Tag: Will Ferrell

Santaland Diaries, Our Elf Names, the Inspiration for Ferrell Elf movie, and Christmas in NYC

Santaland Diaries by David Sedaris, Our Elf Names, the Inspiration for the Ferrell Elf movie, and Christmas in NYC

Welcome to the Torg Stories Podcast! On this episode we discuss David Sedaris’s account of working as a Macy’s elf in what the store called Santaland. The story is David Sedaris’s account of two Christmas seasons he spent working as an elf at Macy’s Department Store in New York City.

Anne, have you been to New York or Macy’s for Christmas? I’m guessing you haven’t been to see Santa?

Sections to Read for Discussion:

  1. Read page 5 about Sedaris’s move to NYC. Anne, what were your expectations for the move to LA?
  2. p. 13 about Sedaris Elf name: his was Crumpet. Remember the SNL elves skit Alec Baldwin was Winter’s Breath. Anne, I had you as Sour Patch. It’s candy. Yay! It’s sour, a little like your enthusiasm for projects or outlook on a situation. For example, sour on motivational sayings or the Colts prospects. Megan said Dribbles for me, because of basketball, and I thought that worked.
  3. Keep reading the rest of p. 13 for an interaction with a customer.
  4. P. 21 pretty funny SatanLand section.
  5. P. 30. Some short diary snippets to read. LET’S TALK ABOUT A 7 DAY DIARY for next week’s podcast. Maybe we will suck at it but an interesting challenge. Fever Pitch was a fan diary. How many words can we manage? We can give ourselves one day where we fail to do it.
  6. Is p. 39 the only heart warming part of the story?
We Torgs have been to Macy’s SantaLand in NYC

Sedaris line that sparked my own memories:

  1. Everything about the cash register intimidates me. p. 7. I never got it right at the Queens golf course.

Information in the story:

  1. On a busy day, Twenty-two thousand people come to visit Santa. Looks like these days you need a reservation. Click here.
  2. Macy’s has two jail cells on the balcony floor and it apprehends three thousand shoplifters a year. p. 10. Here is a 2003 New York Times article about the jail cells.

What work stories could you write?

  1. I did write a Russell’s Old Trading Post story that appears in my collection Horseshoe.
  2. I did write a Queens Golf Course Story, and I can’t even remember if it was published. Racial tension. Police wanting free golf. Me messing up the register. Listening to Yankee games and eating take out.
  3. Tree trimming story – guy catching his chest hair and t shirt on fire in the tree, to a lesser degree going out to the house and having a big meal of deer
  4. Indiana Beach – the almost wreck, the water skiers and their groupies story
  5. Winamac Town Pool – romantic relationships, Michael Tank riding a bike off the diving board, Jim Price and I sent to scrub the diving boards in the rain while everyone else hung out in the concession stand.

Observations about people from Sedaris:

  1. All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I’m afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints. (p. 33).
  2. Standing in a two-hour line makes people worry that they’re not living in a democratic nation. (p. 33). Atlantic article about how self checkout lines are longer than the regular lines.
Santaland Diaries, Holidays on Ice David Sedaris New York City Christmas
Sedaris’s story Santaland Diaries was included in the collection Holidays on Ice

Is Sedaris saying anything about the holiday or people?

  1. Pretty dark on parenting. The over engineering of the photos and the kids not even getting to talk. p. 31
  2. p. 43 Maybe reading the ending from last paragraph on p. 43 to the end.

The Christmas movie Elf with Will Ferrell partly inspired (re)writer and Director Jon Favreau. The elf name Crumpet appears in the Sedaris story and Favreau’s film. David’s sister Amy was also in the movie Elf. Click here to read more about it in Rolling Stone.

Tweetsie Railroad Christmas Boone Blowing Rock North Carolina
Tweetsie Railroad is located on 321 between Boone and Blowing Rock North Carolina

Thanks for checking out this edition of the Torg Stories Podcast!

False Profit: A Mockumentary Indie Film about the Financial Crisis, the Bailout, and Occupy Wall Street

“Finally,” CNBC declared about the mockumentary False Profit. “A comedy movie about the financial crisis.” I met one of the producers on this film, Dan Abrams, because we’d both been fans of and guests on a podcast called asymco. It’s host is Horace Dediu and Horace studies Apple and its competitors. It’s an example of the ways in which stories, digital media, and Apple are coming together for me. Dan’s current project is a mockumentary called False Profit, and it’s an indie film project in that he is seeking his own financing, partially done through a website called Kickstarter. To read more about that and potentially help fund the project (and pick up some swag in the process) you can click here.

William Torgerson Dan Abrams False Profit asymco Horace Dediu
False Profit from Kickstarter

When I asked Dan about his process for writing the story for False Profit, he said he wrote collaboratively, something that comes from his connections to the Second City comedy theater. He talked about a way of writing (and maybe it’s an improv technique too) called the “Yes And” method. I couldn’t figure out what he was saying on the podcast until I later saw it in writing. His example of the technique went something like this:

“It’s raining frogs.”

As the fellow writer, I am to accept that it is raining by thinking yes and and then going with it. “Finally,” I might say, “we’ve been having a terrible drought of frogs this summer.”

On the audio podcast, Dan and I debated the social merits of Will Ferrell movies. I thought mostly funny but also usually just silly and maybe even homophobic, and Dan mounted a satire-themed defense. From there, we discussed the Bailout, Chekhov, George Bush, and whether or not Republicans and Democrats alike might enjoy the film False Profit.

Dan is using Kickstarter to help finance his film and he explained how that works. I asked about Vimeo or YouTube for the sort of work I’m doing, and I had a lot of questions about copyright when it comes to news footage, the legal contracts in securing images and music, and all sorts of questions when it comes to film festivals and indie film distribution.

If you take the time to give the podcast a listen, I hope you’ll help me learn about some of this. I’m almost done with my documentary film For the Love of Books and I’m sensing that there’s more work ahead than completed when it comes to actually getting the film in front of audiences to where they can view it.

On iTunes, the podcast is called the “Read, Write, and Teach Digital Book Club.” If you look down the right side of this page, you can click on the file for download. I’d love to just have it ready for streaming play, maybe one of you can tell me how to set that up. Is it possible to do it while paying to go ad free on WordPress or do I need to run my own site? Thanks in advance for the help!