'Elf' Was Originally "Much Darker"—And Emerged from a Failed Pitch

2003's Elf has been around long enough to be a certified holiday classic.

The film follows Buddy the Elf (Will Ferrell), who's not an elf at all and feels like an outsider in the North Pole. His adoptive elf father tells him his birth dad lives in the grand city of New York, so Buddy sets off into the "real" world, leaving his stop-motion animal friends behind in search of his origins in the rougher setting of Manhattan and high-power publishing. James Caan, Zooey Deschanel, and Mary Steenburgen also star.

The film was a little bit of a surprise hit and a unique take on holiday family comedy that had a rough-around-the-edges quality, which resonated with viewers.

In 2022, screenwriter David Berenbaum spoke with RadioTimes about how the film came about.

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Elf's Origins

He said his original idea was a story called Christmas in New Jersey. It didn't ultimately go anywhere, but it put the holiday setting on his radar and got him meetings.

"It got me in the door with all sorts of people, and they said, 'What's next?'" he said. "And then I thought of the idea for Elf because I was surrounded by all this Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Rankin/Bass stuff. And I sort of thought it would be amusing to put a human into that sort of environment."

Berenbaum stayed in that Rankin/Bass world (also looking to Tom Hanks' Big for inspiration) to write Elf, and the script went through the purgatory of development over the following years.

It was optioned, had an actor attached, but didn't go anywhere. Another company picked it up, only to let it languish again. But then SNL's Will Ferrell started looking for a project and eventually signed on. The script eventually landed on director Jon Favreau's desk, but he wasn't intrigued.

Favreau told the story to Rolling Stone like this:

I took a look at the script, and I wasn’t particularly interested. It was a much darker version of the film. I liked the notion of being involved with Will in his first solo movie after SNL, but it wasn’t quite there. I was asked to take another look at it. They were looking for somebody to rewrite it and possibly direct it. And I remember reading it, and it clicked: if I made the world that he was from as though he grew up as an elf in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, one of those Rankin/Bass Christmas specials I grew up with, then everything fell into place tonally. So for a year, I rewrote the script. It turned into more of a PG movie from a PG-13. He was a darker character in the script I had read originally. The character became a bit more innocent, and the world became more of a pastiche of the Rankin/Bass films.

Berenbaum worked on some of those rewrites with Favreau, he said.

What Screenwriters Can Learn

Tone can make or break your script. The shift from PG-13 to PG, from darker to innocent, completely changed how audiences connected with Buddy.

Learn about mood vs. tone and how to identify your script's tone.

Great writers stay open to collaboration. Berenbaum worked with Favreau on rewrites even after multiple drafts. We've covered how to create a collaborative atmosphere.

And sometimes your script just needs to find its people. Elf bounced around Hollywood for years before Ferrell and Favreau came together at the right moment. Persistence is important, but so is recognizing when your story needs to evolve. A script you wrote five years ago might benefit from another look.

We've got methods for screenplay rewrites if you're struggling.

A little holiday cheer and magic doesn't hurt either, it seems. Now get to writing!