Grief for Christmas
An out of work actor working as a housekeeper in Los Angeles books a cleaning job in the Hollywood Hills on Christmas Eve. What he thinks is a job for a Christmas party turns out to be a wake! Already struggling with his own grief after the loss of someone very special, Brian is forced to grapple with Carol, the rich daughter of a recently deceased film producer. Grief For Christmas is a dark comedy about shared loss, class and second chances.
When it comes to grief, well meaning people always have something to say. After tragically losing two boyfriends and a best friend in recent years, I heard it all! Yet, it wasn’t people’s words themselves that had the most lasting impact on me, but instead my wildly differing responses to those words.
How could one day, “grief is love with nowhere to go” send me into tears when another it might bring rage to my eyes?
Losing Steve
I heard that phrase in particular over and over when my ex boyfriend Steve was recently murdered - from people on social media, in person, phone calls, texts - and I never knew, even in the moment, what those exact same words would bring up in me.
Perhaps it was the incessant repetition of phrases like that one and others that finally broke through the numbness I most often felt after Steve died - finding myself staring at random objects, food, my cat! - in a sort of waking grief coma. I remember the day well when I finally snapped out of it. Although yes, before you say it - “grief never fully goes away.” That one probably comes in 2nd place for the most repeated grief consolation prize.
Anyway…back to the day I came back to life, pun intended. I was outside my twelve step meeting after sharing yet again at the podium about my strange experience with losing my ex bofriend to murder when someone said - “Brian, there is no wrong way to grieve.” I stared at them for what seemed like an eternity, when I suddenly burst into maniacal laughter.
From the look in the person’s eyes, I could almost hear their thoughts. “Well…there’s no wrong way to grieve…except that way.”
It was the laughter in that moment that gave me exactly what I needed to take my next steps, to walk through a life of loss with some levity. Even one without my ex partner in it.
From “The Mystery” to “Grief For Christmas”
When exploring what my next film project would be after “Wrath Mercy” I picked up an old feature script that I had started but not finished many, many years ago. It was a thriller called “The Mystery” about a young writer who lived in NYC and worked as a housekeeper to pay the bills. After landing a book deal about his life experiences, he heads back to his childhood home for research and is forced to face an unsolved mystery that has haunted him and his friends since they were kids, when a member of their friend group was murdered. After the darkness I explored in “Wrath Mercy” I wasn’t quite sure I was capable or even wanted to delve into that type of shadow material again.
In reading it though, I was quite taken with the opening scene, which had our lead character showing up to a house cleaning job, thinking he was helping get the place ready for a holiday party, only to discover the party was now a wake! (Side note -this actually happened to me when I was working as a housekeeper in NYC.)
With my own fresh grief in mind, I thought - wouldn’t it be interesting if that opening scene became the premise of its own story. What if the holiday was Christmas and the film was set in Los Angeles, a place where the holidays feel very unique with their blue skies, warm days, fake snow and palm trees. Suddenly, the opening shot of the film came to me in a flash with the title card amidst a bright blue sky showing “Grief for Christmas.”
Grief is funny, right?
Even before I started writing the film I knew I wanted it to be a dark comedy. Grief is a bitch after all, and sometimes the only thing you can do is laugh through some of the more ridiculous experiences of it. I also knew that my lead character had to express my own grief at losing Steve, and quite importantly, I had to act in the part myself, something I chose not to do with “Wrath Mercy.”
What’s next!
As I continue to polish the script and pre-produce with my dear friend Glenn Payne, I am going to explore some of my experiences with grief over the years with a series of essays about the people and experiences I have lost over the years. Those will be published here on my website in the days, weeks and months to come.
In the next few months I will begin looking for executive producers to assist in financing the proejct as well as starting a fundraising campaign in early 2025 with plans to film later that December in both Los Angeles and Mississippi.