No ageism in Elf

Start with the Oscar and work backwards.

It’s a maxim I (half)-jokingly toss around from time to time — when you write something new, it can’t hurt to begin with the end goal in mind. Of course, filmmakers are often shocked when something they make turns out to be successful. But there are also movies like Elf, which found a place alongside Miracle on 34th Street and A Christmas Story in cable TV’s coveted holiday classic rotation by no accident: “Our goal, even then, was to make a movie that could be part of that pantheon,” Elf’s director Jon Favreau once said in an interview. “The fact that it’s in the rotation is the highest honor that movie can have.”

So what got it there? The original screenplay for Elf, about a boy (Will Ferrell’s ‘Buddy’) raised by elves in Santa Claus’s workshop before reuniting with his real father in New York City, was reportedly “much darker,” until Favreau (you may know him from Iron Man fame, but he’ll always be from Swingers to me) rewrote it with a new vision: “If I made the world that he was from as though he grew up… in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, one of those Rankin/Bass Christmas specials… then everything fell into place tonally.” That means timeless locales and toys -- the Empire State Building, Etch-A-Sketches -- in a kid-friendly world, where the biggest dangers are snowball fights (and maybe the Central Park Rangers) and you think twice before calling someone a “cotton-headed ninny muggins.” (I wonder exactly how that term — one of the best pejoratives in movie history — came about.) It’s “more of a PG movie [than] a PG-13,” said the director then known for grown-up stuff like Made.

Still, kid-friendly alone does not a classic make, and Elf really earns its status as a holiday perennial by somehow not letting its PG rating bore the grown-ups away. “It’s just a matter of limiting…how much is available to you in order to make your audience laugh. It forces you to become more resourceful in the way that you approach comedy,” according to Favreau, who’s since proven to be one of the most versatile storytellers in Hollywood. In this case the Queens native’s resource is his sardonic New Yorker wit: from a phony Santa with a thick Jersey accent (a perfectly-cast Artie Lang) yelling at Buddy to “cool it, Zippie,” to Buddy’s father musing about Buddy being “chemically-imbalanced,” it’s all what Favreau calls “irreverent and edgy without being offensive.” Even “cotton-headed-ninny-muggins” has something weirdly edgy about it, doesn’t it?

The end result — 90 minutes of Buddy’s child-like enthusiasm (“Buddy the Elf, what’s your favorite color?!”) bumping against that famous jaded New Yorker attitude — culminates in the city-dwellers taking a page from Buddy’s book with an uncharacteristic burst into song. But the best moment comes earlier when Buddy thinks a coworker of his father’s — a prima donna children’s book author who also happens to be a little person (Peter Dinklage) — is an elf, and an innocent “Does Santa know you left the workshop?” leads to the inevitable fisticuffs. It’s darn funny, I don’t care how old you are.