Genre: Holiday Comedy
Premise: When Santa Claus’ protégé is killed in an avalanche, the next relative in line, a New York cop with no holiday spirit, is taken to the North Pole for his training until he must save Christmas from the grinch-like Krampus.
Why You Should Read: Apart from this script placing in the finals of both the Fresh Voices and Studio 32 screenplay competitions. It is a fresh new take, from two hungry writers, into the mythology of how to become the father of Christmas. It’s nostalgic, comedic and downright magical.
Writers: Matt Ritchey & Michael Onofri
Details: 101 pages
Merrrrrry Christmas everybody! I hope you get everything under the tree you wished for. I hope you don’t have to spend much time in airports over the holiday, what with all the sniffly flu-ridden travelers looking to spread their disease like candy canes. I luckily don’t have to take the worst Christmas flight ever this year (that would be LAX to O’HARE), as I’ll be working on my tan in good old Los Angeles. Praise St. Nick.
Now to our Holiday Amateur Offerings Battle. As much as I was rooting for Droid Rage to win due to its zany premise, it received two late suspicious votes that did not seem to be in the Christmas spirit. That’s okay because Christmas Academy sounds funner than a sleigh ride after the season’s first snow, like something Bruce Willis would’ve made after Die Hard 3 to poke fun at the genre. I’m loving the energy of the premise already. Let’s hope it’s more of a Lego Millennium Falcon gift than a pair of socks (which my brother got me last year. His rationale: “Everybody needs socks.”).
Every 200 years, Santa Claus must pass the baton to a new Santa, which is exactly what St. Nick is doing when we meet him. However, an unexpected avalanche obliterates the poor successor, leaving Santa to improvise. He decides to hold a Santa-Off for three distant relatives with the winner awarded the “Santa” title. But he’s going to have to move fast. Christmas is in less than a month!
Cut to New York City where we meet beat cop Chris Kimble. Chris is a bull in a china shop with attitude to spare, the kind of guy who will run up thousands of dollars of damage for every perp he brings in. After Chris does just that in his introductory scene, leaving a trail of Christmas carnage to catch a thief who he has to let go due to not properly reading him his Miranda Rights, his Captain suspends him for one month without pay.
This forces Chris, a Christmas hater, to take a Santa Department Store gig to pay the rent. While there, he’s approached by two store elves with suspiciously nice costumes. They tell him to follow them, and after going through some Narnia back closet, Chris finds himself in the North Pole! It’s there where he’s told he’s a distant relative to the Claus family, and will be participating in a competition to become the next Santa.
It shouldn’t be difficult. His competition is Melvin, an old dude who can barely walk straight. And Sandy, a hard-as-nails chick who’s so obsessed with winning she can’t see the forest through the Christmas trees. The thing is, Chris doesn’t care about winning. The only reason he participates is because Santa pays him to stay and compete.
Then a couple of things change. Chris starts to fall for Sandy. And some dude named Krampus starts stealing toys from the factory! Chris springs into cop mode to eliminate the threat. But when Krampus gets his hooves on Santa’s magic cloak, the thing that powers Christmas Eve, there’s a high probability there won’t be any Christmas this year. Unless, of course, Chris can stop him!
This is going to sound corny but I love the spirit of this script. Christmas is about letting go and having fun with the people you love, and there’s something undeniably fun about this premise. Every time I read the logline, I see the potential in it.
But here’s the thing. It’s really hard to write screenplays where the main character doesn’t care about achieving his goal. It’s not impossible. But it’s hard. And Christmas Academy is built around a protagonist who doesn’t care if he achieves his goal (winning the title of Santa Claus) or not.
This hurts comedies in particular. Jokes aren’t as funny if the character doesn’t care about succeeding. That’s because the character’s desire to succeed is what adds the stakes. And with stakes, it actually means something if the character fails. And failure (or the potential for failure) is where the funny is.
Look at Elf. Will Ferrel wants his father’s love more than anything. We know if he screws up, he could lose his dad. That’s what makes all his ridiculous mistakes so hilarious. Kevin must keep the burglars out of his house at all costs in Home Alone. We laugh because we care. Once you add the element of not caring, there aren’t as many jokes to be had. Or maybe I should say, you have to find your comedy somewhere else.
That was the strange thing about Christmas Academy. It felt like a comedy. But there were never enough jokes. Part of this is due to what I outlined. The other part is that there wasn’t any structure to the comedy. It was more of a “let’s put our character in generally funny situations and hope that comedy evolves somehow” approach. Like Chris’s opening scene. He chases the thief. Yeah, throwing snow globes at the thief is kind of funny. Yeah, stealing a Christmas horse and buggy with a couple inside is funny. But none of these were hard jokes. It was more of a “comedy adjacent” situation.
Let me give you a more specific example. I was unlucky enough to catch one of the Meet The Parents sequels on TV the other day. The scene I landed on was Greg (Ben Stiller) and Jack (Robert DiNero) at a giant kid’s party. The writers decided that it would be funny if Greg and Jack got into a big fight during the party. And I agree that, in theory, this is funny. You have the irony of a couple of adults having a full out brawl at a kid’s party. But there was no structure to this sequence, nor was there structure to any of the jokes. It was more of, “We’ll take these guys through all the kid’s play stations and something funny will inevitably come from that.” So while the sequence was amusing. It wasn’t funny.
Contrast this against a more famous comedy scene, the dinner scene from the first Meet The Parents, and the difference is night and day. That scene was meticulously structured to mine the comedy built from Jack hating this dork who wasn’t good enough for his daughter, and Greg desperate to impress Jack in order to win his daughter. The conflict between the characters was so sharply crafted that the conceit of the scene – Greg was going to fail at every desperate attempt to get Jack to like him – essentially created a joke conveyer belt. It would’ve been hard to NOT write a funny scene here.
We don’t get anything like that in Christmas Academy. It’s more of a flow of humor-adjacent moments. Some of them are amusing. I liked Melvin’s bumbling around, for example. But there’s never enough scene structure to truly mine the kind of jokes that make us LOL.
I believe fixing the stakes will help this. If Chris wants to succeed, it makes every scene feel like it matters. If I were Matt and Michael, I would consider altering the concept. Someone’s been stealing Santa’s toys as Christmas approaches. This has never happened in the North Pole before so they don’t have a system in place to deal with it. So they recruit a real-life cop (Chris), to investigate. This way, Chris actually wants to achieve his goal.
Meanwhile, Krampus needs a bigger part. He can’t hide in the shadows for 70 pages and then become a semi-menace in the third act. We need to set him up sooner and establish that he’s going to stop Christmas this year. This ups the stakes considerably. Chris must first figure out who is stealing the presents, and then, of course, stop him.
You could still play up the contrast between character and setting here. Everybody in Christmas Land is happy and optimistic. Chris is serious and negative. He’s had a tough life and he sees this as a job. Not as saving Christmas. Of course, by the end, he will have found his Christmas spirit.
If you don’t want to do that, that’s understandable. But I would then look for another goal to drive Chris. We need him to care about whether he succeeds or not.
Hopefully this helps the writers and also some of you with similar script dilemmas. MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY HOLIDAY WRITING!!!
Script link: Christmas Academy
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Use fear to mine humor. In The Death of Stalin, the opening scene has a music director finishing up a concert. As everyone’s leaving, he speaks to a couple of co-workers who gossip about the fact that Stalin’s assassinating anyone who even mildly annoys him these days. RING RING. It’s the phone. The director picks it up and it’s Stalin. Stalin says he wants a recording of that night’s concert. The director, of course, nods and says okay. He hangs up and asks the assistants if they recorded the concert. No, they say. The director hilariously darts out of the room and starts screaming at the crowd to get back into their seats. He then tells all the musicians to get back in their places. They’re going to perform the concert all over again. The reason this scene is funny is because of how much fear we have for the director. We know if he can’t get everyone to stay here for another two hours, he will die. Without that fear, there is no joke.
