and pretty much only listened to hip-hop and played basketball.”
You can see some of the artifacts of adolescence in his West Hollywood office: a framed photo of hoops legend George Gervin and a signed photo of ‘CHiPs’- era, Erik Estrada. An embalmed-looking John Wayne doll scowls underneath an end table, presumably a nod to his old hero, Chuck D, who famously roared “F--- John Wayne!” on ‘Fight the Power’.
A film junkie versed in high and low, McKay is quick to shout out ‘ Vice’s’ stylistic influences: ‘Being There’, ‘Z’, ‘Sid and Nancy’, ‘American Splendor’, ‘ Repo Man’ and ‘ 24 Hour Party People’. culture wasn’t going in that direction.