Christmas Films--#8

The holidays are approaching and Hulu just sent me a list of Christmas films they have that will help me get into the holiday season. It’s barely November, and yet our thoughts turn to Christmas [or whatever holiday you personally celebrate].

Christmas films are a staple this time of year. Depending on where you live, you may have one of the Sony movie channels that’s running Christmas movies from now through December—that’s all day, every day, for 8 weeks!! And there’s always the Hallmark channel which also runs so many Christmas movies you can hardly keep track.

What does this mean to the writer? Studios and networks want Christmas-themed material. Which means that you might have a shot at getting your material read if it’s on a familiar theme. So this could be just the time of year for you to start writing that Christmas film.

One of the best ways to come up with a Christmas idea is to look at some of the best Christmas films [sticking only to live action here]. So between now and the end of the year I’m going to count down the top 8 Christmas films.

#8: Trading Places by Timothy Harris and Herschel Weingrod is the perfect film to ease you into the holiday season. It’s set around Christmas but that’s almost incidental to the terrific story. Two bored millionaires make a bet about nature vs. nurture and use real people as their guinea pigs. They disgrace a white commodities trader—their best—by planting evidence on him of theft. And they take a Black street hustler and give him the commodities trader’s job, complete with a great salary and a fabulous apartment, butler, the works.

Here’s the trailer for the film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEaXAsbvHV4

I think the film plays well today—37 years after it was made—because we’re still dealing with issues of racial bias, just as we were then. The film explores a serious topic, but it does it through humor and insight into the issues of rich vs poor and Black vs. white. And it does it in a season where we all talk about charity and the spirit of the holiday season, but perhaps don’t do as much as we should.

There’s a particularly great scene where the rich trader has been reduced to abject poverty and looks through the window of a restaurant to see all his former co-workers having a Christmas party. He dons a Santa Claus suit to crash the party and is so hungry he stuffs a whole salmon in his Santa suit. How low has he come?

Interested in issues of the day like racial injustice and poverty? What a better time of year to deal with them than at Christmas. So you can take that interest and create a Christmas film that grapples with some of these issues—and, like Trading Places, you can even make it funny… it’s all in how you write it.

As I write this, Joe Biden has just become president, and it occurs to me that there hasn’t been a great film about Christmas set in the political realm. Politics of interest to you? Then why not meld the political film with the Christmas film to come up with something really new and different?

Tune in next week as the Christmas film countdown continues with #7 of the best Christmas films.

Copyright © Diane Lake

08Nov20

Email Diane a question to Diane@DianeLake.com