New from Will Ferrell’s site, “Funny or Die.” He’s been calling in B- and C-list celebrities to appear in the feature clips over the past few months to help promote the launch; Dafoe is a slight step up in prestige. Pretty clearly there’s no script beyond a barebones outline. They just show up for the shoot, let ‘er rip for a few hours, and harvest what they’ve got later on the editing machine. My sense is that’s how “Anchorman” worked too. The problem with doing things that way is that you end up with a lot of crap material (enough to make an entire, awful feature-length film, in fact).

I guess they didn’t shoot enough here to cull four good minutes because what we’re left with is a good concept, a few good gags, and a lot of dead stretches.