A NOIR CHRISTMAS

(Original 1993 screenplay summary)

The time: mid October.

The place: Santa's workshop at the north-pole.

Two elves are working late. A dark figure steps into the workshop, fixes a silencer to its gun, and kills the elves. Elven blood run bright red over the wood chips and shards of candy cane that litter the work shop floor.

Several days later, Chicago gumshoe Smiles Johnson and his sidekick Charlie, are visited by Santa. He looks tired and concerned. He explains that the last year has been hell on him. He tells them that a research team is trying to buy the land that his workshop is on so they can set up a research base where they can take deep glacier core samples. He fears that if he doesn't meet production by Christmas, they will achieve their goal. He doesn't think that he'll be able to meet the demand. A congressional committee is also holding hearings to see if Santa should split up the Christmas monopoly to make way for more competition in a free market economy because. The Elves are threatening a walk-out unless someone investigates the strange factory accidents and deaths in the last few months. Santa has come to Smiles because he can't afford a shutdown this close to the holiday season.

Smiles finds that the company trying to buy out Santa is OBERON TECHNOLOGIES, which works in highly advanced bioengineering: cloning, gene splicing, that sort of thing. Most of the funding that began the company two years ago came from a philanthropic organization called the Lidden society. It was started by Senator Joseph Lidden, who is also heading the congressional commitee against Santa.

Smiles stumbles across the major project being work on at OBERON, which is the creation of a huge bio-reactor. The reactor would create huge amounts of a thick polymer called Estaxolyne. The reactor would receive a chemical feedstock of xylenes & toluene. The only missing ingredient is a bacteria to act as a catalyst for the polymer to be created out of the feedstock. This bacteria is only found in deep glacier core samples. Once a few bacteria are retrieved OBERON will then clone the bacteria and produce the polymer. The project is being requested by ALLIED RECONSTRUCTION, a company that converts giant oil tankers for reuse. The polymer would be used to suspend fragile cargo on long journeys to all points on the globe, almost completely eliminating breakage.

The money to be made from the polymer patent alone is enough to give either OBERON or ALLIED reason to kill in order to get Santa out. But Smiles wants more. Smiles wants the people at the top. He finds that ALLIED is owned by a holding company called JUDAS GOAT FINANCES. The holding company also owns CONSOLIDATED HUEVOS, a world wide egg distributor . JUDAS GOAT operates off of money stored in a Swiss bank account owned by the law firm of KNOLL &

CROSS. Senator Joseph Lidden was Thomas Knoll's adopted son and he inherited the company and all of its assets when Knoll died.(Cross had been dead for 5 years.) When Lidden was drafted into Vietnam he liquidated everything and deposited the money in the bank account. Smiles has his man.... or does he?

Smiles confronts Lidden. Lidden is nervous and keeps saying, "He might be listening." That night, Lidden commits suicide. Smiles comes up empty. While going through the OBERON files he finds that they have also been commissioned by

CONSOLIDATED HUEVOS to develop a way to clone the most productive chickens. Smiles decides to investigate JUDAS GOAT. He finds that the chairman of the board operates out of a mansion in Michigan.

When Smiles starts digging harder, he finds that the mansion is owned by the Easter Bunny. The Easter Bunny and Lidden served in 'Nam together on a secret military death squad. Knowledge of the squad's actions could've destroyed Lidden’s political career. The Easter Bunny, being the only other surviving member of the squad, blackmailed the senator into subsidizing all of the Bunny's projects. All of which, OBERON, ALLIED, and CONSOLIDATED HUEVOS were working toward two goals:

1) the obtaining of Christmas

2) the control of the world egg market.

The ships and polymer would be used to transport billions of genetically engineered eggs all over the world. If the Bunny were to succeed he would control Christmas, expand the Easter egg tradition to cover the world as opposed to North America, control the world egg prices , and get the money from the polymer patent. Smiles realizes that the Bunny must be stopped.