Colin and AJ’s Christmas Noir

We began work on our third overdubbed movie, an adaptation of the film noir classic The Big Sleep, in early 2020. But, as alluded to in the 2020 party description, COVID dashed our hopes of having an in person screening in 2020. So we put it on the back burner to focus on Clash of the Christmases.

No alternate idea ever emerged for the 2021 party though, so we picked the material up again in the late summer of 2021. For a Colin and AJ-style re-cutting, re-editing, and overdubbing, this was quite late to really dive in. The only real progress we had made in 2020 was to determine that we wanted the movie to be less a faithful adaptation where just a word or two is changed (a la Colin and AJ’s Christmas at the Overlook Hotel) and more of a totally different movie.

Viewings of the movie in mid 2021 confirmed this instinct. Very few people know The Big Sleep, so we figured it would be fruitless to pursue a merely sleight twist on the movie. Instead, we began working on a heavy adaptation. We re-ordered sequences, mixed up scenes, and drastically changed the plot. We removed key characters, re-oriented key relationships, and imposed a strong Christmas-movie story over the otherwise classic noir-style plot.

This made outlining and scripting by far the longest and hardest stage of the development of Colin and AJ’s Christmas Noir. The script wasn’t finalized until the first week of December, which left us just a few weeks to record all the dialogue, sound effects, and soundtrack for their version of the movie.

Somehow we got it done and the movie was screened (twice, due to COVID capacity restrictions at the Thaxton) successfully on December 23, 2021.