Back in the distant past of 2008, the team that put together Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby decided to put their heads together and give us another “Oh my God, did they just say that?” kind of buddy comedy. The R-rated flick stars Will Ferrell as Brennan Huff and John C. Reilly as Dale Doback, two nearly 40-year-old men who still live at home. It’s a comedy that prides itself on filth, improv, and out of nowhere musical numbers.
If you’re the kind of obsessive Step Brothers fan who forces your family to belt out “Sweet Child O’ Mine” a cappella during road trips and has John C. Reilly tattooed on your body, then you might know some of the interesting details we’ve gathered, but if you’re a normal fan, then it might all be new to you, so without further ado, let’s get to earnin’ and burnin’ and maybe, just maybe, a little learnin’.
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The Catalina Wine Mixer is a real thing now.
The Catalina Wine Mixer, affectionately referred to as the “F*cking Catalina Wine Mixer,” is the biggest helicopter leasing event in the Western Hemisphere since 1997. It’s the best place to put on an impromptu performance of “Por Ti Volare.” And this past September, it actually happened. The Descanso Beach Club invited one and all to “experience the classic event from Step Brothers” without a hint of irony. If you missed it the first time, don’t worry! They’re calling it the “1st Annual” one, which means they’re probably planning to keep this going for as long as they can.
There was almost a rap album.
While it took until 2012 for the rap album idea to officially be shelved, it seemed like a done deal for the singers of “Boats n’ Hoes.” It was actually semi in production already; director Adam McKay was already working with producer to the stars, Lukasz Gottwald. But it wasn’t meant to be. As McKay told Indiewire, “Right in the middle of it, we suddenly got super busy and everyone had to walk away, and it’s never been revived.” “Boats n’ Hoes” may never be a full song, and isn’t that the real tragedy?
Will Ferrell kept those prosthetic testicles from the film.
The next time you want to put your nutsack on a drumset, keep in mind that the t-bagging scene in Step Brothers set the film back $10,000. And that’s not for the cost of an understandably traumatized drum set; it’s how much a pair of realistic, prosthetic testicles cost in Hollywood. No wonder the Step Brothers crew didn’t want to get rid of them. According to Ferrell, “I will often bring [the testicles] out at dinner parties that we host.”
A lot of Step Brothers was improvised.
McKay seems to be a pretty big believer in improv comedy. The back stories for Brennan and Dale were actually improvised by Mary Steenburgen and Richard Jenkins. “About 30 percent of the final cut is improvised. It’s either improv, or me yelling it from off-camera, or us talking about us on the spot,” McKay told Cinema Blend. The bicycle fight in the beginning of the film? Just one of the things that McKay came up with that day for them to do. Ow?
The original cut of the film is much longer.
Call it a symptom of all the improv. While the scene on the script might be a page, letting the actors improvise the scene leads to funnier, albeit longer takes. McKay told NPR that the total cut of the film came to around five hours. The good news about that is that he actually managed to make a cut that was much shorter, telling Cinema Blend, “We cut it pretty tight, but the original version, that I really kind of like, was an hour 50.” The film itself had to be cut down to 98 minutes, but McKay says, “The DVD has insane amounts of material.”
