Leadership / 12.09.20
INTIX Members Can Join the Ranks of Santa’s Elves This Holiday Season
Teddy Durgin
Image courtesy of Dana Nachman
I’ve been an admirer of Dana Nachman’s documentaries ever since seeing her wonderful “Batkid Begins” about a cancer-stricken boy who got his Make-a-Wish dream come true when the city of San Francisco transformed into Gotham City back in 2013. Her projects (“Pick of the Litter” is another keeper) are not your standard, stuffy docufilms. You always walk away from a Dana Nachman work feeling something — often feeling a lot!
Nachman’s “Dear Santa,” is no exception. It’s now in select theaters and on VOD platforms ranging from DirecTV and Xfinity to Spectrum and Google Play. It tells the story of Operation Santa. For over a century, human elves have been helping Santa Claus respond to the thousands of letters written and mailed to him at the North Pole via the United States Postal Service. Nachman’s film crisscrosses the country and follows some of the most emotional letters as elves work to make each kid’s holiday dreams come to true.
The film’s website touts that Santa himself has watched the film and approved it. So, this is a good holiday month view for the whole family. And for INTIX members, it can also be a wonderful, end-of-the-year volunteer opportunity. You can adopt a letter as either an individual or as a team by clicking here.
But before you do that, I sat down with Nachman to discuss her film and its place this Christmas season. Please give my interview with her a read, or you can view it here.
Teddy Durgin: I saw “Dear Santa” last night and just stopped openly weeping about a half hour ago. I loved it, and I think only a Grinch would not.
Dana Nachman: Good! I hope you’re right.
TD: Without giving too much away, I am glad you kept the magic of Santa alive throughout. I imagine that must have been a tightrope. But it’s a decision you made early in the filmmaking process, correct?
DN: Yeah, it’s always a plan of mine to not ruin Christmas for anybody! When I approached the United States Postal Service, we had conversations about it, and they were interested. Toward the end of our access negotiation, they had a few [points], and the main one was, “We don’t want to ruin Christmas for anybody!” And I said, “Well, of course not!” There was no way I was going to do this movie without keeping the magic of Christmas alive. In fact, my first idea was to have an entire narrative component where there was a whole set and Santa came in. But I realized there was a high cheesy factor potential with that. So instead, I chose to interview children and have them be the voice of and authority on Christmas. That was really fun to do.
TD: How did you find the kids you put on camera? Most of them were so engaging.
DN: One of the hardest things about making this film is we were waiting a lot for letters to come in. We were raring to go throughout November [2019], but there was nothing to shoot because the letters hadn’t come in yet. So, before we went off to shoot, I had time on my hands and said, “You know, I’m just going to set up a scene in my living room, and I’m going to invite every kid I know and just ask them questions.” So, we spent a day doing that, interviewing 10 or 15 kids. We also went to five or six classrooms where kids were writing letters to Santa. So, we would just take them out separately and pepper them with questions. We went to other letter-writing events and would take the kids that seemed the most verbal and expressive and creative.
TD: What I love about “Dear Santa” is what I love about Christmas. It does kind of return us to our more old-fashioned ways and roots for just a little while. And writing a letter to Santa might be the only time kids even write letters anymore. You go into detail about the great technology involved in making Operation Santa possible each year. But at the heart of it, there is still just this old-school thing that kids were doing in the 1940s, 1970s and today: writing a letter!
DN: In normal years, the Postal Service has a big letter-writing day. I think normally it’s at The Smithsonian where kids can come in and write letters. And I think they use it as a [tutorial on] “Hey, here’s how you write a letter.” A lot of kids don’t know and don’t do it anymore. But I think you’re right. Christmas is a time where we slow it down and go back to traditions — go back to family, in general — and get off our screens as much as possible. This year, because of COVID-19, a lot of this program will be online. And I think after the year we’ve had as a nation divided so much, no matter who we are, where we are and what we believe in, we can rally around this tradition of writing to Santa and helping by being an elf.
TD: Some of the most poignant parts of the film are the people — even adults — in dire need. Did you get any numbers as to how many adults write Santa each year through the Postal Service?
DN: It’s not a high percentage I would say. But when you read them, it’s like that woman said in the film. It’s like this message in a bottle kind of thing. You’re kind of manifesting what could be. Maybe it’s your hopes. Or maybe it’s just putting it down on paper. There is so much to this program and so much to the letters that, really, we could have taken the film in many [directions]. Obviously, it wouldn’t be as interesting if you’re talking about every kid who wants an iPhone. The more I read the letters, the more I thought about getting stock in Apple, by the way. Every kid wanted an iSomething! At the same time, we didn’t want to make it 100% a poverty movie, which it could have been. We tried to go somewhere in the middle. You had the fun, the joy and the magic of it. But also, you understand that there are a lot of people in our society who need help, and this is one way to help them.
TD: Do you have any advice for young filmmakers, whether professional or folks just wanting to explore that side of their creativity outside of their day jobs?
DN: We started this with just a cold email to the United States Postal Service. All of my six features started with cold emails. It’s so crazy! Even when I was a student at NYU Journalism School and asking people to be in my television journalism stories, I found that people tend to say “Yes.” You do have to be persistent. With one of my films, I never got a “Yes.” But I called and wrote to them every single day for months. In the end, they said, “No comment.” But I needed them to say, “No comment!” So, be very persistent, and the passion will come through.
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Dana Nachman has won multiple Emmy awards and an Edward R. Murrow Award for her television news work. She is also a member of the Directors Guild of America.
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Tags: Leadership , COVID-19 , Coronavirus