Who Killed Santa?

Who Killed Santa Claus?

The Man Who Killed Santa Claus | Mental Floss

Path Created with Sketch. Cast Size Cast Size 6m, 2f. Additional Info Barbara Love is a famous TV star who, just before her Christmas party, is threatened by a chilling voice on her answering machine and then receives a macabre present boxed in a miniature coffin. Not so much a 'whodunnit' but more a 'who's going to do it', as along troop the staff of her television show for the Christmas buffet, each one of them with a motive to murder her. The tension mounts as this cunningly plotted thriller twists and turns towards the final spine-tingling revelation.

Reviews "A thriller with heaps of suspense, surprises, and nattily clever turns and twists Considerations License details Minimum Fee: Production Casting 6m, 2f. Sign In You'll have to sign in before you share your experience. Sign in to your Samuel French account. Santa's airplane will arrive over Mesa direct from the north pole at exactly 4: His pilot will circle the airplane over Mesa rooftops and will put the plane through a few difficult stunts. Then Santa will step out on the wing and with his special parachute firmly attached to his body, he will step off to land in the arms of the awaiting children McPhee enlisted the services of a pilot at a nearby airport.

Once he arrived by police escort, the parade would commence and retailers would enjoy a profitable day of cheer. The day of the scheduled take-off, McPhee found the performer at a bar, too inebriated to participate. Faced with the possibility of storekeepers and children being crushed with disappointment, McPhee immediately set another plan into motion.

He convinced a clothing store to let him borrow a mannequin, which he dressed in the Santa suit. He then instructed the pilot to make his scheduled run. At the climax, a pilot would push the Santa-dressed dummy out of the plane and into the field. McPhee would be posted to meet the dummy, disrobe it, don the beard, and drive into town as Santa. As the minutes ticked by, residents of Mesa began to gather downtown, their necks craned to look for any sign of the airborne Santa en route.

The plane started doing circles around the town. As advertised, a red-suited man soon appeared in the doorway. If he seemed less than animated, no one appeared to notice.

The Man Who Killed Santa Claus

On cue, Santa stepped off the plane and began rocketing through the air, where McPhee—watching from the pasture—expected to see a parachute deploy automatically like a military cargo drop. Like a dead weight he fell, leaden and tumbling through the air. His parachute did not open. As Santa rocketed to his pending death, children began screaming.

Some parents covered their eyes, their own mouths agape at the unfathomable tragedy occurring in front of them. Migrant workers tending the crops were so shocked they took off running, up and over a barbed wire fence. Aghast, McPhee raced toward the dummy, stripping it of the suit and putting it on so he could begin consoling eyewitnesses. But he arrived to a veritable ghost town—children were behind doors, sobbing, and parents looked at McPhee with a mixture of astonishment and fury.

McPhee thought they would be placated by the sight of Santa, alive and well, but no one knew how to react. The parade went on as scheduled. It resembled a funeral procession.

The Choose-Your-Own-Ending Musical Murder Mystery Holiday Whodunit! With Puppets!

As McPhee assuaged the town by explaining what happened—one woman was so horrified by the flying Santa she went into premature labor—he realized that being solely to blame for ruining Christmas might not bode well for his physical health. He left town for a week. Beginning with "faith explains all things," the article explained:. Many hearts mentally removed the traditional stocking from the fireplace mantle Monday afternoon when the jolly old gentleman leaped from his plane high over Mesa, and his only apparent insurance against death failed, the parachute did not open.

Two minutes later, Santa was seen riding through town on the hood of the city police car driven by Marshall Ray Merrill, bidding his thousands of friends return Tuesday and receive a gift bag of nuts and candy from him. One young Mesan suffered but one qualm of fear for the Christmas visitor, and then when he appeared remarked his recent feat as one of the many wonderful things accomplished by him each year Despite his efforts, McPhee was destined to become infamous in Mesa.

Telling the story of the "man who killed Santa Claus" and terrorized an entire generation became an annual tradition in and around town, with Arizona newspapers running retrospectives for the next odd years. Although McPhee briefly returned to Mesa to run a radio station in the mids, his horrific mistake preceded him.

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He moved on, eventually editing a Colorado newspaper and working for the Navajo nation before his death in If there was any bright side, it was that the entire point of the stunt—to drive business for local merchants—was actually successful. Parents were so concerned their children had been traumatized by seeing Santa meet his maker that the kids of Mesa were showered in gifts that year, briefly lifting the community from the dire atmosphere of the Depression. The man who killed Santa, it turned out, still wound up saving Christmas.

Oskar Schindler, a Nazi party member, used his pull within the party to save the lives of more than Jewish individuals by recruiting them to work in his Polish factory. In October , Australian novelist Thomas Keneally had stopped into a leather goods shop off of Rodeo Drive after a book tour stopover from a film festival in Sorrento, Italy, where one of his books was adapted into a movie.

Page gave Keneally photocopies of documents related to Schindler, including speeches, firsthand accounts, testimonies, and the actual list of names of the people he saved. Page whose real name was Poldek Pfefferberg ended up becoming a consultant on the film.

Gosch told the story to her husband, who agreed to produce a film version, even going so far as hiring Casablanca co-screenwriter Howard Koch to write the script.

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Koch and Gosch began interviewing Schindler Jews in and around the Los Angeles area, and even Schindler himself, before the project stalled, leaving the story unknown to the public at large. Seven lists in all were made by Oskar Schindler and his associates during the war, while four are known to still exist. Eventually the studio bought the rights to the book, and when Page met with Spielberg to discuss the story, the director promised the Holocaust survivor that he would make the film adaptation within 10 years.

The project languished for over a decade because Spielberg was reluctant to take on such serious subject matter. So he tried to recruit other directors to make the film. He first approached director Roman Polanski , a Holocaust survivor whose own mother was killed in Auschwitz.

Polanski declined, but would go on to make his own film about the Holocaust, The Pianist , which earned him a Best Director Oscar in Spielberg then offered the movie to director Sydney Pollack, who also passed. The job was then offered to legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese , who accepted. Make the lucrative summer movie first, they said, and then he could go and make his passion project.

Kevin Costner and Mel Gibson auditioned for the role of Oskar Schindler, and actor Warren Beatty was far enough along in the process that he even made it as far as a script reading. For the role, Spielberg cast then relatively unknown Irish actor Liam Neeson, whom the director had seen in a Broadway play called Anna Christie. Besides having Neeson listen to recordings of Schindler, the director also told him to study the gestures of former Time Warner chairman Steven J. In order to gain a more personal perspective on the film, Spielberg traveled to Poland before principal photography began to interview Holocaust survivors and visit the real-life locations that he planned to portray in the movie.

The production was also allowed to shoot scenes outside the gates of Auschwitz. A symbol of innocence in the movie, the little girl in the red coat who appears during the liquidation of the ghetto in the movie was based on a real person. In the film, the little girl is played by actress Oliwia Dabrowska, who—at the age of three—promised Spielberg that she would not watch the film until she was 18 years old. She allegedly watched the movie when she was 11, breaking her promise, and spent years rejecting the experience.

I had to grow up to watch the film. The actual girl in the red coat was named Roma Ligocka; a survivor of the Krakow ghetto, she was known amongst the Jews living there by her red winter coat. Ligocka, now a painter who lives in Germany, later wrote a biography about surviving the Holocaust called The Girl in the Red Coat.

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