Now, I am not talking about Scrooged, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, Die Hard, and other fine christmas films. I'm talking about the ABC Family specials, Christmas with a Capital C (I shit you not), The Santa Clause, The Christmas Shoes (yes, they made a move, two in fact, out of that song), and every sitcom's version of A Christmas Carol that has been done. A brief aside about A Christmas Carol: that poor little story has been retold, redesigned, and reimagined so many times that over 150 versions of it exist for theatre, film, television, radio, and opera. Done to death doesn't quite cover it. So how about we give it a much needed rest, ok? That said, I have a few jokes about it The Most Wonderful time of the Year.
Anyway, as I'm putting myself through the pain of watching these holiday horrors, I start to pick and choose bits and pieces that I want to make fun of or otherwise use. Things were going pretty smoothly until I started to go over what I had written. I had done something terribly wrong. I wanted to write a parody of christmas like The Naked Gun is a parody of cop movies but what I had on my hands was resembling one of those god-awful ______ Movie movies (i.e. Epic Movie, Not Another Teen Movie, Scary Movie, Date Movie, etc.). At this point, I really began to hate myself and tossed everything out.
This was probably was a good thing and got a lot of lame crap out of my system. I decided to go ahead and think of an original story. While researching christmas and other winter holidays, I started to think about what I wanted to say about it. I have no interest in any sort of religious commentary. I'm a humanist and I focused on why we decide to do this every year for each other. They answer came to when I had this idea of two characters standing together, one giving the other a beloved jacket. One would ask, "Why are you giving this to me?" The other would answer, "because it's cold outside". It was that simple. It is cold and dark at this time of year and we band together and help each other not die. To me, that represents some of the best of humanity and gave me an endpoint to work toward.
So, I begin the task of reverse engineering the story. I start think of bits of dialogue and scenes and it starts to look something like this:
Usually, while in the early stages of a script I like to write on a mirror or glass with a dry-erase marker. This helps me get the ideas down faster, gets me away from the computer screen, and helps make a more physical connection with the act of writing.
From here, ideas start to gel, scenes begin to take shape, and character voices start to develop. Now, is when most of the plotting happens and I like to think of it as planning a road trip across the United States. For instance, I know I'm going to start in Los Angeles and I want to end in New York. I got to hit Las Vegas and Chicago but I may want to spend more time in Austin and less in New Orleans. Catch my drift?
Now comes the part that I actually hate the most, typing the damn thing up. I'm self-taught when it comes to typing and I'm not very fast. However, this is good because this where I start to connect those dots on the map and I can let the script evolve as I type.
So after many long hours at the diner, typing and formatting the script (I use a free software called Cletx for formatting. It's pretty great). I have myself a script.
There is just one problem.
I don't like it.
I'll talk about how I solved that problem next time.
For now, the show has an awesome poster shot and designed by Bryan Ortiz:
Linkage:
Tickets for the show can be bought at The Overtime Theater's website
There is a Facebook event page for the show.
You can follow me on Twitter and use the hash-tag #MWTY for pictures, quotes, and other nano-bits about the show.
FUN FACT: Charles Dickens full name was Charles John Huffam Dickens and his pen name was Boz.
Next Time: Making Christmas Part 2: What a difference a draft makes!
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