CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 12/12/08

Life's Rich Christmas Pageant:
Nothing Like the Holidays' Rick Najera

By sarah skilton

Screenwriter, playwright, and actor Rick Najera, a two-time WGA Award nominee, tells CS Weekly how he drew from his own life and the experiences of his collaborators to turn the concept for a "Latino Christmas Story" into a heartfelt dramedy with universal themes.

Nothing Like the Holidays follows the homecoming of the Rodriguez siblings, who travel from the East Coast, West Coast, and even Iraq to return to their childhood town of Humboldt Park in Chicago for Christmas. There, they reconnect with one another, re-evaluate their lives, and discover what's most important to them: family.

Producer Robert Teitel, Executive Producer and actor Freddy Rodriguez, and actor John Leguizamo were personally connected to the locale and story, and Rick Najera had also lived and performed in Chicago. Here, he tells CS Weekly about his experiences writing Nothing Like the Holidays and how he dramatized elements of his own life to create a compelling script.

While we endeavor to avoid specifics, the following article may contain minor spoilers for Nothing Like the Holidays, so proceed with caution.

The setting feels integral to the story, and the film was originally titled Humboldt Park. Why did you decide to set the film there?
There were a lot of personal stories. Freddy [who plays young Iraq veteran Jesse Rodriguez] was from Chicago, Bob Teitel was from Chicago, I spent a lot of years in Chicago, I had a show at the Goodman Theater, John Leguizamo had a show at the Goodman Theater… We all felt a real special kinship to it. The other writer, Alison Swan, had spent time in Chicago, so all of us had our own Chicago world. Bob Teitel approached me and said, "I want to do a film about Chicago…and I want a Christmas story." We wanted to do the Latino Christmas Story that, at the same time, would be a universal story.

How conscious were you of keeping authentic Puerto Rican experience and dialogue, but also making the story and characters accessible for a mainstream audience? Was that something you thought about as you went through the writing process, or did it just feel natural?
It felt natural. What I loved about Chicago was that it was Mexican and Puerto Rican, a great mix of cultures, and it was also a mix of the West Coast and East Coast, and so Chicago's always been that town. There's almost as many Mexicans in Chicago as there are in Guadalajara, Mexico. Same with the Puerto Ricans, there's a large population there, and traditionally [has] been there in Humboldt Park. Everyone recognized their family in it, and Debra Messing's character [came about from the fact that] I'm married to an Anglo woman and she's been in an environment where she's seen the Latino culture from outside eyes. The Latino experience is very mixed and diverse and touches a lot of different groups, and I think that's what's great about it. This is a Christmas story that happens to be Latino, but it's a Christmas story that so many people relate to.

The relationship between the siblings is incredibly natural and realistic, filled with the types of embarrassing memories that only your brothers and sisters know about and can use against you. Did you draw on your own lives to make it so real?
In some ways I did. Alfred De Villa, he's a great director and a great guy, he's putting in his story, and everyone kind of puts in their story. What's funny is, the character of the daughter who's the actress is kind of the character of me, coming home. John Leguizamo's character is a little bit on my side of my brother's experience, that whenever I would return home, was the mijo, the one that everyone would fawn over. I was looked at, and felt odd and out of place, thinking that they would have the steady lives, the normal lives, and I had the Hollywood life. So I would long for what they had, and they would long for what I had.

They wouldn't understand why no one's hiring me. They'd go, "Come on, you're this great writer, this great performer, what's going on?" And I'd go, "It's not that easy." My mother once told me, "Just go to the studio early and apply." [Laughs] She actually thought you go to a studio and apply for a job, like if I went earlier, I'd beat all the other people. They were sleeping in, and I would get the job.

That's what's great about the movie: it's very rich in texture with real kind of observations, how people talk. The tree became a metaphor, because in La Mesa where I grew up, we went from the barrio to this nice neighborhood, which is basically a two-bedroom house and five kids and two parents who inhabit it, and we wanted to make it civilized, so we started cutting down trees.

[In the film] the tree meant a lot of things, it's an old tree, and it makes a lot of metaphors for what the movie's about. It very much has this sentimental and real aspect of what a Latino world is. There's the Hollywood formula, and the Latino formula is we can be unabashedly sentimental, and at the same time go from crying to laughing very quickly. So a lot of times people go, "Well, is it a drama, or is it a comedy? Which is it?" And with us, we tend to look at the world as, you can have it all.

It's good that you mentioned that, because I was going to ask how you moved between tones without changing too abruptly or halting the momentum. Did you think to yourself, "I can't move too quickly between the laughter to the tears?" Or did you feel like, "No, this works, because this is how it would go."
I really felt that it worked how it goes. I went to one of those writing programs, took all the typical Hollywood screenwriting courses, and I said, you know, this is life, and the producers and Alfred and Alison Swan, everyone was pretty good about accepting that reality, that you can have laughter and tears in a very short time. It's really a hopeful film, it's unabashedly hopeful. I think, especially now-a-days, all of us want to see hope, there's gotta be some sort of hope, and I think we've moved away from the cynical view into more of a hopeful point of view. This is also one of the first times you see a middle-class Latino family, and there's so many of them, and…I think really almost an evolution for what the Latino experience is in film today. But, it's a film for everybody. A nice Christmas card.

Did you find that you wanted to give certain characters more script time, or was it easy to balance all the different stories equally?
It was like a family, in that the people who got more of the screen time, it made sense that they got the screen time. It was about [Jesse] returning. There was a scene in the script where he's at the opthamologist and he reads the chart. The father's there and he goes, "The eyesight has actually improved," and he realizes [Jesse's] lying, he memorized the chart, he's actually blind in that eye. The father realizes [Jesse is] going back to Iraq, and he's trying to talk him out of it. Once any screenwriter gives the script to the producer or director, the actors, there's another level of, for good or bad, and sometimes it can be magical 'cause it works all around.

I had the first scene take place in Iraq, where he's wounded, and the problem is, it's expensive. So then the producer steps in and goes, "Too much, too expensive, we don't need to see that first scene." And in a great way, the performance of Freddy, he brought to the production that experience of someone who loses someone in Iraq, so he in a strange way, sitting back and watching the film process, here's an actor who saved us, you almost didn't have to see that scene. That was a beautiful thing for me to watch.

In the end, you're hoping that everyone makes each other look great, writer-wise and actor-wise and director-wise, because that's the magical part. There's not really a spot in this film where I go, "Wow, that's a real weak spot"; it's I think some of the best work from everyone involved.

"Family reunion holiday" films have sort of become their own genre, but Nothing Like the Holidays took the familiar and added its own original stamp. Are there any other genre screenplays you'd like to tackle and make your own?
I wrote a screenplay called Mariachi Club, and it's basically a "teacher comes to high school and gets involved with these students and teaches them mariachi." It's based on a real story, a guy really did that. It's one of the top programs in the country, and it really cut back on Latinos quitting school. It's an important kind of film. And people said, "Wow, it's like Mr. Holland's Opus." I went, "You know, that's not a bad thing to be called."

I wrote a parody screenplay about the Old Yeller story. Old Yeller set in the 'hood, and it's a stoner comedy. What's good about the Latino experience is—and Tyler Perry's done it so well with the African-American experience—is to not think we're going to change any genre, because going back to Aristotle and Shakespeare, there are certain formulas in the storytelling process that are the same. The difference is, you want to tell your unique story. I learned this when I was doing standup and performing. People would say, "Aren't you worried about people stealing your material?" and I'd say, "Not if I really made it about me." Because you are the unique one, and vice versa. If you tell your story, you will tell a uniquely different story. The trick is to tell more of your story than to worry about the formula of filmmaking or TV.

Sarah Skilton is a staff writer at Breakdown Services. She is hard at work on her first novel.



Rick Najera courtesy Rick Najera
Nothing Like the Holidays courtesy Overture Films

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