Article by Marcus Siu

It’s been twenty two years since the release of Bad Santa. While the R-rated holiday film didn’t quite make the rotation of TCM’s Christmas classics such as, “It’s a Wonderful Life”, “Miracle on 34th Street”, “A Christmas Story”, “Home Alone”, and “Elf”, it certainly has been a cult favorite among fans everywhere who appreciate raunchy dark comedies showcasing deeply flawed individuals trying to find human connection in a society filled with Holiday cynicism.

When the script’s final draft was sent to Universal Pictures, the studio rejected it because “It was the foulest, disgusting, misogynistic, anti-Christmas, anti-children thing we could imagine. Some people found it mean spirited, and were probably turned off by all the sex and profanity throughout the movie and left the theater before it was over.

Director Terry Zwigoff was fresh on the critical success of “Crumb”, the Sundance winner of the 1997 Grand Jury prize for Best Documentary featuring an intimate portrait of controversial cartoonist Robert Crumb and his traumatized family, (also produced by David Lynch), and the Oscar nominated coming of age movie, “Ghost World”, starring Steve Buscemi and Scarlett Johansson and Thora Birch which Zwigoff and Daniel Clowes were nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay.

With a reputation about telling stories of eccentric characters, Zwigoff’s agent has always been “pestering” him to get projects going and got hold of the script from “Bad Santa”. “My agent sent me this script, but she sent it with a note saying, you’re going to love this, but you’re never going to get it made. Nobody’s going to make this film”, Zwigoff recalled.

“But I said this dialogue is just so incredible. I mean, I just read three lines of that script, and I thought, I just have to make this film.” The three lines were “Thank the **** Christ”, “Sweet juice for Jesus”, and “This ain’t no Chinese menu, jagoff!”.

The Coen Brothers got hold of the script and Zwigoff thought they were going to invite him to lunch just to chew him out. Surprisingly, they loved the script and were enthusiastic in producing the film. They brought their ideas into the script.

“They pulled out this crumpled up newspaper article about a guy who was a drunken Santa”, Zwigoff recalled “The idea is this guy’s drunk and he drinks beer and stuff and he says, Santa… and they said, that’s it.”

As months passed by, Zwigoff thought the deal was dead and he was ready to move on to something else, but then he got a call from Bob and Harvey Weinstein. They just saw “Ghost World” and wanted to do a film with him. However, they did not realize that they had previously passed on the script of “Ghost World” that Zwigoff sent to them in the mail prior to when it got the green light.

FIVE GREAT ACTORS TO POSSIBLY PLAY BAD SANTA

Regardless of this omission, the Weinstein’s were all aboard and had mentioned five names to play Willie’s “Bad Santa” character, including A-listers Robert DeNiro, Jack Nicholson, and Sean Penn. Nicholson really wanted to play the role but had already signed on with “Something’s Gotta Give”. DeNiro had his own personal “shtick” comedy that didn’t quite match Zwigoff’s ideas, but also didn’t want to deal with Zwigoff’s producers. Penn bowed out when the Weinstein’s demanded that he audition for the role. Lastly, Bill Murray was also considered but didn’t return any of Zwigoff’s phone calls, which just left one actor named Billy Bob Thornton.

“So they sent him (Thornton) the script, and he wanted to talk to me and Weinstein, and he called us on a three-way call, and he said, “I’m in, I’ll do it. I love the script, I love Terry, but I’m not doing any profanity or anything sexual.” Zwigoff said, “I’m like, okay, we got a 22-minute film now.”

“So Weinstein said, forget it, and hung up on him and called me back and said, “this isn’t going to work, so we have to rethink this.” I said, “okay, so I’m dead in the water again” and then he had to change of heart and called back and said “He’d do it.”, Zwigoff added. “I don’t know what that was about. I don’t know, to this day.”

When casting for Sue, the bartender who has a fetish for Santa Claus, played by Lauren Graham, Zwigoff first had Mira Sorvino in mind for the role. However, when he mentioned her name to the Weinstein’s, they had hung up on him. Zwigoff took the hint.

THE DIRECTOR’S CUT

There were several cuts to Bad Santa. The Theatrical Cut, The Unrated Cut, and the Director’s cut. Most people have seen the theatrical cut and many did not like the director’s cut, even though it mirrored the character driven script. It was too dark for many people according to Zwigoff. The Unrated Cut just adds more R-rated raunchiness and doesn’t add much punch to the character development.

As far as the Director’s Cut, the best scene in the movie according to Zwigoff was written by his wife, Melissa Axelrod; which is known as the report card scene, where the kid is showing his report card.

“The kid is saying something like, “I know you’re not Santa Claus. I just thought maybe you’d want to give me a present because we’re friends.” Zwigoff said. “I thought it was a very touching scene and originally the scene was written where the Santa character just blows the kid off at the end.”

“When they saw that script, they said, I know you’re going with Billy Bob, but we just work with him and, I don’t know if it’s going to be that easy for him to naturally evidence self-hatred.” Zwigoff continued to push the method-actor Thornton to become the Walter Matthau character from the “Bad News Bears” and was always on his case to be more haggard…be more self-hating and more run down that Thornton had enough and didn’t come back to the set for two weeks.

“He was in a drunken, belligerent state through most of the filming, which may have helped his performance.” Zwigoff acknowledged how great he was, especially when after he read the voiceover on that letter at the end which he thought would take 400 takes. Thornton just did it in one take. “He just came in the trailer, here it is, get a microphone, read it once, it was perfect.”

However, Thornton was never very good at improvising with the delicate script that was actually written with James Gandolfini in mind on behalf of the Coen Brothers request. “We’d just throw it off, and me and the editor, Robert Hoffman, in that editing room, we would just sit there and try to retain the rhythm that they had created.” Zwigoff said.

MICKEY ROONEY BEGGING FOR THE ROLE OF THE ELF

Zwigoff has an amusing story about Mickey Rooney auditioning for the role of Marcus, the Elf.

“So he comes in, and he hands me his resume, his headshot and I say, “Mickey, you’re like the biggest star in the world. You’re a legend”…I glance at his resume with 280 credits. He wants to read, and the Weinstein’s insist every reading gets videotaped and FedExed to them so they can approve or disapprove.”

“So he sets up the camera, he starts reading, and every time he gets to a profanity, he skips it and says, “blank”. So he says, “your mother blank and blank”. And I go, “Well, Mickey, you know, you got to say the profanity”. He says, “Well, there’s a lady in the room, the casting director”. She says, “I’m fine, Mickey, I’m the casting director”. Rooney responds, “I’ll do it on the day. I’ll do it on the day”. I’ll say, “Just do it today, because I got to make this leap.”

Zwigoff was thinking, “I got to get him hired and he was sort of in and out. He had these moments that were so brilliant and so great…and he’s begging me at this point.”

Rooney asks, “Do you think I have the job?… I really need this job… God, this is the greatest part I’ve ever read… Oh, you’ve got to help me, please…and he literally falls with me. He’s pulling on my pants… Jeez, how do I let this guy down easy, you know? …I just said, “Mickey, you’re just too tall. The guy’s 3 foot 6 in the script. I’ve got to have a guy 3 foot 6″ and so he was okay with that and he left and Tony Cox walked in and he was three foot six.”

Even Peter Dinklage auditioned for the role, but he wasn’t funny. Zwigoff acknowledged his greatness as an actor, but he just wasn’t funny to him. Many have auditioned that with far less talent than him that weren’t funny either.

“I think what it had to do with, I might be wrong, is rather mysterious and it’s rather subjective, but I really think was the fact that Tony Cox’s face naturally took on these sort of cartoonish expressions when he reacted…It was still truthful, but it was bigger. And Peter Dinklage’s face was always, sort of deadpan, but he’d say the lines, he’d get a little bit here and there.”

Bernie Mac was one of the busiest actors around during the time of the shoot. He had his own show and working on another movie so he needed Zwigoff to help him rehearse his lines. After a few mornings, they got together and he read his lines with no problem. Mac showed up and his first day of shooting with the scenes with John Ritter where he’s eating that orange, which wasn’t in the script at the time. It was basically just him across the desk from each other.

As soon as they were filming, “He just started delivering his lines like you couldn’t understand a thing he was saying. He was just speaking gibberish and sort of mumbling. And just went on for a while and John Ritter’s looking over at me like, what the, I don’t even know when to come in with my line. When is he done?”

“I finally took Bernie aside. I said, “Bernie, okay, what’s going on?” and he said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m just really nervous. You know, I just, I grew up like, worshiping John Ritter and it’s just like, I just can’t do the scene.” I said, “We love you, Bernie. He loves you” and then John came over to him and I don’t know what he said to him. He put him completely at ease.”

Zwigoff had an idea to sort of help him be a little less self-conscious.

“I thought, well, what if you peel this orange while the scene’s going on? You need a bite if you want, you know. So he starts eating this orange and then he did it in a sort of sloppy way at one point.” I said, “Play that up.” He said, “What?” I said, “This sloppiness, like, you’re eating in front of this guy who’s so prudish that he’s sort of, whenever he sees or hears anything off color, he sort of vomits a little bit inside his mouth. And it’ll really help his performance.”

Unfortunately, this would be the very last role for John Ritter.

THE KID FROM CANADA

“When it came to the kid, the Coen brothers also said, “You know, this is going to be really hard to find a kid who can remember all this dialogue and pull this off…in the script, he’s written like this sort of fat, weird kid. All I could think of was Joe Cobb from the Our Gang comedies from the 20s… a kid like that. That’s the instruction I gave the casting people and they went state by state to the entire country and couldn’t find a kid that looked like that. Finally, I went to Canada. They’re about to make me hire this other kid, who was a cute Disney kid and this kid from Canada, they sent me his headshot. and I said, if this, I just fell on the ground laughing. I said, if this kid can even walk and talk at the same time, he’s hired.”

“Brett Kelly came down with his mother. He was wearing exactly the outfit he wears throughout the entire film and I don’t know if his mother was a genius or if he actually dressed this way, but I said, “Whatever you do, stop by the wardrobe and have them copy this or, put this away, put this in moth balls for a few months and don’t wear it out because you’re going to wear that the whole film.”

Smart kid. I think he was in on the joke. That’s a sweet kid. Smart kid.