Confessions of a Shopping Mall santa was recently shortlisted in the ‘Keep your Wits About You’ development program from Warp X and Screen Australia. Out of over 200 entries COASMS was in the final 18 entries. The Keep Your Wits development fund requires you to hand in a one page treatment and if you get in you receive a two day workshop to help you develop the film into a screenplay. Unfortunately the treatment was not selected in the end, but it was certainly encouraging to get through to the shortlist and we are forging ahead with the screenplay anyway. It was also good discipline to try and condense all the ideas into a one page document, which we post here for your enjoyment:
Charlie MacDonnell (65) has played Santa at the upmarket Bacchus Marsh Mall for twenty years. He’s a well-loved pillar of the community and has always used the role of Santa to enrich the lives of others through various charities and community events. It’s a role he’s particularly enjoyed since handing over his successful truck repair business to his somewhat estranged son Stephen. And this year is especially important, as Channel Six have decided to shoot carols by candlelight in Bacchus Marsh! Things are about to shake-up Charlie’s world.
He’s just bought a new plush velvet suit and is in the midst of construction on an all-new Santa set for the Mall when he’s informed they are professionalising the role and is effectively fired; the corporate entity that owns the mall decides to use a professional Santa agency for the televised event. Charlie is outraged, indignant and puts up a fight before being escorted off the grounds. To make matters worse he discovers his son Stephen is in the midst of selling the family business to the franchise chain ‘Keep on Truckin’ a subsidiary of the GM Corp.
Charlie’s granddaughter Lindsay comes to the rescue. Evoking the wisdom of William Wallace (Mel Gibson’s version) she discovers the Santa agency are recruiting and convinces Charlie to sign up for the two week corporate Santa training course. There’s still a chance he’ll be re-recruited to his beloved Mall. Charlie begrudgingly attends the training course and is immediately at odds with the instructors who promote amongst other things, suggestive selling to the kids. Indeed the whole Santa agency is a thinly veiled front for a massive advertising push for this year’s new gaming console.
Charlie comes up against the various parties involved in the Santa selection process from dodgy politicians and Christian fundamentalists to slimy corporate interests and slimier TV people. Charlie manages to pass his course but is banished to the downtrodden mall 40 minutes from Bacchus Marsh in the town of Gisborne.
At the impoverished Mall Charlie sees a side of the community he’s been able to ignore in his cushy role at the upper class mall. The people of Gisborne are doing it tough and Charlie comes to realise that its time for him to stop whining and step up and be the Shopping Mall Santa these people need. Charlie unites the fractured community and along with a few of Charlie’s old Santa mates and truckie contacts band together to hijack the Channel Six event and perhaps redistribute some of the game consoles headed for Bacchus Marsh.
The film is a humorous look at small town politics, the commercialisation of Christmas and finding meaning in ones life after retirement. It says ‘It doesn’t matter what other people think … the important thing is you believe in yourself’.
