The Man Who Invented Christmas

That's going to be the name of my upcoming film about the life of Charles Dickens. You see, I've been inspired by Ray, a sub-moronic piece of claptrap attempting to explain away all the events of Ray Charles' complicated life via gauzy flashbacks. That movie has garnered multiple Oscar nods for doing nothing more than connecting events in Ray Charles' life to the images and ideas in his songs. So, that's what my Charles Dickens movie will do.

It will be about the time in Dickens' life when he wrote "A Christmas Carol." That is, late 1862 and early 1863. Dickens was middle-aged at this point, and divorced, and had just returned to England from a lengthy trip to America. We open with his country childhood, celebrating Christmas in a drunken revelry, presided over by a character who will become the jolly Fezziwig in the story. Then, we jump a few years ahead, to the fall of the Dickens family, when young Charlie was forced to take a job in a blacking factory. (A blacking factory, by the way, is a shoeblacking factory, where Dickens' parents sent him to work, removing him from the bucolic idyll of his childhood. I had to look it up.)

So, anyway, for the whole movie, we'll have flashbacks to young Dickens in the shoeblacking factory, toiling away and dreaming of the day when he'll be rescued from his horrible toils by some wealthy old guy, possibly having a spectre-related change-of-heart.

Cut to 1862, Dickens returns from America, where it was gloriously snowing in New York prior to his depature. The London he returns to is a dreary, rainy mess. One day, he sees a young homeless boy begging on a street corner, and he treats him to some soup. The boy's name is...say it with me now...Tiny Tim.

You get where I'm going with this. Tiny Tim has a hard-working father who himself has a miserable, dare I say Scrooge-esque, troll of a boss. And a relative of Dickens' ex-wife Catherine dies, a Jacob something-or-other, dragging him back into the painful business of his broken family and raising fears of eternal damnation. Blah blah blah.

The point isn't that I'm going to make this movie. I'm not. I'm not going to make any movies. I have, like, $18 to my name. The point is, this story could be theoretically true. I'm sure it's not, but it lines up to reality. Dickens really was returning from America to England, he really did live with his middle-class family in the country until being cruelly sent away to work in a shoe polishing warehouse, and he really was divorced in 1858.

The point is, I made this shit up in about 10 minutes, and you could too. It's easy. Pick a famous person and something famous they created - Whistler's Mother or Dr. Seuss' The Grinch or Fellini's 8 1/2 or Phillip Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint" - and trace some element of the story back to their own lives. Fill in the rest with sappy bullshit, and blammo, instant Oscar bait.

I'd like to add, if you're a powerful movie executive, then I really could write this in about 2 weeks. Plus, I have a lot of other ideas. Did you know that a young Marty Scorsese really spent time at a neighborhood mob hangout? It's true!