Almost everyone has some yearly traditional activity they do around the holidays - and for a lot of people, that activity is gathering around the TV or piling into a movie theater to watch favorite films. Netflix’s The Holiday Movies That Made Us offers an inside, behind-the-scenes look at two recent holiday classics: Elf, for the purists out there who want their holidays filled with Christmas magic and Will Ferrell; and The Nightmare Before Christmas, for people who prefer their Christmas a little more spooky.
With commentary from directors, writers, producers and stars, The Holiday Movies That Made Us give a refreshing behind the scenes look at how these movies that made us got made.
10 Elf Was Written By A Jewish Man (Who Loves Christmas)
Christmas movies tell universal stories - they’re not limited to being enjoyed by people only of a certain faith, and screenwriter David Berenbaum is a perfect example of this.
Although he himself is Jewish, he grew up watching Christmas movies and specials with his father; when his father passed away, the movies became extra special to Berenbaum, especially Rankin/Bass-produced classics like Rudolph, which is an obvious point of inspiration for his father/son Christmas classic Elf.
9 Elf Almost Got In Legal Trouble With Rankin/Bass
That inspiration almost got them in trouble, though, because Elf treads the thin line between “inspiration” and “plagiarism”. The love for the Rankin/Bass classic began to really shine through, especially in the costuming, which made the execs at New Line Cinema a little nervous, to say the least.
However, due to some quick thinking and a few brilliant legal minds, the team was saved from having to recolor and/or reshoot all of the scenes with Buddy’s classic green-and-gold outfit, which just so happens to be almost identical to the getup the elves in Rudolph wear...but ‘almost’ really is the operative word here.
8 Elf Was Created By A "Bunch Of Nobodies"
The legal concern was especially nerve-wracking for the team because most of the people involved hadn't made a movie yet. It was Berenbaum’s first screenplay, the producers’ first time producing. Will Ferrell wasn’t yet a household movie-star name - he was just a funny guy on SNL. Jon Favreau had directed exactly one movie before (Made). Even Zooey Deschanel hadn’t truly broken out as a star yet.
Every studio they pitched passed on the project until a junior exec (who hadn't made any movies either) at New Line Cinema got his hands on the script and loved it. They brought on some big-name stars like James Caan, but even in his case, he was best known for playing Sonny Corleone, and The Godfather series is about as far from Elf as it’s possible to get. It shouldn't have worked, but thankfully, it did. It’s safe to say that Elf’s success skyrocketed the successful careers of pretty much everyone involved, and cemented the film as one of the best modern Christmas movies.
7 Wanda Sykes Was Meant To Play Jovie's Boss
A member of the cast that didn’t quite make the cut? Wanda Sykes, who was originally going to play Zooey Deschanel’s boss. She had to drop out at the last minute, leading Favreau to call Faizon Love in as backup.
The change was so last minute that Love is still wearing the nametag they’d intended for Sykes - eagle-eyed fans can notice that his nametag actually reads ‘Wanda’ in the final version of the film.
6 New York Scenes Shot In Real-Life New York City, With Real-Life New Yorkers
When the team decided that the best way to capture the energy of New York was to actually film in New York, they fully committed to the idea. Every scene where Buddy’s exploring the city, whether spinning around revolving doors or nearly getting flattened in the Lincoln Tunnel, is all filmed on-location.
The crowds pictured aren’t extras - they’re real New Yorkers who just happened to be there while they were filming. (Yes, even the “Santa?!” guy in the all-red jogging suit!)
5 Nightmare Before Christmas Exists Thanks To Peewee Herman
Here's a math problem: Peewee Herman + Batman = Nightmare Before Christmas, obviously. Both are directly responsible for The Nightmare Before Christmas being made and made to be what it is. Paul Reubens' Peewee Herman was hugely popular, and when had his pick of directors for his movie, he selected Tim Burton.
He was also a huge fan of Oingo Boingo's Danny Elfman, so he and Burton approached Elfman to write the score for Peewee's Big Adventure. The success of that movie catapulted Burton to wildly influential heights - successful enough that he was chosen to direct Batman, and then the sequel, Batman Returns. This was what caused Nightmare Before Christmas to turn out the way it did: Batman Returns and Nightmare were being developed simultaneously. Burton couldn’t give Nightmare his full attention - or, really, much attention at all, in spite of the original idea and design being his pet project. Instead, he left it in the hands of the director, the songwriter, and the art department to bring the story to life without him.
4 Tim Burton Didn't Direct Nightmare Before Christmas
In spite of the somewhat misleading full title of the film (Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas), Burton didn’t direct the film. Henry Selick directed it, a full 13 years before he directed another stop-motion fave film, Coraline. Nor did Burton write it - Caroline Thompson did. He didn’t even create the figures for the stop-animation, that was Rick Heinrichs! But the designs were all his, as is the wacky core idea. Disney thought the film would only appeal to teens, who already knew and loved Burton thanks to Edward Scissorhands, so they made Burton's involvement explicit.
So while the idea was all his, the final version we know came from many different creatives: director Henry Selick, screenwriter Catherine Thompson, songwriter Danny Elfman, Disney liaison and producer Kathleen Gavin, and countless others who comprised ‘Skellington Productions’ and took part in the painstaking, tedious, very very slow process of stop-animating the film, which became the first full feature-length stop-motion film ever made.
3 Michael McDowell Was Originally Going To Write The Screenplay
Caroline Thomspon was the screenwriter for Edward Scissorhands and she was dating and living with Danny Elfman while he was developing the songs for Nightmare Before Christmas. This combination may make it seem like she was the obvious choice to write the screenplay, but it wasn't quite so simple. After creative differences with Thompson on the set of Edward Scissorhands, Burton decided to tap Michael McDowell to write the script for Nightmare Before Christmas. McDowell was a horror writer who had worked with Burton on Beetlejuice, but McDowell had a drug problem.
His addiction got the better of him, and he ended up writing basically nothing at all. He departed the project and made room for Caroline, who had the added benefit of having been witness to the movie’s progress and creation. In spite of some creative tension over script control between her and director Henry Selick, she essentially created the character of Sally from scratch, which gave the film depth (not to mention the staying power of the Jack/Sally romance).
2 The Songs Came First (And Jack's Speaking Voice Came Last)
While they were waiting for the script, there was plenty of work to do. They began creating the figurines and sets, and Danny Elfman went to work composing the music. Without a script to follow, Burton and Elfman wrote as much of the story into the songs as possible.
During the process of writing the songs, Elfman got very attached to Jack Skellington, finding similarities between the character and his own position in life as a semi-retired rockstar. Burton initially agreed to let Elfman play Jack, but when his acting ended up not quite meeting the director’s standards, Chris Sarandon (aka Prince Humperdink from The Princess Bride) was brought on to be Jack’s speaking voice, while Elfman sang for him as originally intended.
1 100,000 Pictures Are Worth 1 Movie
Part of the reason stop-motion animation takes so very long - aside from the insane number of physical pieces needed to assemble even just one scene - is that a photo has to be taken every single time a piece is moved. These pictures are then stitched together to create a movie, almost like an extremely long flipbook. In the end, it took two years, 24 million dollars (6 million more than Disney originally allocated for the project), and over 100,000 individual photos to create the genre-bending, holiday-crossing classic.
It has become a cult classic for those who don't quite fit in. Its fanbase may not have blown the box office wide open, but its striking imagery and haunting soundtrack have become almost commonplace as fall turns into winter and the days grow shorter. Whether it’s pins, hats, blankets, or even cosplay, Nightmare Before Christmas has proved to be a story that no one knew they wanted, but everyone needed.
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