Will Ferrell trades in his ice skates and NASCAR for a sleight stab at slightly-pro basketball

By Melissa Michaels

HOLLYWOOD, CA (Hollywood Today) 2/29/08 — Guns, Corndogs, and Bears, Oh My! This movie hinges on a series of loosely strung together SNL-esque comic bits, including a Russian roulette poker game, bear-wrestling, corndog nights, an eyeliner malfunction, roller-skating over a line of ‘ball girls’, you get the picture.

Set in 1976, disco-funk Will Ferrell plays Jackie Moon, with his especially bad hair and warped sense of narcissism, who parlays the profits of his one-hit wonder song “Love Me Sexy” to achieve his basketball dreams as owner, coach and player of the Flint Tropics. Moon’s franchise is the worst team in the league, and in danger of folding when the ABA announces its plans to merge with the NBA. If they want to survive, Jackie and his teammates including a player he traded his washing machine for, former NBA benchwarmer Ed Monix (Woody Harrelson), and star player Clarence “Coffee” Black (Andre’ Benjamin) must now do the seemingly impossible, (no, not wear longer shorts), place at least fourth to enter the NBA and save the team.

However, wearing those short-shorts was probably a greater challenge, as Ferrell offers us some insight on the skimpy uniforms. “I think Andre and I had the shortest shorts, which a lot of our fellow teammates refused to wear. But, I did have to wear a special pair of underwear, because when I went into a defensive stance…there was a potential for things to happen. Woody, care to comment on the shorts? Yours weren’t that short.” Harrelson chuckles and retorts, “Nobody doubts your leading man status.”

While the film took some hits from reviewers, Farrell is semi-critic proof, with legions of fans happy to see whatever he’s spoofing at the moment. Leading man in a sports/comedy is something Farrell is familiar with, first as an ice-skater in “Blades of Glory”, and as a race car driver in “Talladega Nights”, and now the world of Basketball in “Semi-Pro”, one can’t help but wonder what sparked the streak. “This is actually just coincidence that these movies lined up the way they did. I love kind of combining sports and comedy together, but only one of those was my idea, that was the NASCAR movie, otherwise I was asked to be a part of these. So, that having been said, it’s a great framework to kind of do comedy in. You can parody the sport, in this movie you can parody the era. And at the same time, you have a built in arc that’s fun for the audience to watch this team of losers try to attain the lofty goal of fourth place.”

Written by Scot Armstrong and directed by NewLine exec’s Kent Altermann, he tells us a bit about stepping down from his duties as executive producer at NewLine Cinema, which just yesterday consolidated into parent Warner Bros., to take on the Director’s chair. “It was a very weird and uncomfortable position for me to be in. To try and be the mature one, yes.”

Harrelson chimes in curiously, wondering if that’s ever happened to him before. “I don’t think so. Well, we did have a lot of fun but we were also doing a production, so there were times when we had to find that delicate balance point between having too much fun and getting irresponsible, but I think we did it pretty well.” Ferrell lends some support to the difficulties of trying to maintain control on the set, stating, “Yeah, Kent had the kind of unenviable task of herding all of us. Because you’ve got 10 guys on a basketball court and about 1800 extras and every time he yelled cut we’d want to just start shooting the ball around and running around and doing bits at the scorer’s table. So, yeah, it was tough.”

Ferrell is hard at work with four upcoming projects. “I have “Stepbrothers” coming out in July with John C. Reilly, and then a passion project of mine, the Lee Iacocca story. 10 years in the making. I get to play one of my heroes, Lee Iacocca.”

Given Ferrell’s USC connections, we wondered if he would tackle college football next. “Unfortunately, the college football parody I’m doing is actually a drama taking an in depth look at the problem we have with steroid use.” Definitely not a humorous issue, Harrelson insists Farrell could still pull off a few laughs.

The big-screen remake of the 1970′s kid’s TV cult classic “Land of the Lost” is in pre-production and due out in 2009, as Ferrell gives us a peek at what to expect. “Y’know, everything is going to be kind of ramped up a little bit. The kitsch of the physical production of the TV show was kind of thrown out the window. The dinosaurs and everything are going to look very realistic or as realistic as we think dinosaurs should look. But even the Sleestaks (a mysterious and dangerous race of dinosaurs) and things like that, they are all going to be real creatures as opposed to in the show where you saw a guy with a costume and a zipper running up his back.” However, if the audience misses the zipper, he’ll be happy to edit it back in.