Genre: Comedy
Premise: A stoner comedy about one family trying to save Christmas from itself after Santa eats the wrong batch of cookies.
About: This script finished with 9 votes on the 2019 Black List. Writer Dreux Moreland is new to the game. Co-writer Hannah Mescon was a producer on the Adam Driver movie, The Report.
Writers: Dreux Moreland & Hannah Mescon
Details: 108 pages
As tempting as it was to publish a “Why You Are Drinking Too Much Blue Milk” rebuttal article after yet another commenter incorrectly labeled Andor a good show, cooler heads prevailed and I decided to, as the great X-Wing pilot, Jek Porkins, once said, “Stay on target.”
And so a Christmas script it is!
Tom and Leah Mercer are a rich suburban couple. She’s a Type A lawyer. He grew up on a WACO like commune. Bit of a weird choice there since it has nothing to do with the story but, no worries, I’m going to roll with it. They’ve got two daughters, one 7, the other 17. Leah also has a sister, Sasha, who frolics into town. Sasha is the family black sheep and cares more about 4:20 than 4 Calling Birds.
It’s Christmas Eve and Sasha bakes some pot cookies that Tom and Leah snarf down. Then, while they’re in the other room, Santa shows up and likewise stuffs some baked sugar yumminess into his gullet. He instantly becomes very high. After first encountering this assumed Santa imposter, Tom and Leah eventually realize that he really is Santa, and he’s way too high. Which means if they don’t deliver presents in his stead, Christmas is canceled.
Just to be clear – and I’m doing this more for myself – talking through it. Santa, the guy who’s been delivering presents for 600 years is very high. Tom and Leah, who have never delivered a present in their lives, are equally high. Yet Tom and Leah are the ones being counted on to save Christmas. Okay, got it!
So the three of them climb up on their roof, get in the sleigh, and proceed to fly to a single house, go inside to deliver the presents, only to get yelled at by one of comedy’s favorite knee-slappers, the swearing parrot, which says things like, “Little b**ch!” as loud as it can. Cause why wouldn’t the talking parrot swear? It’s a comedy. Wackiness rules!!
After this delivery failure, Santa gets the munchies and decides to take everyone to Miami because he wants a Cubano sandwich. When the Elf team back at North Pole 1 hear of this, they assume he’s been kidnapped by the Mercers and spring into action to locate Santa and get him back on track.
Luckily, with this version of Santa Claus, Santa doesn’t actually have to do anything. He has drones that fly down into houses and deliver the presents, as well as retrieve cookies for him. So it looks like, even though Santa is high as heck, that Christmas is going to end up okay. Hallelujah!
I don’t know what it is about screenwriting but when you first get into it, you always want to write a Christmas script. Every single screenwriter I know, me included, has a Christmas movie idea. So I don’t begrudge anyone who writes one. But just as we learn every year why eggnog is so terrible, we learn that writing a Christmas script is no smooth ride down the chimney.
Here’s the big issue with High on Christmas. And it’s a mistake a lot of comedy writers make. You think of this overall wacky idea and assume it’s going to do all the work for you. I mean, how can ‘wacky’ not result in laughs, right? They go together like Nutella and crepes.
But, in my experience, writers rely so heavily on that “wacky = comedy” premise that they don’t do the work necessary to come up with *actual* funny scenarios.
Let’s go back to one of the final great feature comedies in cinema – The Hangover. There is a “wacky” version of The Hangover that could’ve been written. It’s the version 99% of writers would’ve written. You’ve got a group of friends in Vegas for a bachelor party. You simply follow them around as they party all night. There’s so much wackiness to draw from, right?
But the writers of The Hangover made a much more difficult choice. They focused on the day after the wackiness. All of the supposed “easy laughs” were left behind. So then why is that movie better than all the other comedies that have come out since 2000, including this one? Because now the writers actually have to think in order to craft a funny scenario. They can’t just throw Zach Galifianakis on a blackjack table and have him poop himself. They have to craft a plot with a clever series of goals that take our characters through a progression of funny scenarios.
High On Christmas didn’t have that. It had the swearing parrot. If you like swearing parrots, it’s got that. But how many times have I told you this? You want to include comedy THAT CAN ONLY HAPPEN IN YOUR MOVIE. The swearing parrot can be in any movie, ya nutcrackers!
Now, to the writers’ credit, they did have one moment like this. I like that when Santa gets the munchies, he doesn’t just go to 7-11. It’s Santa. He has a device that can take him anywhere in the world. So, flying to buy a Cubano sandwich that you can only get in Miami – that’s much closer to what I expect in a comedy about a high Santa Claus.
But that was basically it on the creativity front.
Drugs, in general, hurt comedies more than help them. Cause all ‘getting high’ really does for comedy is give you one or two scenes where it’s funny watching your characters try to do something normal but they’re way too high to do it. Yeah, that scene is going to funny. And we do get that here. Tom and Leah trying to take selfies when they first see Santa’s sleigh but continually screw it up – it’s kind of funny.
But now what? You still have an hour and forty minutes of movie left to fill. You can’t just keep doing that joke over and over again.
I don’t mean to be the Grinch but… you gotta come correct here. The characters may be high. But that doesn’t mean you get to write the script high.
LEAH: Tom, I need you to get on my level. That degenerate licking the cookie jar is not Santa.
TOM: But what if he is? He coughed up glitter.
LEAH: So did I at that Bowie concert — and I’m not Santa.
What does this joke even mean?? Do David Bowie’s concerts have a lot of glitter in them? Even if for some reason they do – and I don’t think they do – but let’s say that’s the case. How many people have been to a David Bowie concert and therefore would know that? .0000000001% of the population? So you’re writing jokes for .0000000001% of the population now?
I’m shaking my head here. There’s nothing more frustrating than reading a comedy that doesn’t make you laugh. You get angrier and angrier as you go on. Which is silly, of course. But there’s a deal that’s made between the comedy writer and the reader and that is: you make us laugh. You renege on that deal and we will turn on you m**herf**er. When we don’t laugh, each page feels like a minute of time being ripped out of our life.
The script is also another tonal mismatch. They’ve got the same SEAL-TEAM Elves from the movie, The Santa Clause, but the script also contains lines like, “What a dumb f**king name.” So, is this written for small children or grown adults? I’m confused.
I want to push out good holiday vibes as we move towards Christmas. But we need better Christmas scripts than this if I’m going to do that. This feels like two people got high, wrote a script in a week, and people giggled at the logline and therefore voted it onto the Black List.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The Black List celebrates one or two Christmas scripts a year, regardless of how good they are. That’s because they’re voting on December 11th every year. So Christmas is hot on everyone’s mind. In other words, if you write a Christmas script, go out with it in the month of December.
