NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, THE [ca. 1992] Rev. First Draft film script

[Los Angeles: Walt Disney, ca. 1992]. Vintage original film script, 11 x 8 1/2″ (28 x 22 cm), stapled, Wrappers show tanning and marginal chipping. 81 pp., with signature at top left of front wrapper of Dan Mason, credited as an Additional Animator. Script is credited: “Story by Tim Burton, Michael McDowell, and Caroline Thompson / Lyrics by Danny Elfman / Revised First Draft Screenplay by Caroline Thompson”.

“Boys and Girls of every age – Wouldn’t you like to see something strange?” Notwithstanding its official title, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) is very much a collaborative work. The project originated as a three-page poem along with character designs, written and conceived while Burton, not yet a director, was working as an animator for Walt Disney Productions in the 1980s. Much later, after the commercial success of Batman, Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, Burton secured a production deal with Disney to develop the story as an animated feature. Michael McDowell, who had co-written the Beetlejuice screenplay, did the original adaptation.

Caroline Thompson, the scripter of Edward Scissorhands, authored the final Nightmare screenplay and, significantly, Beetlejuice and Nightmare are generally considered to be the Burton productions with the most heart. The second most important collaborator was surely composer Danny Elfman, who wrote the film’s music and lyrics (since almost three-quarters of the movie is sung). Finally there is the director, stop motion animator Henry Selick, whose own very distinctive style and vision is equally apparent in his 2009 stop motion masterpiece Coraline.

Surprisingly for an animated feature, this Revised First Draft screenplay is not identical to the completed film. For example, as scripted the film’s opening sequence, which introduces the concept of holiday worlds, is visualized as a series of illustrated calendar pages. In the movie, the holiday world concept is visualized as a forest where each tree has a door representing a different holiday — a Christmas tree for Christmas, a heart for Valentine’s Day, and so on. Though the lyrics of Elfman’s songs, which carry the story and are set forth in full in the screenplay, remain substantially the same in the film as they are in the script, many of the visual ideas described in the screenplay were plainly reimagined and expanded during the storyboarding stage of pre-production.

The central concept of the film is the contrast between Halloween Town and its macabre inhabitants, ruled by protagonist Jack Skellington the Pumpkin King, and the world of Christmas Town with its corresponding ruler, Santa Claus. When Jack accidentally discovers the world of Christmas Town, he jumps to the conclusion that he could do Christmas better, an idea that is doomed to failure. However, in the course of his comically doomed project, loner Jack learns to accept himself as who he is, and gains a much-needed friend in the form of the stitched-together rag doll Sally.

Much of the screenplay and film’s charm arises from its diverse cast of Burton-designed characters. In addition to elegant skeleton-man Jack and rag doll Sally, they include: the Dr. Frankenstein-like Evil Scientist who created Sally, an abusive parent figure; Zero, the flying transparent ghost dog with a glowing nose who is Jack’s faithful companion; Halloween Town’s Mayor, a politician with two faces on opposite sides of his revolving head, one upbeat and cheerful, the other whiny and anxious; the three mischievous henchmen/children, Lock, Shock and Barrel, who are assigned to kidnap Santa; and the film’s most malicious character, Oogie-Boogie, described in the screenplay as a large burlap sack “filled to the brim with bugs, snakes, and creepy-crawlies (which occasionally escape through ill-sewn seams)”. 

Another significant difference between the script and the film is that the script adds a coda, narrated by Santa Claus, which describes Jack in the future, surrounded by four or five skeleton children, and has Santa asking Jack, “Would you do it again, knowing what you knew? … Then Jack turned and asked softly of me … Wouldn’t you?” If it was filmmaker Burton’s intention to create a perennial cult classic, as beloved as A Christmas Carol or Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas, he clearly succeeded.

[NOTE: This copy of the script is missing seven pages (pp. 47-53) which presumably include the scene where Lock, Shock and Barrel bring back a large bag containing what they think is the kidnapped Santa Claus, only when the bag is opened… out pops the Easter Bunny! We have carefully examined the script and it is obvious that those pages were not in the script and subsequently removed. We have high confidence that those pages were omitted because those scenes were in the process of being completely re-done while this first draft was being printed and collated].