Gift #5: Assurance that there will never be a classic Hanukkah movie
The greatest gift is acceptance of the truth.
Sooner or later, as a Jewish movie fan, you must accept this fact.
And the sooner you accept it, the better.
I won’t say that every Christmas movie is great. There are some duds. “Deck the Halls” is a complete waste of time, I wouldn’t even recommend watching that if you liked torturing yourself.
But at least we can all agree there are classics. “It’s A Wonderful Life” may be dated and (probably) racist, but there will never be a time when that shit doesn’t play on TV. Skimming through through the Library of Congress Film Archive (I’m not going to deep read the whole thing now), I counted three titles with Christmas themes: “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “Miracle on 34th Street,” and “A Christmas Story.”
Oh, and “Die Hard.”
PLEASE let’s not even get into the debate about “Die Hard” as a Christmas movie right now. Instead, let’s just revel in the fact that “Die Hard” has been archived by the UNITED STATES LIBRARY of CONGRESS.
Also on the LOC list: no Hanukkah movies.
And there will never be any Hanukkah movies.
There will never be a classic Hanukkah movie.
Movies cost money, especially ones that aspire to be classics. So to start with, you’d have to finance your Hanukkah movie. You’d have to find a producer willing to take the bet, in a genre that has never made money within the Hollywood system, and you’d have to convince him that an audience exists among the 2% of Americans who call themselves Jewish for a movie based on a holiday that isn’t central to their beliefs. You’d also better make the case that despite “Eight Crazy Nights” losing $10 million at the box office, something like that will never happen again.
Once you’re rejected by your first producer, it’ll be hard to get a meeting with anyone else. You could try taking your script to Hallmark. They’ve made a few Hanukkah movies, but don’t expect it to be any good. Hallmark doesn’t make classic movies. Hallmark makes greeting cards.
And while we’re talking about the script, what is the script? What would it be based on? Hollywood, as I’m sure you’re aware, is obsessed with content ripped from existing content that people are familiar with. What Hanukkah material are you thinking of starting with? What even is the story of Hanukkah?
Blah blah blah Second Temple blah blah blah Seleucid Empire blah blah blah blah the Maccabees blah blah blah blah blah blah directed by Darren Aronofsky, cause I’m pretty sure he’s available and looking for work.
No one knows the story of Hanukkah and I’m not sure that anyone really cares. If “Full-Court Miracle” can’t make people care about Judah Maccabee, surely nothing will.
That leaves you the option to write a story around the Hanukkah story, focusing on the traditions themselves, the menorahs and dreidels and shit. Plenty of storytellers have done this, some of them successfully. “Herschel and the Hanukkah Goblins” is a great story, beautifully told. The Hanukkah episode of “The Nanny” is delightful. We take them all and we love them, but these are not movies. And even moves that make an attempt to tell a Hanukkah-themed story -- “Menorah in the Middle” and “Hanukkah on Rye” -- stumble on the premise of adult Jews rushing home to spend time with their families on Hanukkah. We don’t. We text our parents on the first night with a blurry photo of a lit menorah and hope they don’t respond.
Also, none of these Hanukkah-themed movies are classic movies.
Meanwhile, Christmas overflows with stories, and more importantly, characters in the public domain. You have the Clauses, then you have the eight original reindeer, and the nose guy who fucked shit up. There’s the snowman, and the guy in the robe -- what’s his name? Scrooge? Was he a Muppet? Anyway, they’ll be making movies out of these shitheads until the collapse of civilization.
I went searching for further evidence of this hard, winter truth, that they will never make a classic Hanukkah movie. It led me to google “best hanukkah movie.” All you’ll find are clickbait SEO articles written by interns who struggle to find even one. They all rank “Eight Crazy Nights” (which features a scene where a deer eats human feces) but for the remaining spots in a list that needs to be at least 2, they struggle to find anything else to come close. A few of these lists branched out into TV episodes. One of them included “Schindler’s List,” naming it “a viewing to save for the end of your Hanukkah celebrations, when the festive atmosphere is dying down and you want to reflect on the more serious themes behind your Jewish heritage and values.”1
KIDS, COME DOWNSTAIRS FOR THE LAST NIGHT OF HANUKKAH! IT’S YOUR FAVORITE! THE NIGHT WE SNUGGLE UP AND WATCH “SCHINDLER’S LIST”!
So yeah, there will NEVER EVER be a classic Hanukkah movie.
The closest we have is “Schindler’s List.”
But wait ...
What’s in this envelope right here ...
It appears to be some kind of ...
... movie script ...
... “A Hanukkah Carol” by Sam Zee.
Interesting. Well, I guess we might as well read it together, huh?
TO BE CONTINUED ...
This is part 5 in my untitled Hanukkah series. Catch up on the previous “gifts”:
The best Hanukkah movie is “The Hebrew Hammer” with Adam Goldberg. I consider it a classic. Prove me wrong.
This is not Christmas related or a movie,
But instead a thriller type series...
Have you ever watched: The Patient with Steve Carell ?? It has a lot of Jewish culture woven in and I absolutely loved the series!