Essay: How to write a (modern) Christmas Movie

It's beginning to look a lot like...utter crap 

(pic not totally unrelated)

It's that time of year again. Painfully short days and long cold nights, decorations along the high street, kids growing more and more excited and uncontrollable with each passing day and ever lightening wallets. Christmas has a funny effect on people, makes them both more affable and joyful, but also far more demanding (as anyone who has worked in retail will tell you). Demanding for entertainment for one, but far more tolerant of the quality of that entertainment. I'm not saying that Christmas specials, songs or movies are all bad because they really aren't. Some of them are downright masterpieces and timeless classics. But by god some of them are utter shite aren't they?

I was originally planning on doing a review for this month, but I changed my mind at half-past the eleventh hour because the idea of watching a bad Christmas movie made me physically nauseous and I already suffered through a god awful movie last month so I wasn't going to subject myself to the damn Christmas Prince or something equally as tosh. I'll suffer for my art, but I wont flagellate myself for your amusement. But it did get me thinking why so many new Christmas movies are so naff, and if I could perhaps deconstruct it into a bullet proof formula that any two-bit hack with a small budget and crew could pull off and still get plenty of views and fat stacks of festive moola. So lets see if I can do just that shall we?

Okay, so to get this ball rolling we need our protagonist. First up, it has to be a white, heterosexual woman in her mid-to-late 20s. Blond preferable, but brunettes are also acceptable in a pinch. She has to be either painfully middle class or a “quirky” working class “gal” from some post industrial city/London. Now the most important thing is that she has to have a severe dislike of Christmas for reasons that should either be hilarious tragic or completely benign. Maybe her first boyfriend was killed by a drunk driving mall Santa when she was 16 and pregnant with her first child, or some pish like that.

Now set your movie at some point in November, but don't be afraid to jump it forward to Christmas eve whenever you need it to. The weather should be grey skies, but not overly bleak. Think needing to wrap up warm but not huddling down inside your coat and hopping your lips don't chap off into dust. Or make it snow every damn second a camera can see the outside world, but never make it so the snow is too overbearingly heavy to inconvenience long romantic walks and playful (if a little sexually charged) snowball fights.

Now, for the plot you have exactly two options, and both are a bit crap. Option A: Female protagonist meets and charms a wealthy man and they fall in love thanks to the magic of the season. Option B: Female protagonist meets and is charmed by a simple but handsome man and the fall in love thanks to the magic of the season. To get maximum effectiveness out of Option A, make your female protagonist a bumbling idiot, who's borderline total inability to function comes across to the rich man as “simple” and “endearing” and a pleasant counter point to the stuffy environment he comes from. Making him European royalty also seems to be quite popular. And for Option B? Two words: Plaid, Shirts. And maybe make him some kind of craftsman, a carpenter if you're making a more Christian oriented flick.

And your Man has to also be white and heterosexual, but he MUST be brown haired with a decent stubble, at least when we first meet him. Feel free to make him shave and clean up for the obligatory scene where he shows up in a tuxedo or some such. He must also be bland as an unsalted cracker. His personality is a square jaw line and appearing conveniently or unexpectedly at the Protagonist's place of work and/or Christmas party (that the protagonist certainly does not want to go to). For some optional flavour make him wistful, a dreamer or for the particularly daring, a wistful dreamer.

Now, in terms of actual plot details, you have the easiest job in the world. Protagonist is a grouch, she meets Man, Man inspires her to love Christmas, they spend the holidays together. The trick is B plots. Maybe the rich man has a complicated family situation? Maybe the honest man needs to organise a fundraiser or save his failing hardware store? Maybe Protagonist's quirky friend is struggling with something? And if you can make someone die at an emotionally tense moment then you can make an easy dramatic peak. Just cap it off with a funeral then slide down back to jingle bells and boughs of holly sometime near the end of the second act (extra points if you have enough guts to kill the quirky friend).

And to end your festive opus? Well you have plenty of options. A wedding/proposal could work, keeps the Christian audience happy and is an easy way to make people tear up. A musical number can work, especially if you tie it in with a B plot. But actually ending on Christmas Day is a sure-fire winner, and it lets you heap on any Christmas imagery you forgot to include earlier on. And a big ol' (but no tongue) smooch between our leads just before the credits roll.

Now just whack it on Netflix or, if you somehow got studio funding, give it a theatre release. The critics will pan it, but you'll somehow make a monstrous profit of it. And then people like me will insult you on the internet it a most likely futile attempt to make you feel bad as you sit atop your cash pyramid. Repeat yearly until the heat death of the universe.

So there's your formula, Merry Christmas.