The story behind the 2003 holiday comedy Elf began with screenwriter David Berenbaum, who moved from Philadelphia to Los Angeles in 1993 hoping to break into Hollywood. Feeling isolated during warm Los Angeles Christmases, he watched holiday films on VHS and wrote Christmas in New Jersey, a screenplay that was optioned but never made. The script helped open doors, and Berenbaum began developing another Christmas story in 1995: the project that would become Elf.
Berenbaum drew inspiration from the Rankin/Bass television special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and from the fish-out-of-water premise of Big. He imagined Buddy as a human raised among elves at the North Pole. Early drafts had Buddy searching for both parents, but Berenbaum eventually made his mother deceased and centered the story on his relationship with his father. The choice reflected Berenbaum’s own experience of losing his father when he was young, and gave the comedy a more personal emotional thread.
The screenplay faced years of delays. The Motion Picture Company of America first optioned it, and Chris Farley, then known for his work on Saturday Night Live, was attached to play Buddy. Berenbaum revised the script with Farley in mind, but their planned meeting never happened. After a year, the company’s option expired, and Farley’s involvement came to an end.
Another production company later optioned the script, but that effort also fell through. Berenbaum subsequently joined Disney’s writing program, where the studio had an opportunity to make Elf, though it did not move forward. Meanwhile, producers Jon Berg and Todd Komarnicki took an interest in the screenplay and began trying to get it made.
Will Ferrell became a possibility through connections formed around comedy. Andy Richter’s excerpt recalls working with Ferrell on an episode of Comedy Central’s Strangers with Candy, produced by executive Kent Alterman, who would later play a role in Elf’s development. In 2000, Berg and Komarnicki became producers and had a particular actor in mind for Buddy: Ferrell.
Ferrell recalled that he first heard about the screenplay through Julie Wixson Darmody, who described its premise as a human raised at the North Pole who travels to New York. He read the script and saw potential in it. The excerpt from Elf Unwrapped, Richter’s oral history of the film written with Aaron Karo, recounts the project’s early development and the succession of people and circumstances that brought it closer to the screen.
Sources: The Hollywood Reporter.