How is it that we live in a country where an accomplished director like John Waters can’t find the money to make a Christmas film, while someone like Kirk Cameron can?
I know there are more important things to be upset about, but, Jesus Christ… How did we come to a point as a society where a movie like Fruitcake can’t get made, but a movie like Saving Christmas can?
Here’s the trailer for Cameron’s upcoming film, for those of you who haven’t yet been subjected to it.
As for the film Fruitcake, which John Waters has been trying to get made for the better part of this last decade, from what I’ve read, it sounds truly heartwarming. “Fruitcake is a little kid in a family of meat thieves,” the director said in an interview not too long ago. “Meat thieves knock on your door and say ‘Meat Man!’ and you go downstairs, and, say you want a pork loin and two steaks, they shoplift it (for you), and you pay half what’s on the sticker. This is a very functional family of meat thieves, and they’re filling their orders on Christmas Eve, (when) Fruitcake gets caught and separated, and he runs away with a little African American girl named Tweefee, whose gay parents have forced her to have gay Kwanzaa. They team up with some orphans named the Lousy Lambs, and they steal all the meat from the families, and give it all to the poor people in a slush storm on Christmas Eve.” (When Waters first began pitching it to studios, the movie was to star Johnny Knoxville and Parker Posey.)
When I initially sat down to write this post, I was going to suggest that, in response to the Cameron movie, we start a giant fundraising campaign for Fruitcake. (“If you’re not ready to cede Christmas to the likes of Kirk Cameron, send $5 to John Waters today.”) Apparently, though, as I just discovered, Waters has said that he wants nothing to do with a Kickstarter type of campaign. Others have apparently broached the subject with him, only to have him respond with, “I’m not public begging.”
Which, I guess, leaves us with one option. We have to blackmail a studio head.
Either that, or we have to accept the terrifying reality that we now live in a country that values Kirk Cameron more than John Waters.
