There is a Hollywood phenomenon known as ‘turnaround’. Put simply, film studios develop a lot more projects than they actually make. At some stage in development, usually with a screenplay written and perhaps even some pre-production done, a potential film will be cancelled at the executive level. At that stage if the original studio definitely does not plan to continue with the project, but a rival studio shows interest, the former might pass the entire production over to the latter in return for the money they had already spent developing it.

The turnaround process was how studio head Bob Weinstein managed to score the Christmas-themed comedy Bad Santa for Miramax subsidiary Dimension Films. ‘I asked a Universal executive, “Why’d you guys pass on it?” And he said, “It was the most foul, disgusting, misogynistic, anti-Christmas, anti-children thing we could imagine.” That’s exactly why I bought it.’ (1)

Bad Santa is everything Weinstein described, and more. It is abrasive, purposefully offensive, and superficially insulting to the entire spirit of Christmas. At the same time it is unexpectedly warm, secretly goodhearted, and one of the most effective Christmas films American cinema has ever produced. It stands as a once-in-a-lifetime confluence of factors: a star living his scabrous reputation on-screen, a cynical filmmaker aggressively pushing sentiment out of the picture, and a notorious interfering producer whose meddling – perhaps for the first and only time – pushed back in exactly the right places to shift a really good comedy into masterpiece territory.

There are countless films based around Christmas. Most of them are terrible. Some of them are quite decent. A select few are outstanding. Hand on heart, Bad Santa is the best of them all, and I am dedicating the next few thousand words to convincing you why that is.

The story of Bad Santa begins with filmmaking brothers Joel and Ethan Coen. Writer John Requa recalled ‘the Coen brothers said: “We have this idea for a movie we want you to write. It’s about a bad Santa. He drinks beer and stuff.”’ (2) Interested enough in the idea to produce the film, but not so enamoured  that they wanted to direct it themselves, the Coens hired writers Requa and Glenn Ficarra to put together a draft of the film in order to sell the project to a studio.

The writing partnership of Requa and Ficarra originated on the Nickelodeon animated series Angry Beavers, with the pair contributing a total of 16 teleplays. Their first produced film screenplay was the 2001 family comedy Cats & Dogs. 

The Coens had originally envisaged James Gandolfini in the title role, having recently worked with him on The Man Who Wasn’t There. When Gandolfini failed to reach an agreement, actors Bill Murray and Jack Nicholson were also courted – both without success. Billy Bob Thornton, who would ultimately play the role, once remarked he had heard both Nicolas Cage and Sean Penn had been approached. For a while the screenplay was actively circulating through Hollywood, passed from agent to actor, usually accompanied by some variation of ‘you have got to read this’. Everyone would remark on how funny the screenplay was. Everyone would also reflect on how no studio was ever going to actually risk producing it.

The project was eventually picked up by Universal Pictures, which had co-distributed their 2000 comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou? With financing in place, the search began for a director to helm the project. That hunt quickly settled on Terry Zwigoff.

The Wisconsin-born Zwigoff had come to filmmaking from the San Francisco ‘underground comix’ scene. There he had formed a friendship with noted cartoonist Robert Crumb and played in his band. In 1972 he had edited the comic anthology Funny Animals, which included work by artist Art Spiegelman that would in time lead to his Pultizer-winning graphic novel Maus.

In 1985 he released his first feature documentary, Louie Blouie, about blues musician Howard Armstrong. His second documentary, the Sundance grand jury prize-winner Crumb (1994), focused on Robert Crumb and his brothers and famously took Zwigoff nine years to shoot. Talking to film critic Robert Ebert, Zwigoff admitted to spending those years ‘averaging an income of about $200 a month and living with back pain so intense that I spent three years with a loaded gun on the pillow next to my bed, trying to get up the nerve to kill myself.’ (3)

Crumb was a runaway success, earning awards and accolades from not only Sundance but the Director’s Guild of America, the New York Film Critics Circle, and the L.A. Film Critics Award. 11 professional critics named it the best film of its year.

It took Zwigoff another six years to produce his first narrative feature: Ghost World (2001), based on the graphic novel by writer/artist Daniel Clowes. The black comedy, which starred Steve Buscemi, Thora Birch, and Scarlett Johansson, was a critical success if not a commercial one and received an Oscar nomination for Clowes and Zwigoff’s screenplay.

The success of Ghost World led Universal the Coens to approach Terry Zwigoff about potentially directing Bad Santa. Zwigoff recalled getting a ‘script that still had problems – there were a bunch of flashbacks and the kid would babble endlessly about going to the bathroom on mommy’s dishes, it went on for pages. They and I agreed that stuff should go.’ (4)

At the time Zwigoff was also weighing an offer to direct the comedy Elf for New Line Pictures. ‘I said, “I love Will Ferrell, but this is just silly stuff for children. I don’t find any of this funny. I can’t do it. I’m not laughing out loud. How would I even know when a take is good?”’ (5)

As noted earlier, the lead role of safecracker and thief Willie T. Soke went to actor Billy Bob Thornton, who was immediately attracted to the part. ‘I like playing people,’ he said, ‘who on the surface look like one thing but on the inside they might be something else.’ (6)

Born in Arkansas in 1955, Thornton had worked a variety of professions while struggling to break out as an actor or screenwriter. His film debut came with a small role in the 1986 thriller Hunter’s Blood, and later appeared in South of Reno (1988), Adam Sandler’s debut film Going Overboard (1989), and the Troma comedy Chopper Chicks in Bikie Town (1989). In 1990 he co-starred in the short-lived television adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s novel The Outsiders. In 1996 he successfully wrote, starred in, and directed Sling Blade based on his 1994 short film Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade. The film’s enormous critical success, including an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay and a nomination for Best Actor, shot Thornton immediately into Hollywood’s A-league. Subsequent films as an actor included U-Turn (1997), A Simple Plan, Armageddon, Primary Colors (all 1998), Monster’s Ball, Bandits, and The Man Who Wasn’t There (all 2001; the latter for the Coen brothers).

In accepting Bad Santa, Thornton took up what would become his defining role.

The second male lead of Bad Santa was Willie’s criminal accomplice, a little person named Marcus. Terry Zwigoff auditioned Tony Cox, and immediately fell in love with his take on the character. The Coens reportedly disagreed, noting the role was written for a white performer while Cox was black. Zwigoff proposed changing the script to accommodate Cox. Again, the Coens disagreed. During this standoff, Cox would ultimately read for the role on six to nine separate occasions (people’s recollections differ).

Tony Cox’s career had, until Bad Santa, been largely restricted to small and/or fantasy roles due to his height (1.07 metres). Earlier roles had included playing an ewok in Return of the Jedi (1983), the demon minister in Beetlejuice, a Nelwyn warrior in Willow (both 1988), and other parts in Captain EO (1986), Bird (1988), and Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991). When presented with the opportunity to play Marcus, Cox was desperate. ‘In 23 years working as an actor at that time, I had never seen a role like that. Those are roles you dream of.’ (7)

Another actor that auditioned for the role of Marcus was, rather improbably, then-82-year-old Mickey Rooney. Not only was Rooney far too old for the part, he was also five foot two inches tall – far from the little person the character was intended to be.

John Requa explained ‘the whole thing is that Mickey Rooney, he’d be doing the scenes and you know the profanity was, at the time, the most F words in any movie, and Mickey Rooney would be doing the scene and the time would come up for him to say “fuck.” He would just go and pause, and then he would go on and then another, like a “shit,” he paused and he would go on. And then Terry said to him, he said, “Mickey, why aren’t you saying the dialogue?” He goes, “There’s a lady present.”’ (8)

Zwigoff would later explain that ‘some parts of it were absolutely genius, but other times were too odd. I wanted to let him down easy because he really wanted the part.’ (9)

Another casting standoff emerged when Zwigoff proposed Brett Kelly as Thurman. According to Zwigoff, Kelly’s casting was opposed by both the Coens and Weinstein. Weinstein would later refute that claim, insisting he had backed Zwigoff and that the Coens wanted Two and a Half Men’s Angus T. Jones.

The then-nine-year-old Kelly had already performed on film in the films Kill Me Later, Out Cold (both 2001), and Cheats (2002), but like Tony Cox Bad Santa represented his highest-profile project to date. Looking back as an adult, Kelly remembered working with Thornton fondly. ‘One of the nicest people, even to this day, that I’ve ever worked with,’ he said. ‘On weekends, we’d go over to his house, and I’d be hanging out with his kids and swimming in the pool. He was very welcoming and made me and my whole family feel really at home the entire time we were shooting.’ (10)

Despite their disagreements, Zwigoff remained on good terms with the Coens – despite media reporting to the contrary. ‘I think they are the greatest writers and directors alive today,’ he said, ‘and they were very, very nice to me. All that ever gets printed is that we had a disagreement over casting. That gets played up as “he hates the Coen brothers!”’ (11)

Two other key roles were those of credulous shopping mall manager Bob Chipeska and his security chief Gin Slagel.

Chipeska was played by noted comic actor John Ritter. Best known for his Emmy-winning turn in television hit Three’s Company (1977-84), Ritter has continued to perform in film and television throughout the 1980s and 1990s. He starred in the TV comedies Hooperman (1987-89) and Hearts Afire (1992-95), and at the time of filming Bad Santa had recently started the new series 8 Simple Rules… for Dating my Teenage Daughter.

Slagel was played by comedian and actor Bernie Mac. The Chicago native had been a prominent comedian on HBO’s Def Comedy Jam in the 1990s before being cast in his own television comedy The Bernie Mac Show in 2001. At the time of shooting Bad Santa Mac was juggling multiple commitments, including shooting both Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle and his own series. (‘I wasn’t going to do that again,’ he later admitted.) (12)

For the film’s key female role of Sue, Zwigoff was keen to approach Oscar-winning actress Mira Sorvino. ‘I was interested in casting Mira Sorvino in Bad Santa,’ he later wrote on Twitter, ‘but every time I mentioned her over the phone to the Weinsteins, I’d hear a “click”. What type of person just hangs up on you like that?! I guess we all know what type of person now.’ (13)

What Zwigoff did not know at the time was that Harvey Weinstein was allegedly attempting to blacklist Sorvino from Hollywood, following claims of sexual harassment. Director Peter Jackson claimed Weinstein had done the same thing regarding Sorvino when he considered casting her in his Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-03). These accusations were strenuously denied by Weinstein, via his lawyers. At any rate, Sorvino was never approached. The role of Sue was performed by Gilmore Girls star Lauren Graham.

‘It was all very strange,’ Graham recalled. ‘I had to audition doing the scene where I first straddle Santa. So I’m basically in front of a room full of executives humping a chair. I really did love Billy Bob though, even more than the chair.’ (14) Attracted to the screenplay, Graham later added: ‘The script reads pretty dark. And if it hadn’t been done so well, it could’ve been much creepier. I know some people find it creepy anyway, but I find it very funny and sweet.’ (15)

It is fair to note that, for all of its strong qualities and humour, Bad Santa is not a particularly balanced film in terms of gender. Sue is its sole major female role – unless you count Marcus’ wife Lois – and is not actually named on-screen. While it remains a brilliantly written and scathingly funny comedy, it is worth noting that it is by means faultless.

Bad Santa commenced filming in Los Angeles on 8 July 2002.

Immediately before shooting commenced, Brett Kelly contracted chickenpox. As Thornton had never contracted the virus himself, Kelly was sent home to Canada until he could produce a doctor’s certificate confirming he was no longer contagious.

We first meet Willie dressed as Santa Claus in a bar during the Christmas season: snowy outside, warm celebrations inside. Chopin’s “Nocturne No. 2 in E-Flat Minor” provides an elegant background to our protagonist explaining how broken and miserable his life is via voiceover, stumbling outside and vomiting against the wall. The title fades into view: it is a perfect introduction to the film’s setting, content, humour, and tone.

The musical soundtrack of Bad Santa is a fascinating one. There is an original score composed by David Kitay, but Zwigoff primarily relies upon riffs from classical music to flesh out the comedic action. There are some traditional Christmas carols peppered through the film, but it is the non-seasonal classical motifs that dominate. Even Kitay’s own composition have a very classical, old-fashioned tone to them.

Early scenes introduce both Willie and his criminal accomplice Marcus. They perform as shopping mall Santa and accompanying elf: meeting excited children in the lead-up to Christmas Eve while secretly planning to rob the centre of its Christmas takings. Marcus is the brains of the operation. While Willie, an ex-convict and safe-cracker, works on stealing the cash, Marcus spends each heist robbing department stores with his malicious wife Lois.

Lois was played by Lauren Tom, best known for guest appearances on the television comedies Friends – where she played a Season 2 girlfriend to Ross Geller (David Schwimmer) – and Grace Under Fire. She had also made minor appearances in a number of films including Wall Street (1987), See No Evil Hear No Evil (1989), and The Joy Luck Club (1993).

The unimpressed Milwaukee mother was played by Alex Borstein. ‘I begged to do anything in it,’ she commented, shortly after filming her role. (16) Borstein is best known for her performances in animated comedy Family Guy (1999-present) and The Marvelous Mrs Maisel (2017-23) – for which she won two Emmys.

Between each Christmas heist, Marcus and Willie go their separate ways. Willie insists he is finished with a life of crime, and plans to retire with a small beachside bar in Florida. When Marcus calls almost a year later, Willie is indeed in Florida: stealing drinks from other people’s beachside bars and spending what remains of his money on sex workers.

The angry bartender who chases Willie out of his bar was played by Bryan Callen, a stand-up comedian and original cast member of Fox’s MadTV (1995-2009).

Willie and Marcus reunite in Phoenix, Arizona, where Marcus has arranged a Santa Claus gig at the Saguaro Square Mall. Already drunk, Willie manages to scandalise the conservative manager Bob Chipeska within minutes of their arrival.

A lot of the comedy of Bad Santa works through contrasts: a foul-mouthed, adults-only Santa Claus, a black Christmas elf, and so on. The Arizona setting is a key example. The primary film audience of Americans are used to seeing their Christmas movies wintry and cold, and the visible heat haze that blurs the opening shot of the Saguaro Square parking lot vividly contradicts that.

There is also a nice comedic touch to Marcus’ fake elf ears. They have clearly been made for white people, and do not match his skin colour at all.

Willie’s first shift greeting local children introduces him to what is possibly Bad Santa’s master stroke: the inquisitive, hopelessly naive boy Thurman. It would have been easy to make the character dimwitted but cute, as the Coen’s proposed casting of Angus T. Jones might suggest. Instead Terry Zwigoff goes out of his way to double down on Requa and Ficarra’s screenplay. There are plenty of clues littered through the film that reflect that Thurman is actually a rather bright child, including skills in literacy and strategy – he easily beats Willie at checkers. Instead Zwigoff makes Thurman actively strange. His dialogue is filled with constant curious questions. His constant misunderstanding of Willie’s answers, and active misreadings of his emotional responses, suggest someone entirely unfamiliar with human behaviour. Zwigoff directs Brett Kelly wonderfully. The more Kelly underplays Thurman’s weirdness, the funnier it becomes.

His first day of work over, Willie heads to the nearest bar. Soon he is furiously having sex with bartender Sue, a local resident with a Santa Claus fetish. Shortly afterwards Willie is assaulted on the street by an angry Indian man, only to be aided in fending him off by an unexpected Thurman.

The angry man was played by Ajay Naidu, best known to this day as Samir in Mike Judge’s 1999 cult comedy Office Space.

Willie drives Thurman home, barely tolerating his incessant questioning. When they arrive, Willie discovers Thurman lives alone with his senile grandmother in a two-story house. His mother has died, and his father is ‘exploring the mountains’. Taking advantage of Thurman’s naivete and Granny’s senility, Willies robs the safe of cash and steals Thurman’s father’s BMW.

Thurman’s grandmother was played by eight-time Emmy-winning actress Cloris Leachman, star of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-75), Phyllis (1975-77), and Malcolm in the Middle (2000-06), as well as the films Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Last Picture Show (1971), Young Frankenstein (1974), High Anxiety (1977), Texasville (1990), The Iron Giant (1999), and Ponyo (2009).

 

Bob Chipeska grows suspicious of Willie and Marcus after hearing Willie having sex in the changing room of a department store. He asks Gin Slagel to investigate Willie in more detail. When Willie is tipped off by a sex worker that someone is snooping around his motel room, he panics and takes up residence at Thurman’s house.

Sex worker Opal was played by Octavia Spencer. Prior to Bad Santa she had appeared in multiple films including A Time to Kill (1996), Never Been Kissed (1999), and Big Momma’s House (2000). Following her appearance here Spencer found phenomenal success via the film The Help (2011), her performance in which saw her receive the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She was subsequently nominated another two times, for performances in Hidden Figures (2016) and The Shape of Water (2017).

Slagel’s first appearance in the film is wonderfully absurd, with the stylishly dressed security chief furious chain-smoking directly beneath a ‘no smoking’ sign. Bernie Mac also adds a brilliant little touch to his performance as Slagel. Aside from the character’s smoking, Mac ensures that – scene by scene – the character is depicted eating various fruits and mixing stool softener into his drinks, all signs that he is experiencing some form of constipation. Add in some additional eccentricities, like his penchant for pedicures and his unconventional methods foiling shoplifters (a brief role for juvenile actor Ryan Pinkston), and he is almost as distinctive a character as Thurman.

Meanwhile John Ritter is having a visibly wonderful time throughout exaggerating Chipeska’s awkwardness around sex, swearing, and disability into overt grotesquery. He pauses incessantly. He struggles to find suitable words, and then often picks the worst ones. He mouths out curse words as if that means he has not said them. His conversations with Slagel are comic gems, each and every one.

Slagel’s investigation into Willie’s activities brings him to Thurman’s father Roger, who is not exploring mountains but instead serving time in prison for embezzlement. Roger Murman was played by Ethan Phillips, a comedic performer whose previous roles included PR guru Pete Downey in the comedy series Benson (1980-85) and the alien scavenger Neelix in Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001).

Having worked out their criminal enterprise, Slagel confronts Willie and Marcus and demands half of their score in return for his silence.

Trapped by Slagel’s demands, Marcus has no option but to maintain his and Willie’s deception at the shopping mall. It is a task made more difficult by Willie’s growing misbehaviour – including turning up to a Santa session blindly intoxicated.

Billy Bob Thornton chose to perform the scene in question while actually drunk, creating no small amount of friction with Terry Zwigoff. ‘I drank about three glasses of red wine for breakfast,’ said Thornton. ‘Then I switched over to vodka and cranberry juice, and then I had a few Bud Lights. By the time I got to that scene there, I barely knew I was in a movie.’ (18)

Willie’s arrival in the scene, lying unconscious on a rising elevator, was not what had been rehearsed. ‘I was supposed to be standing up on the escalator,’ Thornton admitted. ‘It dumps me out up there on the floor, at the top of the escalator, and it literally woke me up. And that’s what’s in the movie.’ (19)

One scene of Willie’s descent that was a particular favourite of Zwigoff’s was a confrontation in the shopping mall food court between a mother, who goads her child into greeting Santa, and Willie, who just wants to eat his lunch in peace. ‘I was inspired by The Santaland Diaries by David Sedaris,’ said Zwigoff, ‘I give him a lot of credit for that scene. I wanted to help make an unlikeable protagonist more sympathetic and I thought this scene helped the audience get there in a truthful sort of way.’ (20)

Too miserable with his life to continue, Willie tries to commit suicide by inhaling the exhaust fumes of Roger Murman’s car. He is interrupted by Thurman, and even tries to give him a confession letter to give to the police, but when he notices Thurman’s black eye he instead sets out and beats up the skateboarding leader of Thurman’s bullies (Max Van Ville). It is Willie’s intervention here – doing something, possibly for the first time, for the benefit of somebody else – that puts his character on a fresh and wholesome trajectory. Later Thurman gives Willie a Christmas gift: a hand-carved wooden pickle. It is significant that it is hand-made, and therefore non-commercial, and later inspires Willie to give Thurman a gift in return.

Marcus and Lois lay a trap for Slagel, crushing him between two cars and electrocuting him with battery jumper cables. Meanwhile, Willie experiences a newfound lease on life preparing for Christmas with Sue and Thurman.

Local resident Herb was played by Matt Walsh, founding member of the Upright Citizen’s Brigade comedy troupe and star of HBO comedy series Veep (2012-19).

Unaware that Marcus and Lois have murdered Slagel, Willie heads to the shopping mall to participate in the robbery. While he attempts to crack the safe – a reportedly uncrackable Kintnerboy Redoubt, Marcus and Lois rob the department store for luxury goods.

The film’s extensive use of classical music continues through the climax. Zwigoff claimed ‘when Marcus chops down a mannequin, cross-cutting that with Willie swinging a sledgehammer against a safe, it wasn’t really funny until I tried using “The Anvil Chorus” as the music there.’ (21)

Once the safe is open, Marcus confronts Willie with a gun and – tired of Willie’s growing inconsistencies – prepares to murder him. Perhaps surprisingly, Willie does not challenge Marcus over this. Instead he asks Marcus and Lois why they need all of the consumer goods and luxuries they steal each year, on top of the cash take from the safe. ‘You people are monsters,’ Willie tearfully tells them. It is not the threat of murder that makes them monstrous, nor is it the grand theft. In the heart of Bad Santa, the greater crime is consumerism.

There are ultimately two types of Christmas in Bad Santa. The first is an intimate one, shared between not just family but found family. By the film’s climax Willie has moved from a drunken, shambolic loner to a man with a home (albeit a stolen one), a loving relationship (albeit one heavily based on sex), and a child (albeit one named Thurman Merman). The film has constructed warm relationships, and has strengthened them through the characters helping one another and by building genuine mutual affection. It is not even a particularly religious sort of Christmas, since Willie earlier rejects Thurman’s advent calendar nativity quite vocally. For Bad Santa the point of Christmas is good human nature.

Contrast that with the crass, consumerist version of Christmas that the film actively rejects. Willie and Marcus are thieves, and they spend the weeks leading up to their theft listening to a litany of requests by children asking for products. They spend the bulk of the film in a shopping mall. Slagel interrupts a shoplifter, and during the altercation takes the kid’s music player. He does not want to participate in a heist, but expects to profit from it. Everything Willie fights against, insults, treats poorly, and rejects through the film represents a Christmas not worth saving.

The film takes pains to have multiple children – ultimately Thurman included – reminding Willie that he is not the ‘real’ Santa Claus. ‘I know there’s no Santa,’ he says tellingly. ‘I just thought maybe you’d wanna give me a present ’cause we’re friends.’

If there is a message at the heart of Bad Santa, and I honestly think that there is, it is that the best part of Christmas is joy and friendship, and everything else is worthless stuff. When Marcus aims a gun at him, Willie experiences the conclusion of a heart-three-sizes-bigger Grinch moment that has been building for the entire film – only instead of finding the joy of Christmas, he finds the commercialised cesspool that American culture has allowed it to become. In that moment, the coarsely-spoken, sexually perverted, criminal alcoholic is in tears.

The confrontation is interrupted by Phoenix police, who received Willie’s confession via Thurman and have arrived to arrest the thieves. Willie goes on the run in Merman’s car with the police in pursuit. In a final, deliberately over-the-top middle finger to Christmas traditions, he is gunned down by Phoenix police while dressed as Santa Claus and in front of a group of screaming children.

A brief epilogue, related to Thurman via a letter and a voiceover, resolves the story elements. Willie’s confession – and the police’s violent shooting of him – have kept him out of prison, and he is recuperating in hospital. Sue will continue to live with Thurman and his grandmother until Roger is released from prison. Marcus and Lois are going to prison. When Thurman’s bully challenges him one more time, Thurman kicks him in the crotch and rides away on a bike – giving the bully the finger as he goes.

Initial test screenings proved disastrous, leading Bob Weinstein to insist on reshoots. The aim of the additional scenes, including an attempt by Willie to train Thurman how to box and a small arc about an advent calendar, was to humanise Willie slightly and make his third act redemption more believable. Terry Zwigoff was highly derisive of the suggested changes, later claiming ‘the studio wanted to mess with it and make it more mainstream and pour some fake sentiment on it for the people that stumble around the mall. Go to Target some day and look at who your target audience is. Look at the people who are out there going to films and you realise you are totally fucked, you don’t want to do anything these people like.’ (22)

Zwigoff pointedly refused to shoot the new sequences (‘I wanted to protect the script’) (22), leading Weinstein to replace him with Todd Phillips (Old School). Billy Bob Thornton was philosophical about the changes. ‘If a studio spends $15 million and says, “We want a commercial comedy,”’ he said, ‘you kind of owe it to them. I understood adding the broader scenes.’ (23)

According to Zwigoff, it was at this point that the Coen brothers were brought back into the process. ‘At one point the Weinsteins asked them to watch a cut that the Weinsteins had done that made it much more mainstream. They had added a bunch of scenes, some of which I refused to film, and they cut them in and the Coen brothers watched it. They said, “Well, you tried to make this film into American Pie. It’s a piece of shit now.” That was their response and they got into a heated argument with the Weinsteins that ended with everyone yelling “Fuck you” at each other.’ (24)

For his own part, Zwigoff applied for arbitration from the Director’s Guild of America, arguing that he contractually had been assured final cut – an agreement that Miramax was reneging on. While the details of the arbitration remain confidential, Zwigoff did return to complete a final edit of Bad Santa and it is widely agreed that the final theatrical edit returned the film somewhat closer to what he had originally intended.

Post-production on the film was struck by tragedy. On 11 September 2003, while rehearsing for his television comedy 8 Simple Rules… for Dating my Teenage Daughter, John Ritter complained of nausea and chest pains. Rushed to Providence St Joseph Medical Center, he was later diagnosed with an aortic dissection and underwent surgery. The procedure was unsuccessful and Ritter died at 10:48 pm. He was 54 years old. Bad Santa would ultimately be dedicated to his memory.

Bad Santa was released in American theatres on 26 November 2003 to capitalise on the Thanksgiving Day weekend. It was a busy schedule, with the film competing with Walt Disney’s The Haunted Mansion (which opened in first place), Ron Howard’s The Missing, and Michael Crichton adaptation Timeline. Bad Santa, which opened on 2,005 screens nationally, finished its opening weekend in fifth place, behind The Haunted Mansion as well as returnees The Cat in the Hat, Elf, and Gothika. In the second week, Bad Santa only slipped to sixth despite fresh competition from Tom Cruise vehicle The Last Samurai and music film Honey. In week three it held onto sixth place, and only slipped to seventh in week four. It took until January for it to slip out of the top 10 altogether.

The Christmas theme meant that elsewhere around the world Bad Santa was not released until November 2004. It found reasonable success in Australia, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany, but less so in Hong Kong where it grossed an estimated US$4,400 in total. The film’s total worldwide gross was roughly US$76.5 million, enough to make it a respectably-sized hit. It was on home video that Bad Santa really found its audience and a dedicated cult following.

It took until 2016 for a sequel to emerge, bringing back Thornton, Cox, and Kelly under new director Mark Waters (Mean Girls). Terry Zwigoff had no involvement in the sequel. Since the release of the original film, he had only kept in touch with Tony Cox. Not only was he not involved, he did not receive any payment for the new film adapting his work. ‘I got a call from some lawyer who said, “You are entitled to some sequel money.” I said, “Oh, great! How much?” And then they said, “Uh, actually, it just expired.”’ (25)

Bad Santa 2 was a failure in cinemas, and did not gross its own budget. It was also widely – and rightfully – dismissed by critics as a poor quality exploitation of the original film.

It is the original Bad Santa that has endured, and that will continue to find new fans and become a new favourite each Christmas. Its scatalogical, puerile coating masks a film with a rare sense of heart and a genuine seasonal message for the festive crowd. Willie Sokes may be a thief, and he may be a sex-obsessed alcoholic. He may be foul-mouthed, and perverted, and enormously ill-tempered, but he also knows good from bad, and by the end of his story he shares in a real spirit of Christmas. He knows what it is, and what it should and should not be.

He knows that it should not be consumerist. It is not a season for taking whatever you can get, or manipulating others, or being a cruel person. It is not for shiny commercialised baubles, or telling Santa a long list of presents you think you deserve, or fake Christmas jingles played in anodyne fashion out of department store speakers. It is not about buying those novelty reindeer ears that you are only going to wear once and nobody at the office Christmas party will find funny. It is not about an annual rewatch of Love Actually where for the 10th year in a row you fail to realise its inherent toxicity. It is not a Mariah Carey cover version. It is not a suburban shopping mall.

It is a hand-carved wooden pickle. It is a blood-stained pink elephant. It is knowing that it’s Christmas and the fucking kid is getting his present.

Perhaps you disagree. Perhaps you don’t approve of Bad Santa due to its foul language, or its anti-social behaviour. Maybe you think I am finding truth and heart somewhere where there is no heart to be found.

You people are monsters.

Merry Christmas.

References

1. Bruce Fretts, “How the First ‘Bad Santa’ Boozed Down the Chimney”, New York Times, 4 November 2016.
2. Fretts, 4 November 2016.
3. Roger Ebert, “Eccentricity at its most extreme”, Roger Ebert.com, 20 November 2005.
4. Drew Taylor, “Terry Zwigoff talks battling over ‘Bad Santa’, his preferred director’s cut & much more in candid interview”, Indie Wire, 20 December 2012.
5. Drew Taylor, “Years before ‘Bad Santa’ launched him into stardom, Tony Cox was a boy from Alabama who kept the faith”, CBS42, 22 December 2023.
6. Emily Zemler, “Billy Bob Thornton, the beating heart beneath the positively profane ‘Bad Santa 2’”, Los Angeles Times, 23 November 2016.
7. Drew Taylor, 22 December 2023.
8. Ryan O’Rourke, “Did You Know Mickey Rooney Auditioned For ‘Bad Santa’? Here’s What Happened”, Collider, 23 March 2023.
9. Drew Taylor, 22 December 2023.
10. Andrew Bucklow, “Where are they now: Bad Santa star Brett Kelly”, News.com.au, 12 December 2022.
11. Jordan Hoffman, “Ghost World Director Terry Zwigoff Has Learned to Expect the Worst from Hollywood”, Vanity Fair, 18 May 2017.
12. Steve Head, “An interview with Bernie Mac”, IGN, 27 March 2003.
13. Ernest Macias, “Bad Santa director claims Weinsteins blacklisted Mira Sorvino from movie”, Entertainment Weekly, 16 December 2017.
14. Quoted in “Interview: Lauren Graham”, Uncut, 1 December 2004.
15. Eric Spitznagel, “Parenthood’s Lauren Graham Is Not Afraid to Hump a Chair to Get a Movie Role”, Vanity Fair, 10 September 2010.
16. Jeffrey M. Anderson, “Swan’s Song”, Combustible Celluloid, 27 September 2002.
17. Tyler Aquilina, “Billy Bob Thornton was really (really!) drunk for that Bad Santa mall scene”, Entertainment Weekly, 18 October 2019.
18. Tyler Aquilina, 18 October 2019.
19. Julia Yepes, “The Sly Poetics of Terry Zwigoff”, Interview, 19 May 2017.
20. Julia Yepes, 19 May 2017.
21. Drew Taylor, 20 December 2012.
22. Drew Taylor, 20 December 2012.
23. Fretts, 4 November 2016.
24. Drew Taylor, 20 December 2012.
25. Jordan Hoffman, 18 May 2017.