Muscatine filmmaker back with ‘Blue Christmas’
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Acclaimed Muscatine writer and filmmaker Max Allan Collins has a new gift for movie fans all wrapped and ready to open.
“Blue Christmas,” his first feature film in 16 years, will have its world premiere Saturday, Feb. 24 in Des Moines, with other Iowa showings March 13 in Cedar Rapids, March 16 in Muscatine and March 22 in Davenport.
A creative, hard-boiled take on the classic “A Christmas Carol,” it’s Christmas Eve in Chicago, 1942, and private eye Richard Stone is visited by the ghost of his late partner, murdered a year ago. Escorted by three spirits, Stone must visit his past, present and future to find the killer…and redemption.
Collins – a 75-year-old Muscatine native – based the new 80-minute flick on his 1993 novella “A Wreath for Marley,” which was a mashup of two of his favorite novels — “A Christmas Carol” and “The Maltese Falcon.” Collins hoped to make a movie from it as far back as 1994, but it got pushed back.
“As long as I’m above ground, I thought we should do this, and I’m just thrilled with how it came out,” he said in a recent interview with Our Quad Cities News. “We did it on a wing and a prayer. We had almost no money, but we had great support and a great — almost entirely local — cast.”
Actors came from Cedar Rapids, Muscatine and the Quad Cities. “Everybody did a great job,” Collins said, noting it was shot last October at Muscatine Community College (his alma mater, which anointed him a “legend” last year).
They shot it over seven days at the school’s black box theater, on one set that turned into a sound stage. Bill Turner built the set.
“When you’re an independent filmmaker, you have no money. You have to be lucky and smart, in terms of the people you surround yourself with,” Collins said. He credited Phil Dingeldein (of Rock Island’s dphilms) as director of photography, and Liz Toal on the crew.
His producer Chad Bishop of Muscatine “wore so many hats, we didn’t have enough hats,” Collins said of him producing, casting, editing, doing sound and lighting. “It was done on a shoestring, but the shoestring didn’t break.” Bishop also has a small part in the movie (as Stone’s father).
This is Bishop’s first feature film, and he’s run the Muscatine Independent Film Festival for several years. He called Collins a “master storyteller,” especially in this detective genre. “Christmas Carol” has been adapted so many times, but never like this, he noted.
“It’s very relatable, no matter where you’re at in life,” Bishop said. “At the end of the movie, you literally feel good.”
“Everybody on set was a thrill to work with,” Bishop said.
“Blue Christmas” will be shown at the Palms 10 theater in Muscatine (3611 Palms Drive), March 16, and at Davenport’s new two-screen, indie movie palace, The Last Picture House (325 E. 2nd St.), on March 22.
“Blue Christmas” also will be shown April 6 during the Cedar Rapids Independent Film Festival.
Cedar Rapids actor/writer Rob Merritt – who stars as detective Richard Stone — has been in a number of “Christmas Carol” productions and loves “Blue Christmas.”
“Every person I’ve mentioned it to — imagine a 1940s film noir take on ‘Christmas Carol,’ and everyone’s like, ‘Wow, that’s cool!’” he said recently. “It’s a really good idea — it’s taking a story people know well, and putting it in a setting they’ve never seen done there, that way before. On top of that, for ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, Max is doing some very inventive things.”
“They’re very different from what every version of ‘A Christmas Carol’ has ever done,” Meritt said. In the original, Scrooge changes in one night from an awful, cruel person, to being a wonderful, cheerful guy, and Collins said what he wanted to do was, Richard Stone isn’t necessarily bad – “he just has something he needs to fix,” Merritt recalled.
“At the end, he hasn’t magically become a good guy. I’m still gonna go get drunk at the bar 20 minutes after the movie ends,” he said. “He definitely has something he needs to accomplish that will help other people, so he has to go out and do that. It’s more of a realistic character arc.”
At Old Creamery Theatre (2007), Merritt played Cratchit, and in Cedar Rapids (2011), he’s played Scrooge’s nephew. “It’s fun to come at it again from a different angle,” he said, noting he did a “Christmas Carol” in high school, the first play he ever did.
Bettendorf actor Tommy Ratkiewicz-Stierwalt (who has been in lots of QC community theater) performed the lamplighter for Ghost of Christmas Past at Music Guild’s 2016 production. In the film, he plays Stone’s idealistic associate, Joey.
“The way that Max had the ghosts come in, I don’t think I could have dreamed of this,” he said of “Blue Christmas.” “The way he did it was so creative. You haven’t seen or read or heard of a version like this. It’s gonna be pretty fricking sweet.”
From Bonnie to Elvis
In the new film, like “Christmas Carol,” Stone falls asleep on a fateful Christmas Eve, visited by his former partner Marley, doomed to an earth-bound purgatory because Stone didn’t bother to solve his murder.
Outlaw Bonnie Parker (of Bonnie & Clyde), the Ghost of Christmas Past, escorts Stone to revisit his idyllic childhood farm upbringing. When the family homestead is foreclosed, a family friend gets young Stone a job on the local police department, where he falls in with shady Deputy Chief Marley.
Together they go to the big city and become successful, corrupt private detectives. But even Stone’s crony Hank Ross of homicide is shocked when Marley’s murder does not move Stone into action, according to a synopsis.
Stone is visited next by Katie’s young brother Ben, apparently home on leave. But Ben proves to be recently deceased in combat – he’s the Ghost of Christmas Present, providing Stone with a look at Maggie and important client Turner having an affair. Maggie’s brother Eddie faces mob guns because Stone refused to help him pay off gambling debts; and Katie, her mother and sister on Christmas morning receive the terrible news about Ben.
The Ghost of Christmas Future comes calling, but Stone does not recognize the King (the otherwise unnamed Elvis Presley). The King reveals to Stone that Joey is about to quit – his pregnant wife Linda will go to work at a defense plant. Also, Stone sees Maggie and Turner getting married in Las Vegas…and witnesses his future self winding up on death row, convicted of Marley’s murder
Alisabeth Von Presley of Cedar Rapids (“who’s a phenomenal success”) plays Bonnie Parker as the Ghost of Christmas Past (of “Bonnie & Clyde”), Collins said.
She is an award-winning songwriter, championship choreographer, and has been seen on ABC’s “American Idol” and NBC’s “American Song Contest.”
“The guy who plays the King is hilariously funny, which is good because ‘A Christmas Carol’ is pretty dark at times,” Collins said of Scot Gehret of Davenport. “We wanted it to be humorous and fun, so we didn’t do a super noir piece. It is a Christmas film.”
The film is meant to be played straight and not a parody, he said (excluding Elvis). “I am very pleased and proud of the cast,” Collins said. There has been some interest from theaters in bringing it to release next Christmas season, he said. “People love holiday movies.”
In the movie, the King hums the Elvis song “Blue Christmas” briefly (but as much as required it to pay licensing fees).
The story is set in 1942, “a sweet spot for hard-boiled detectives,” Collins said, who’s obsessed with and has become a maestro of detective stories. “The Scrooge-type character doesn’t have to be a skinflint. His flaw is that he’s a little shady. He bribes the draft board so he doesn’t have to serve. He has different flaws than Scrooge did. He has the kind of flaws a tough detective in Chicago might have.”
He goes through a change in “Blue Christmas,” but Stone is still the same guy at the end. Collins said what he doesn’t like so much about “A Christmas Carol” is just how full of the holiday spirit Scrooge becomes.
Dick Tracy to ‘Perdition’
Collins – who loved reading Dick Tracy comics as a child – was hailed in 2004 by Publisher’s Weekly as “a new breed of writer.” A frequent Mystery Writers of America “Edgar” nominee in both fiction and non-fiction categories, he has earned an unprecedented 18 Private Eye Writers of America “Shamus” nominations, winning for his Nathan Heller novels, True Detective (1983) and Stolen Away (1991), receiving the PWA life achievement award, the Eye, in 2007.
His graphic novel Road to Perdition (1998) is the basis of the Academy Award-winning 2002 film starring Tom Hanks, Paul Newman and Daniel Craig, directed by Sam Mendes.
It was followed by two acclaimed prose sequels, Road to Purgatory (2004) and Road to Paradise (2005), and a graphic novel sequel, Return to Perdition (2011). He’s written a number of innovative suspense series, including Nolan (the author’s first series, about a professional thief), Quarry (the first series about a hired killer), and Eliot Ness (four novels about the famous real-life Untouchable’s Cleveland years). He’s completed a number of “Mike Hammer” novels begun by the late Mickey Spillane, with whom Collins did many projects; the fourth of these, Lady Go, Die!, was published in 2012.
His many comics credits include the syndicated strip Dick Tracy (1977 – 1993); his own Ms. Tree (longest-running private eye comic book); Batman; and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, based on the hit TV series for which he has also written video games, jigsaw puzzles, and ten novels that have sold millions of copies worldwide. Collins was assisted on his CSI novels by writer Matthew Clemens, with whom he collaborates on short stories and such novels as You Can’t Stop Me (2010), a Thriller Award nominee, and its sequel No One Will Hear You (2011).
He has been termed “the novelization king” by Entertainment Weekly, with tie-in books on the USA Today bestseller list nine times and the New York Times list three times. His movie novels include Saving Private Ryan, Air Force One, and American Gangster, which won the Best Novel “Scribe” Award in 2008 from the International Association of Tie-in Writers.
An independent filmmaker, Collins has written and directed five features and two documentaries, including the Lifetime movie Mommy (1996) and a 1997 sequel, Mommy’s Day. He wrote The Expert, a 1995 HBO World Premiere, and The Last Lullaby, starring Tom Sizemore, a 2008 feature film based on Collins’ acclaimed novel, The Last Quarry; the film won numerous awards on the film festival circuit before its theatrical and home-video release.
Collins never moved from Muscatine and has been married to his wife Barbara for 55 years.
“People always ask me, why stay in Muscatine?” he said recently. “I tell them, I didn’t stay; I just never left. I realized early on that you could write from anywhere.”
Collins said the Midwest was a rich part of the country for crime fiction — from the hub of Chicago, and he set his “Road to Perdition” graphic novel in Rock Island, based on the ruthless gangster John Looney (played in the 2002 film by Paul Newman as John Rooney).
He’s done some series set in Muscatine, and he and his wife have written (as Barbara Allan) about a town called Serenity, Iowa (based on Muscatine). The “Antiques” series is themed around antiquing and a mother-daughter, and some of its titles include “Antiques Roadkill” and “Antiques Flee Market.”
They hope to do an indie film based on one of those stories.
He’s planning to adapt one of his “Antiques” stories on “death by fruitcake” as another holiday-themed movie. “It isn’t anything like ‘Blue Christmas’,” Collins said. “You have the benefit of, I’ve got another Christmas movie for ya, but it’s a whole new deal. It’s not a sequel, it’s something new.”
He specializes in crime stories for many holidays: Christmas, Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, Father’s Day, Fourth of July and Thanksgiving.
A Wreath for Marley adds intrigue to a traditional Christmas tale; Flowers for Bill O’Reilly infuses a Memorial Day setting with horror-movie madness; and in the Thanksgiving yarn A Bird for Becky, a sweet 12-year-old girl turns out to be the reincarnation of a rubbed-out Chicago gangster.
Also included are the short stories Mommy, a Mother’s Day tale that became the bases of a cult movie; Firecracker Kill, a Fourth of July serial-killer noir that pairs a cop and a mob enforcer as heroes; and His Father’s Ghost, a Halloween-meets-Father’s Day study of an adopted boy’s search for the killer of the father he never met.
Filming in Iowa and Chicago
Ratkiewicz-Stierwalt has been an extra in a handful of “Chicago Fire” episodes (all non-speaking roles), all filmed in Chicago. He also filmed another movie (a narcissistic dude) last fall in North Liberty, Iowa, which he called a combination of “Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “Star Trek.”
His character in “Blue Christmas” is “the polar opposite” — wanting to care about everybody and to the best thing for everyone. Tommy is “kind of the Bob Cratchit to the walking master class that is Rob Merritt,” said of the actor who plays Stone.
“He’s realizing that not everything his boss does is ethical, but he needs a job and he wants to be there for his family,” Ratkiewicz-Stierwalt said. “He’s stuck between a rock and a hard place and has a few decisions he needs to make.”
Merritt has been an Iowa-based actor about 30 years, and has done a lot of film work in the past decade. “There’s a lot of filmmaking happening in Iowa and a lot of opportunities here,” he said. “It’s a very exciting place to be as an actor.” He had never worked with Collins before.
“I had seen some of his previous films at the Cedar Rapids Independent Film Festival, but I didn’t realize until the day we had the first read-through of ‘Blue Christmas,” I grew up as a fan of the daily Dick Tracy comic strip,” Merritt said, noting he didn’t know until decades later that Collins wrote and edited the strip collections.
He’s seen “Road to Perdition” many times, which he called “incredible.”
“Blue Christmas” was the fourth feature Merritt has acted in over the past year. In 2017, he wrote the script for the film “Amelia 2.0,” which featured Ed Begley, Jr.
“It’s been really cool to do so much film work without leaving the state,” he said.
Merritt recently finished filming “Until the Music Fades,” made by a Mason City-based director. They’re aiming for a fall 2024 release, and he played the main character (a country singer dealing with Lou Gehrig’s disease).
Collins will attend each of the “Blue Christmas” screenings, which will have a Q&A following, and he’s looking forward to the Last Picture House, co-owned by filmmakers (and Bettendorf natives) Scott Beck and Bryan Woods.
He said they have been very kind, and Collins added they’ve called him a mentor. He hasn’t been to a movie there yet, since it opened in late November at 2nd and Iowa streets. “I’ve talked to people who’ve been there and have been impressed. I’m looking forward to it. I hope the Quad Cities support it.”
Last Picture House is doing a good job supporting regional filmmakers, “which is incredibly generous,” Collins (former president of the Iowa Motion Picture Association) said. “I decided to stop being jealous of them and embrace what they’ve accomplished. And what they’ve accomplished is remarkable.”
For more information on “Blue Christmas,” including a trailer, click HERE.
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