Mort Crim only has one complaint about Will Ferrell saying he inspired Anchorman‘s Ron Burgundy.
“Will quotes me as saying I was a typical male chauvinist pig. I didn’t say that. I said I was a typical male chauvinist anchor,” Mort said during a Tuesday phone interview.
The retired newscaster now lives in Florida, where he operates a voiceover business and flies airplanes in his spare time — which he hasn’t had much of ever since Will Ferrell told Rolling Stone and New York Times that he created Ron Burgundy after watching Mort’s interview in an A&E Biography of Jessica Savitch.
“When people ask me if I’m offended by the fact that I was the inspiration for this movie, I say absolutely not,” said Mort, now 78. “If this were a documentary, I would be offended. But it’s comedy. And that’s what parody is. It’s taking a little element of truth and then exaggerating it to a ridiculous extreme.”
The little element of truth is that, back in the 1970s, Mort Crim was skeptical about co-anchoring the news in Philadelphia with a young Jessica Savitch.
“I think the resentment that I and other members of the news team had about Jessica coming in was a matter of experience and not having paid her dues. She was 25 years old,” Mort said of Jessica, noting she was clearly the basis for Christina Applegate’s Veronica Corningstone character. “There was just a sense that we had earned our position at the anchor table and she had not. So, I don’t think it was gender-based so much as it was the feeling that you don’t take a 25-year-old with limited experience and set them down in a major market, prime anchor chair.”
Mort and the other news team members weren’t alone in their feelings — and that fact wasn’t lost on Jessica. As she recalled in the early 1980s, “One TV executive told me you couldn’t put a woman on the 11 o’clock news because that’s when wives look their worst, so they would be jealous. Those were really the dark ages.”
Despite the sexism, Philadelphia’s KYW-TV hired Jessica as Mort’s co-anchor.
“Once the decision was made, I took Jessica out to dinner before we ever went on the air and I said, ‘Jess, you’re very well aware that I was not thrilled about this decision. But, it is the decision and I want you to know that I’m going to do everything I can to make this work because our successes are now yoked together. If I succeed, you succeed and vice-versa. I’m here to help you in any way that I can.'”
With Mort and Jessica at the anchor desk, the Philadelphia station went from third to first in the market.
Jessica left Philadelphia in 1977 to pursue network opportunities. Mort moved on to WDIV-TV in Detroit in 1978.
Yet, the bond they forged at the anchor desk remained strong: When Jessica’s second husband committed suicide in 1981, she fled to Mort’s Michigan home for a week of recovery. Then, when Jessica was killed in a car accident two years later, Mort gave the eulogy at her funeral.
Thirty years later, Mort still thinks of Jessica often — partially because of the upcoming Anchorman 2 movie.
“Jessica had a good sense of humor and I think she would have taken the movie the same way that I do. I think she would have laughed hilariously at Christina Applegate portraying in some loose fashion Jessica’s story,” Mort speculated. “She would have enjoyed it and I think she would have answered the questions in a very similar way that I am answering them.”
Anchorman 2 premieres nationwide on Dec. 18. Before then, Mort will meet Will Ferrell for the first time during the New York City premiere on Dec. 15.
