Craig D. Lindsey
Welcome to Harvey’s Hellhole, a monthly column devoted to spotlighting the movies that were poorly marketed, mishandled, reshaped, neglected or just straight-up destroyed by Harvey Weinstein during his reign as one of the most powerful studio chiefs in Hollywood. Since it’s the holidays, let’s go back 20 years ago, when the Weinstein brothers dropped the filthiest, funniest gift into theaters.
It’s no surprise that Bad Santa is a movie where the people involved in making it were just as pissy, bitter, and unprofessional as the characters onscreen.
Anyone who knows the history of the anti-holiday favorite–where Billy Bob Thornton stars as Willie “Tugboat” Soke, an alcoholic, safecracking, department-store Santa who robs the stores he works at with his diminutive, elf suit-wearing partner Marcus (Tony Cox)–knows that the vile, vulgar comedy was heavily retooled before it hit the screen. (The New York Times ran an oral history in 2016 featuring most of the principal players.)
Santa was really the foul-mouthed brainchild of executive producers Joel and Ethan Coen, who hired uncredited Looney Tunes: Back in Action writers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa to write a comedy about a Kris Kringle who “drinks beer and stuff.” As Ficarra told the Times, “They said: “Watch Bad News Bears. We want something like that.” (Incidentally, Ficarra and Requa would later write a Bad News Bears remake in 2005, directed by Richard Linklater and starring Thornton in the Walter Matthau role.)
Ficarra and Requa came back with a script for the Coens, who added some dirty jokes and took out the more problematic ones. (“The Coens cut all our Down syndrome jokes,” Ficarra later said. “They thought that was going too far. I’m thankful for that.”) The script was picked up by Bob Weinstein’s Dimension Films after Universal passed on it. Weinstein remembered a Universal exec telling him, “‘It was the most foul, disgusting, misogynistic, anti-Christmas, anti-children thing we could imagine.” Harvey’s brother had one response: “That’s exactly why I bought it.”
Terry Zwigoff, the Crumb documentarian who became a critical darling when he brought Daniel Clowes’s graphic novel Ghost World (where blossoming starlets Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson played uber-sarcastic teens) to the big screen in 2001, was just the correct, cynical sumabitch to direct. While some of his casting choices didn’t sit well with the Coens (they wanted Danny Woodburn, who played Michael Richards’s little-person sidekick on Seinfeld, for Cox’s role), Zwigoff ultimately came with the cantankerous, comedic goods.
If there was ever a Christmas movie for people who hate Christmas movies, Santa accurately fits that description. Thornton plays Willie as a boozy, horny fuck-up. (James Gandolfini, Jack Nicholson, and Bill Murray were a few of the heavy hitters who were offered the role.) When he’s not drunkenly asking kids what they want for Christmas, he’s having quickies with any woman he can find. He engages in some dressing-room action with a lady in the big-and-tall section (“You ain’t gonna shit right for a week,” Willie tells the gal mid-fornication); the store’s manager (John RItter, who died two months before the movie’s release) catches him in the act, and alerts the cowboy-gear wearing head of security (an exuberantly in-his-element Bernie Mac), who blackmails Willie and Marcus for a hefty cut of their booty.
Willie finds a fuck buddy in a Jewish bartender (Gilmore Girls mom Lauren Graham) who apparently always wanted to smash Santa Claus (she constantly yells “Fuck me, Santa!” as she and Thornton get it on). Most of the time, he’s laying low in the home of a pudgy, naive kid (Brett Kelly) who thinks Willie’s really Santa. With the mom dead and the dad in jail, the boy’s only guardian is his clueless, sandwich-making grandma (Cloris Leachman).
Zwigoff followed the Coens’ implicit instructions of keeping Willie in a state of drunken amorality until the final act. However, according to Bob Weinstein, a “disastrous” test screening had him telling Zwigoff to throw in some scenes that prove Willie does have a heart underneath all that bile and Old Granddad whiskey. Writer/critic Jeremy Smith, who used to be “Mr. Beaks” on Ain’t It Cool News, was at that screening and wrote a praise-heavy review. “BAD SANTA is *that* relentlessly funny,” he wrote, “but with a biting sense of satire that could garner a good deal of critical praise, as well.”
Needless to say, Zwigoff didn’t want to add anything to his hilariously misanthropic masterpiece. Besides, he was most likely tired of dealing with Thornton, whom he said was an actual, alcoholic mess on-set. (Thornton later admitted he got his drink on for certain scenes.) There was a YouTube interview clip that no longer exists (but I heard it!) where Zwigoff says he was contacted by the late filmmaker/comedy god Harold Ramis, who wanted to cast Thornton in his black-comic, 2005 Christmas film The Ice Harvest. He asked Zwigoff what it was like working with Thornton. Zwigoff kept his personal feelings to himself, thinking Thornton might get along better with the more seasoned Ramis. A pissed-off Ramis later hit up Zwigoff and asked him why he didn’t warn him.
Anyway, Bob Weinstein hired Todd Phillips, fresh off the successes of his frat-boy comedies Road Trip and Old School (he would later direct Thornton in 2006’s School for Scoundrels, also produced by Dimension) to direct reshoots where Willie warms up to the snot-nosed kid. (You can tell which ones are reshoots because Willie — and Thornton — are clearly sober.) These scenes also give Willie a sense of self-awareness. Yeah, he’s a miserable, self-loathing drunk – but he’s a drunk who knows, especially during his non-blackout moments, that he needs to do better. Thankfully, these scenes stick to the film’s caustic, gleefully low-brow tone, like the slapsticky scene where Willie and Marcus teach the kid how to box, ending with all three of them on the floor after getting hit in the nuts.
The $23 million Santa came out in November 2003 and raked in $76.5 million. The critics loved it too. (“This is the lump of coal you’ve been longing for,” raved former Time Out New York critic Mike D’Angelo, who put Santa in his top-ten list that year.) As was par for the course with raunchy comedies of that era, an “unrated” version (titled Badder Santa) was released on DVD, at the same time as Santa’s home video release. It includes alternate takes, extended scenes that amp up the naughtiness (the dressing-room scene goes on a couple beats longer), along with a deleted sequence where Willie steals a car, robs the car owner’s house, and picks up a stripper whom he slides a $5 lottery ticket in her G-string.
Two years later, Miramax released a Zwigoff-approved director’s cut on DVD that got rid of all the Phillips scenes (as well as opening narration from Thornton) and restored the brazenly bitter tone.
Even though Zwigoff, who went from Santa to a little-seen, big-screen version of Art School Confidential – another graphic novel from Clowes – hasn’t directed a movie since (several years ago, he talked to Vanity Fair about all the high-profile projects he almost made), people still have a soft spot for Santa’s R-rated madness. Bad Santa 2 dropped in 2016, with the directing duties handed off to Mark Waters (who directed Mean Girls, Freaky Friday, and the Miramax-released The House of Yes) and bombed hard, making $24.1 million against its $26 million budget.
Personally, I’ll stick with the theatrical version I saw first two decades ago. After I attended a press screening, I told my mother and grandmother, both fans of raucous, raunchy humor, that this was right up their alley and they should go see it. As crazy as it sounds, the smutty shenanigans of Bad Santa made me get closer with my family one holiday season. And that’s one yuletide memory I’ll never fuckin’ forget.
All three versions of Bad Santa are available to rent or buy on Apple TV. If you just want to watch the theatrical version, it’s available to stream on Paramount+ and PlutoTV.
