The Baker Street Nativity DVD Extras
Nov. 30th, 2013 02:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swissmargThis is basically an extended credits and end notes section for my fic, The Baker Street Nativity. It includes:
Images and videos:
This section includes to lots of content created and posted by other users. If any of the links go dead, you can let me know but I won't be able to replace any of it. You may be able to find other, similar links by doing a Google search.
Banner manip by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
frodosweetstuff: HERE
Manip of John and Sherlock as teachers in the classroom bylabellecreation: HERE, originally posted here.
Martin Freeman dancing gifs from Nativity!: HERE
Cracker the dog in Nativity! (how I imagined Gladstone looks): HERE and HERE
A Last Enemy/Nativity crossover slash fanvid (Benedict Cumberbatch's character/Martin Freeman's character): HERE
Thanks to summerdays on AO3 for finding this.
Sherlock and John dancing: HERE
Thanks tolabellecreation for pointing it out.
[Edit: It's been brought to my attention that this YouTube video is blocked in some countries due to copyright. I don't know anywhere else this video might be available, sorry. It's Sim!John and Sim!Sherlock dancing to Staying Alive. Here is a screenshot anyway:]
Movie references:
Nativity! And Have a trailer.
Mary Poppins, which was originally a book, of course, but John was referring to the Disney movie in chapter 5.
A Few Good Men, mentioned in chapter 7.
Top Gun, mentioned in chapter 7.
The Princess Bride, which was not named, but was referenced with the mention of iocane powder in chapter 16.
Alien, mentioned in chapter 20.
Music references:
Silent Night, We Three Kings and Little Town of Bethlehem, all traditional Christmas songs mentioned in chapter 3.
Those Were the Days, theme song to All in the Family, a 1970s sitcom. That was the one I was thinking of for Moriarty's little outburst in chapter 4. Apparently there was also another famous song called Those Were the Days, sung by Mary Hopkin, which would also work.
God Save the Queen is the British national anthem. Mentioned in chapter 7.
O Holy Night and Silver Bells, both traditional Christmas songs mentioned in chapter 10.
Saint-Saens' Violin Concerto No. 3 in B Minor, which Sherlock comforted himself with in chapter 19.
Additional references:
Paper airplane aerodynamics, which I researched for chapter 4 and then ended up hardly using any of it.
Itzhak Perlman, world-famous violinist mentioned in chapter 4.
Cuisenaire rods, a classroom learning tool for mathematics used in primary schools. Mentioned in chapter 9.
Hei Fung, the Chinese restaurant mentioned in chapter 11, is the real name of a Chinese restaurant in the town where I live. I have never eaten there but they appear to have received good reviews.
The Daily Telegraph is a real UK national newspaper. My only intention with assigning Moran as a reporter there was to show that he is linked into the big names. I have never read the newspaper and have no opinion on the quality of its reporting one way or another.
The ruins of St. Michael's Cathedral in Coventry, which was first mentioned in chapter 14 and served as the venue for the play in the movie. See below for more discussion on the setting of the fic vs. the movie.
Guy Fawkes Night is an English celebration at which fireworks are traditionally set off. Mentioned in chapter 15.
David Beckham is a well-known English football player. Mentioned in chapter 16.
Bacha bazi, mentioned in chapter 16.
Soju, the Korean drink mentioned in chapter 16.
The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum, mentioned in chapter 16.
Poisons: From Hemlock to Botox to the Killer Bean of Calabar by Peter Macinnes, mentioned in chapter 16.
It turns out that there are actually flats in London managed by a company called Clarendon. I didn't know that when I wrote chapter 17, and I don't intend the mention of the name to be in any way representative of the company or their properties. They actually look quite nice, much nicer than I imagined the place John was living.
Hackney cabs, mentioned in chapter 17, are the iconic black cabs associated with London, although they are also used in other cities in the UK.
Batman as John meant it in chapter 20. And as Sherlock understood it.
You can order personalised Christmas tree ornaments with your own pictures like John did in chapter 22 from many online sources, for example Snapfish.
First of all, Nativity! is not about a romantic relationship between the two male leads at all. There isn't even a subtext, as far as I can see. It's not really a buddy movie, either. The chemistry between the actors is completely different, and Mark Wooton as the classroom assistant reminded me more than anything else of an oversized, overenthusiastic puppy dog, with the teacher as someone who's not quite sure how he feels about dogs, hovering and trying to prevent vases from being broken. Aside from that, there is actually a romantic subplot between the teacher and his ex-girlfriend, who is a PA to the movie producer, and whose role I ignored completely in this fic.
So why did I choose the teacher and his assistant as the pairing, rather than the teacher and his PA ex? For one thing, the PA is more of a bit part. She appears mainly in flashbacks, and I wanted the main action in this fic to occur between John and Sherlock in the present. But that was only a later consideration, once I started to really get serious about plotting this out. The main reason was that there are quite a few moments in the movie that could be seen in a slashy light, given a different chemistry between the two leads. They hug, they kiss (on the forehead, but still), they dance together holding hands, they fight, they make up. Several times, I thought, if that were John and Sherlock, this scene would be all over tumblr.
My thoughts went to John and Sherlock, of course, because of Martin Freeman playing the teacher, and in my initial musings, I was thinking of Sherlock as the assistant. There are certainly points in favor of arranging it that way, first and foremost that it wouldn't involve any great mental adjustment in imposing the image of John onto Martin Freeman's Mr Maddens as you read. Then, in the BBC series, John is more the by-the-rules guy, at least officially, which is more like the teacher, while Sherlock is more likely to go off and have a crazy idea like the assistant does. In the movie, the teacher has a dog – named Cracker, which incidentally ended up being the basis of a pretty awful line in the movie - and Watson was the one with a dog in ACD canon. And really, Sherlock is not a dog person (although I ended up being pleasantly surprised how things worked with him and the dog in this).
However, as I looked at the characters more closely, I found Sherlock better suited to be the teacher and John the assistant. The dynamic of Sherlock being in charge and established in his position already (whether with the police or at the school) and John the one who has to fit himself in around Sherlock and figure out what his role is, is more like in the TV series. Another point was that I saw the teacher as being the more bad-tempered one, and the assistant more friendly and popular, which I think is also closer to the characters of Sherlock and John, respectively. The main selling point for me in the end, though, was that in the movie, it's the teacher's character who goes through the greatest development, who has to humble himself, make amends, and admit to his own feelings, and I just saw that as fitting Sherlock best and the plot that would make the most interesting story.
With that decided, I started writing. From John's point of view. Everything else I'd ever written in this fandom was from John's point of view. I had never even considered writing from Sherlock's point of view, and so I didn't think twice about it here either. I got about halfway through what ended up as chapter 2 – the first meeting between John and Sherlock – before I realized I needed to be writing from inside Sherlock's head. Not only because the main character development I was interested in was Sherlock, but also because there are actually quite a few scenes in the movie where the assistant isn't present. Scenes like the one where the teacher tells the rival music director about the movie, or when he takes the children to the studio, or when he goes to see the other school's play. Really key scenes. Either I would have to switch points of view - something which I think very few authors can pull off successfully, and I didn't want to risk it - or I'd have to scrap those scenes, or else come up with tricks for John to be witness to them. (As it turned out, I ended up having John present for all of those scenes, but I didn't know that yet.) And it was going to be necessary to see Sherlock's thoughts in order to do him justice anyway.
That threw a huge wrench in things. I didn't think I could pull Sherlock off. He's much smarter than me, for one. But I really thought it would be the best thing for the story. So I read a few fics written from Sherlock's point of view to get me in the mindset, backed up to set Sherlock up at the school before John comes onto the scene, and took a new start. It was weird at first, and I kept getting sidetracked trying to come up with details he could deduce about people (there were even more in the first couple of drafts, so you're seeing the pared down version). I also had to keep reminding myself to make his actions selfish but well motivated from his point of view. But I think I got a handle on him eventually, and I enjoyed messing about in his headspace. It's certainly a different way of seeing the world.
The downside, of course, as several readers have commented, is that we never see what John is thinking. I had a definite idea of what his feelings were for every scene he was in, though, and I hope I got enough of that across that his actions and motivations were comprehensible and in character.
Once I had the leads set, most of the rest of the casting was pretty easy. Moriarty was the rival school's music director, of course, and that meant that the film critic he was buddy-buddy with had to be Moran. Lestrade was the obvious choice for the head teacher, the one who gave Sherlock his assignments and was the authority he and John had to answer to.
There was only one named teacher in the movie aside from the two leads – Miss Rye - and as she helps with the play, I gave that role to Molly, as I see her as being the most active supporter of Sherlock and John on their cases. Also, Miss Rye is the only one they let in on the secret that there is not really a movie in the works, and I thought that fit with Molly being the only one who knew that Sherlock faked his death (at least as far as we know at the end of series 2).
There weren't actually any mean-spirited teachers in the movie who denigrated Mr Maddens' efforts with the play, but on the one hand, I wanted to give this fic more of an ensemble feeling, at least for some scenes, and on the other hand, I felt that having opposition in addition to Moriarty would work well to show Sherlock's social and emotional isolation. Thus Donovan and Anderson make a couple of appearances in their completely un-nuanced roles as themselves, and I sort of apologize for making them cardboard and predictable, but they are really only there as foils. I did at least give Anderson a first name, Nigel, because it bugs me when he is only ever referred to by his last name, even in situations where it would be natural to include his first name.
Mike Stamford got to make a cameo in the first scene because I needed to establish that he was at the school (so that he could be the contact who brings John in), and because he was also in the first scene in the BBC series where John and Sherlock met each other and I sort of wanted to honor that. In the movie, the teacher and the assistant first meet in the classroom when there are no other teachers around, and I liked that better that inserting Mike there. So this is basically, like Donovan and Anderson, Stamford playing himself.
Next was Mrs Hudson, who I definitely wanted to include because she opens a good window on Sherlock's underlying sensitivity and shows that he is able to get along with people when he has a will to. There was no secretary in the movie, but there was a school priest (the school was religiously affiliated in the movie, which I'll discuss later on). At first, I wrote Mrs Hudson in as a kind of Mother Superior because I thought that the only way a school would have a nun on staff would be if she were actually in charge of the school, but that put her in conflict with Lestrade as an authority figure. I didn't think a nun would be there only in an advisory function, as I saw the priest being. (Although maybe I'm wrong about that, I genuinely have no idea how Catholic schools function.) The main problem, though, was that I eventually decided I didn't want the school to be overtly religious. So I invented the school secretary position for Mrs Hudson. That way, she would be a neutral party who could pop into any scene when I needed her and was in a position to do little favors for Sherlock.
Now I was down to dealing with Mycroft and the Hollywood people. I knew that Mycroft was going to be the one who swooped in at the end in a deus ex machina move to save the day, but I actually had a really hard time defining his role. In the movie, the situation is that the teacher brags to the rival school's music director that his ex-girlfriend is a big-shot Hollywood movie producer and is coming to make a major motion picture out of the Nativity play. The problem is, though – aside from the fact that he hasn't had any contact with her in years and obviously is lying through his teeth - the teacher believes that his ex-girlfriend really is a producer. He doesn't find out until much later that she is 'just' a PA at the studio. Now, you might think that's fine for Mycroft, since he is supposed to have only a minor bureaucratic position, but in that case, Sherlock would never have bragged that Mycroft was going to make a movie out of the play. And I didn't find it believable that Sherlock wouldn't know what Mycroft's job title really was, regardless of how much actual power he wielded behind the scenes. So since I needed Mycroft to have a job that was actually in line with the amount of power and authority he has, I decided to go one better than producer and make him head of the entire studio, a role which didn't exist in the movie. I suppose in retrospect it would have been more accurate and worked just as well if I'd left him as a producer, but I wanted him to have autonomy and not have to answer to anyone else, and while he may be able to work the system from inside a government bureaucracy, I thought he'd have a much harder time pulling of spectacular stunts as a producer attached to a major studio.
Next, with Mycroft set, I considered putting in Anthea as the PA. There was also a bitchy male receptionist at the studio who Anderson could have played pretty well, as well as another pompous executive I might have made good use of – perhaps with the Superintendent and a well-aimed punch to the nose – but I ended up making much less of the entire trip to the studio than they did in the movie, mostly because I didn't see how I could do much in those scenes to show any new angles or developments in John and Sherlock's relationship by that point in the story. So I cut all of those characters and their scenes. Anthea actually does make a brief appearance, as Mycroft's unnamed PA, but since as I said, I eliminated the role of the ex-girlfriend, she really is just Mycroft's PA as in the BBC series. And she remained unnamed because it bugs me that she's always referred to as Anthea in fics when we know that's not her name.
The mayor is the only character from the movie who emerged unscathed from my recasting campaign and was allowed to retain his original face. The reason was because in the movie, there was a romantic subtext going on between the head teacher (a woman in the movie) and the mayor, and I didn't want to get into any sort of romance with Lestrade. Also, I was out of well-known characters from the BBC to use.
... and then there was the dog. I hesitated over including him at all, since he doesn't contribute anything to the plot in the movie, and as I mentioned above, I don't see Sherlock as the kind of person who would have gone out and got himself a dog. On the other hand, there is precedent for a dog in the ACD canon as well as in other adaptations, and I realized fairly quickly that having a dog would give Sherlock an excuse for going out, as well as for getting out of socially uncomfortable situations. So I started including the dog to see how it went. At first I only put him in the scenes he appeared in in the movie, but I was also making up lots of original scenes to get the private interactions between Sherlock and John going, and I realized at some point that Sherlock was neglecting his dog (i.e. I'd forgot about him). So I had to decide to either take the dog out of the scenes I'd put him in already, or to add him in here and there in the other scenes. I opted to add him in as it seemed less work, and I am very glad I did. Gladstone ended up being a real addition to Sherlock's character, as well as creating opportunities for a little humor in certain emotionally heavy moments. He was kind of a millstone in other parts, like when Sherlock was staking out John's flat, and I had to constantly remind myself to make sure he was walked and fed and accounted for at all times. But I think the dog ended up being an enrichment to the story. And lots of readers commented on him too, so I think he was well-received.
The deeper I got into this project, the more I was surprised by how many things mapped incredibly well from the BBC series onto the movie, and vice versa. There were, of course, many other things that I had to change one way or the other.
The first thing I ran into was Sherlock's housing situation. In the movie, the teacher lives in a semi-detached house, and I decided I wanted to keep that, rather than having him live in the flat at Baker Street. The main reason was because I wanted him to teach at the Baker Street School so that I could call the fic The Baker Street Nativity, and if I co-opted the name of the street, it seemed weird to insist on keeping him in a flat on a generic street when I had a perfectly good house standing empty, as it were. This also played into the casting of Mrs Hudson, since the teacher does not have a landlady, so I needed to find another role for her.
As long as we're on housing, I'll just mention John as well. In the movie, the teaching assistant lived in a trailer on the school grounds. Since John doesn't have any personal connection to the school – unlike the teaching assistant in the movie, who was the head teacher's nephew – I didn't see why he would be living there. I could have put the trailer in his sister's driveway I suppose, but the BBC series had John in a dingy bedsit, and that seemed easiest to stick with.
The next issue I ran into was which city to set the fic in. The movie is set in Coventry, and I would need to keep it there if I wanted the play to be put on in a spectacular bombed-out cathedral, as there isn't one of those in London. But... Sherlock Holmes in Coventry? That doesn't really compute. So I kind of took the squishy route and didn't name the city at all. However, you might notice that no one ever takes the Tube, and there are no other London landmarks named. The river is just a river, not the Thames, for example. I even went so far as to check that there are black taxis in Coventry (there are) so that when they take one to the studio, it doesn't unequivocally identify the city. You just have to imagine that London has something like the St. Michael's Cathedral ruins, if you have your heart set on Sherlock living in London.
Then there was the question of whether the school was private or state-funded. In the movie, as I said, it was religiously affiliated (Catholic, I think, although I could be wrong), which I assumed must mean it was a private school. I have since been informed that there are state schools with religious affiliation in the UK, and that the school in the movie was one of those. I think they made the school religious in the movie so that they could stage the Nativity in the first place; a secular school would presumably not do one. Anyway, as I started planning this fic, I had in mind that the Baker Street School was religious, albeit private. Then I started thinking about how Sherlock got into teaching. The extremely helpful members of sh_britglish on LJ gave me lots of tips on this, as on many other things. (As a side note, it's kind of fun – for me anyway - to look back through my posts on the community starting in January 2013 and watch my progress through writing this in the various issues that crop up.) According to what I gleaned from their discussion, probably the easiest thing would be for him to gain his certification while teaching, and a private school would be the best place for him to do that as they would have the greatest leeway in hiring. Once I'd established that, I couldn't justify him applying for a job at a Catholic school in my mind. I also really didn't want to turn this fic into any sort of statement on religion. So I scrapped any mention of the religious aspect and only said it's a private school. It's up to you if you want to read between the lines whether it's still a religious school.
The movie studio was another institution that needed to be adapted. Can we talk for a minute about all the problems with what they did in the movie, taking the two kids to California without their parents being aware of it? How did they get their passports? Visas? This wasn't just an afternoon jaunt. It would have required them to be gone for 48 hours, at the very least. One would presume the parents would have alerted the police within a couple of hours of the children not coming home from school. They obviously went there on a weekday, as the studio offices were open. So the teacher was missing from school. Maybe the assistant covered his classes, but someone would have noticed he wasn't there. So... teacher missing, students missing, maybe they are with him? But no one thought to try and contact him. And he was never even questioned by the police. Just chewed out a bit by the head teacher. Well, and fired. But that didn't even begin to balance out all the other plot holes.
I wanted to fix all of that. Since I'd decided Mycroft was the studio head, I didn't see any reason for him to be in California. I mean, Mycroft is quintessentially British. He would never move to California. So I kept the movie studio in England. I didn't want to use a real movie studio's name, but I started out basing it on Leavesden Studios (a movie studio near London most famous for being where the Harry Potter movies were filmed). I originally called it Bladeslair (leaf:blade, den:lair), but at a later stage changed it to Whitehall Studios, in a nod to Mycroft's government connection. (Whitehall is a street in London; from Wikipedia: "Recognised as the centre of Her Majesty's Government, the street is lined with government departments and ministries; the name "Whitehall" is thus also frequently used as a metonym for overall British governmental administration, as well as being a geographic name for the surrounding area.") Keeping the movie studio fairly local meant that the visit could take place in the course of an afternoon and could be done without parental involvement or anyone noticing at first that Sherlock and John were involved.
For the rival school, I wanted a name that had somewhat sinister connotations. I remembered that the villain in the 2009 movie Sherlock Holmes with Robert Downey Jr. was named Blackwood, and that appealed to me for a couple of reasons. There's the 'black', which suggests something dark and mysterious, and there's also the 'wood' that made me think of Westwood, which of course is the designer whose suits Moriarty wears.
One question that a lot of people have asked is about the lyrics. All of the lyrics are directly from the movie, except for the three lines of Sherlock's original version of Mary and Joseph's song, with the portents and shofarim. This was one of those areas where I was astounded by how well the lyrics suited my new interpretation of the movie and the relationship between John and Sherlock. It's as if they were written with this story in mind. ;)
In addition to the lyrics, several of the lines of dialogue and even some of the longer speeches are also taken directly from the movie. I neglected to make specific note of which bits, but there are a lot. Some of the ones I remember are: most of Lestrade's speech at the start of the play, the children's letters to Santa, all of the dialogue in the scene in the classroom where the two boys are fighting over who will be cast as Joseph, large chunks of the dialogue in the scene where Molly finds out about the movie not being real, quite a lot of the casting discussion, and most if not all of Molly's lines in the scene where John and Sherlock get fired. I'm sure there are more, mostly single lines here and there. Even given all that, measured against the total word count of the story, it's a miniscule percentage. I actually transcribed extensive portions of the movie while writing the fic, although I didn't keep those notes separate from the chapters, so the bits I didn't end up using got deleted.
- Links to images and videos created for or tangentially related to the story
- Credits to the films referenced in the story
- Credits to the music referenced in the story
- Additional credits and links to people, places, and things in the story
- The Making Of: How this story came to be
- The Casting Couch: How the roles were assigned to the characters
- The Adaptation: Some of the alterations and compromises that were made in order to meld the two verses
Images and videos:
This section includes to lots of content created and posted by other users. If any of the links go dead, you can let me know but I won't be able to replace any of it. You may be able to find other, similar links by doing a Google search.
Banner manip by
frodosweetstuff: HERE Manip of John and Sherlock as teachers in the classroom by
labellecreation: HERE, originally posted here.Martin Freeman dancing gifs from Nativity!: HERE
Cracker the dog in Nativity! (how I imagined Gladstone looks): HERE and HERE
A Last Enemy/Nativity crossover slash fanvid (Benedict Cumberbatch's character/Martin Freeman's character): HERE
Thanks to summerdays on AO3 for finding this.
Sherlock and John dancing: HERE
Thanks to
labellecreation for pointing it out.[Edit: It's been brought to my attention that this YouTube video is blocked in some countries due to copyright. I don't know anywhere else this video might be available, sorry. It's Sim!John and Sim!Sherlock dancing to Staying Alive. Here is a screenshot anyway:]
Movie references:
Nativity! And Have a trailer.
Mary Poppins, which was originally a book, of course, but John was referring to the Disney movie in chapter 5.
A Few Good Men, mentioned in chapter 7.
Top Gun, mentioned in chapter 7.
The Princess Bride, which was not named, but was referenced with the mention of iocane powder in chapter 16.
Alien, mentioned in chapter 20.
Music references:
Silent Night, We Three Kings and Little Town of Bethlehem, all traditional Christmas songs mentioned in chapter 3.
Those Were the Days, theme song to All in the Family, a 1970s sitcom. That was the one I was thinking of for Moriarty's little outburst in chapter 4. Apparently there was also another famous song called Those Were the Days, sung by Mary Hopkin, which would also work.
God Save the Queen is the British national anthem. Mentioned in chapter 7.
O Holy Night and Silver Bells, both traditional Christmas songs mentioned in chapter 10.
Saint-Saens' Violin Concerto No. 3 in B Minor, which Sherlock comforted himself with in chapter 19.
Additional references:
Paper airplane aerodynamics, which I researched for chapter 4 and then ended up hardly using any of it.
Itzhak Perlman, world-famous violinist mentioned in chapter 4.
Cuisenaire rods, a classroom learning tool for mathematics used in primary schools. Mentioned in chapter 9.
Hei Fung, the Chinese restaurant mentioned in chapter 11, is the real name of a Chinese restaurant in the town where I live. I have never eaten there but they appear to have received good reviews.
The Daily Telegraph is a real UK national newspaper. My only intention with assigning Moran as a reporter there was to show that he is linked into the big names. I have never read the newspaper and have no opinion on the quality of its reporting one way or another.
The ruins of St. Michael's Cathedral in Coventry, which was first mentioned in chapter 14 and served as the venue for the play in the movie. See below for more discussion on the setting of the fic vs. the movie.
Guy Fawkes Night is an English celebration at which fireworks are traditionally set off. Mentioned in chapter 15.
David Beckham is a well-known English football player. Mentioned in chapter 16.
Bacha bazi, mentioned in chapter 16.
Soju, the Korean drink mentioned in chapter 16.
The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum, mentioned in chapter 16.
Poisons: From Hemlock to Botox to the Killer Bean of Calabar by Peter Macinnes, mentioned in chapter 16.
It turns out that there are actually flats in London managed by a company called Clarendon. I didn't know that when I wrote chapter 17, and I don't intend the mention of the name to be in any way representative of the company or their properties. They actually look quite nice, much nicer than I imagined the place John was living.
Hackney cabs, mentioned in chapter 17, are the iconic black cabs associated with London, although they are also used in other cities in the UK.
Batman as John meant it in chapter 20. And as Sherlock understood it.
You can order personalised Christmas tree ornaments with your own pictures like John did in chapter 22 from many online sources, for example Snapfish.
The Making Of...
First of all, Nativity! is not about a romantic relationship between the two male leads at all. There isn't even a subtext, as far as I can see. It's not really a buddy movie, either. The chemistry between the actors is completely different, and Mark Wooton as the classroom assistant reminded me more than anything else of an oversized, overenthusiastic puppy dog, with the teacher as someone who's not quite sure how he feels about dogs, hovering and trying to prevent vases from being broken. Aside from that, there is actually a romantic subplot between the teacher and his ex-girlfriend, who is a PA to the movie producer, and whose role I ignored completely in this fic.
So why did I choose the teacher and his assistant as the pairing, rather than the teacher and his PA ex? For one thing, the PA is more of a bit part. She appears mainly in flashbacks, and I wanted the main action in this fic to occur between John and Sherlock in the present. But that was only a later consideration, once I started to really get serious about plotting this out. The main reason was that there are quite a few moments in the movie that could be seen in a slashy light, given a different chemistry between the two leads. They hug, they kiss (on the forehead, but still), they dance together holding hands, they fight, they make up. Several times, I thought, if that were John and Sherlock, this scene would be all over tumblr.
My thoughts went to John and Sherlock, of course, because of Martin Freeman playing the teacher, and in my initial musings, I was thinking of Sherlock as the assistant. There are certainly points in favor of arranging it that way, first and foremost that it wouldn't involve any great mental adjustment in imposing the image of John onto Martin Freeman's Mr Maddens as you read. Then, in the BBC series, John is more the by-the-rules guy, at least officially, which is more like the teacher, while Sherlock is more likely to go off and have a crazy idea like the assistant does. In the movie, the teacher has a dog – named Cracker, which incidentally ended up being the basis of a pretty awful line in the movie - and Watson was the one with a dog in ACD canon. And really, Sherlock is not a dog person (although I ended up being pleasantly surprised how things worked with him and the dog in this).
However, as I looked at the characters more closely, I found Sherlock better suited to be the teacher and John the assistant. The dynamic of Sherlock being in charge and established in his position already (whether with the police or at the school) and John the one who has to fit himself in around Sherlock and figure out what his role is, is more like in the TV series. Another point was that I saw the teacher as being the more bad-tempered one, and the assistant more friendly and popular, which I think is also closer to the characters of Sherlock and John, respectively. The main selling point for me in the end, though, was that in the movie, it's the teacher's character who goes through the greatest development, who has to humble himself, make amends, and admit to his own feelings, and I just saw that as fitting Sherlock best and the plot that would make the most interesting story.
With that decided, I started writing. From John's point of view. Everything else I'd ever written in this fandom was from John's point of view. I had never even considered writing from Sherlock's point of view, and so I didn't think twice about it here either. I got about halfway through what ended up as chapter 2 – the first meeting between John and Sherlock – before I realized I needed to be writing from inside Sherlock's head. Not only because the main character development I was interested in was Sherlock, but also because there are actually quite a few scenes in the movie where the assistant isn't present. Scenes like the one where the teacher tells the rival music director about the movie, or when he takes the children to the studio, or when he goes to see the other school's play. Really key scenes. Either I would have to switch points of view - something which I think very few authors can pull off successfully, and I didn't want to risk it - or I'd have to scrap those scenes, or else come up with tricks for John to be witness to them. (As it turned out, I ended up having John present for all of those scenes, but I didn't know that yet.) And it was going to be necessary to see Sherlock's thoughts in order to do him justice anyway.
That threw a huge wrench in things. I didn't think I could pull Sherlock off. He's much smarter than me, for one. But I really thought it would be the best thing for the story. So I read a few fics written from Sherlock's point of view to get me in the mindset, backed up to set Sherlock up at the school before John comes onto the scene, and took a new start. It was weird at first, and I kept getting sidetracked trying to come up with details he could deduce about people (there were even more in the first couple of drafts, so you're seeing the pared down version). I also had to keep reminding myself to make his actions selfish but well motivated from his point of view. But I think I got a handle on him eventually, and I enjoyed messing about in his headspace. It's certainly a different way of seeing the world.
The downside, of course, as several readers have commented, is that we never see what John is thinking. I had a definite idea of what his feelings were for every scene he was in, though, and I hope I got enough of that across that his actions and motivations were comprehensible and in character.
The Casting Couch...
Once I had the leads set, most of the rest of the casting was pretty easy. Moriarty was the rival school's music director, of course, and that meant that the film critic he was buddy-buddy with had to be Moran. Lestrade was the obvious choice for the head teacher, the one who gave Sherlock his assignments and was the authority he and John had to answer to.
There was only one named teacher in the movie aside from the two leads – Miss Rye - and as she helps with the play, I gave that role to Molly, as I see her as being the most active supporter of Sherlock and John on their cases. Also, Miss Rye is the only one they let in on the secret that there is not really a movie in the works, and I thought that fit with Molly being the only one who knew that Sherlock faked his death (at least as far as we know at the end of series 2).
There weren't actually any mean-spirited teachers in the movie who denigrated Mr Maddens' efforts with the play, but on the one hand, I wanted to give this fic more of an ensemble feeling, at least for some scenes, and on the other hand, I felt that having opposition in addition to Moriarty would work well to show Sherlock's social and emotional isolation. Thus Donovan and Anderson make a couple of appearances in their completely un-nuanced roles as themselves, and I sort of apologize for making them cardboard and predictable, but they are really only there as foils. I did at least give Anderson a first name, Nigel, because it bugs me when he is only ever referred to by his last name, even in situations where it would be natural to include his first name.
Mike Stamford got to make a cameo in the first scene because I needed to establish that he was at the school (so that he could be the contact who brings John in), and because he was also in the first scene in the BBC series where John and Sherlock met each other and I sort of wanted to honor that. In the movie, the teacher and the assistant first meet in the classroom when there are no other teachers around, and I liked that better that inserting Mike there. So this is basically, like Donovan and Anderson, Stamford playing himself.
Next was Mrs Hudson, who I definitely wanted to include because she opens a good window on Sherlock's underlying sensitivity and shows that he is able to get along with people when he has a will to. There was no secretary in the movie, but there was a school priest (the school was religiously affiliated in the movie, which I'll discuss later on). At first, I wrote Mrs Hudson in as a kind of Mother Superior because I thought that the only way a school would have a nun on staff would be if she were actually in charge of the school, but that put her in conflict with Lestrade as an authority figure. I didn't think a nun would be there only in an advisory function, as I saw the priest being. (Although maybe I'm wrong about that, I genuinely have no idea how Catholic schools function.) The main problem, though, was that I eventually decided I didn't want the school to be overtly religious. So I invented the school secretary position for Mrs Hudson. That way, she would be a neutral party who could pop into any scene when I needed her and was in a position to do little favors for Sherlock.
Now I was down to dealing with Mycroft and the Hollywood people. I knew that Mycroft was going to be the one who swooped in at the end in a deus ex machina move to save the day, but I actually had a really hard time defining his role. In the movie, the situation is that the teacher brags to the rival school's music director that his ex-girlfriend is a big-shot Hollywood movie producer and is coming to make a major motion picture out of the Nativity play. The problem is, though – aside from the fact that he hasn't had any contact with her in years and obviously is lying through his teeth - the teacher believes that his ex-girlfriend really is a producer. He doesn't find out until much later that she is 'just' a PA at the studio. Now, you might think that's fine for Mycroft, since he is supposed to have only a minor bureaucratic position, but in that case, Sherlock would never have bragged that Mycroft was going to make a movie out of the play. And I didn't find it believable that Sherlock wouldn't know what Mycroft's job title really was, regardless of how much actual power he wielded behind the scenes. So since I needed Mycroft to have a job that was actually in line with the amount of power and authority he has, I decided to go one better than producer and make him head of the entire studio, a role which didn't exist in the movie. I suppose in retrospect it would have been more accurate and worked just as well if I'd left him as a producer, but I wanted him to have autonomy and not have to answer to anyone else, and while he may be able to work the system from inside a government bureaucracy, I thought he'd have a much harder time pulling of spectacular stunts as a producer attached to a major studio.
Next, with Mycroft set, I considered putting in Anthea as the PA. There was also a bitchy male receptionist at the studio who Anderson could have played pretty well, as well as another pompous executive I might have made good use of – perhaps with the Superintendent and a well-aimed punch to the nose – but I ended up making much less of the entire trip to the studio than they did in the movie, mostly because I didn't see how I could do much in those scenes to show any new angles or developments in John and Sherlock's relationship by that point in the story. So I cut all of those characters and their scenes. Anthea actually does make a brief appearance, as Mycroft's unnamed PA, but since as I said, I eliminated the role of the ex-girlfriend, she really is just Mycroft's PA as in the BBC series. And she remained unnamed because it bugs me that she's always referred to as Anthea in fics when we know that's not her name.
The mayor is the only character from the movie who emerged unscathed from my recasting campaign and was allowed to retain his original face. The reason was because in the movie, there was a romantic subtext going on between the head teacher (a woman in the movie) and the mayor, and I didn't want to get into any sort of romance with Lestrade. Also, I was out of well-known characters from the BBC to use.
... and then there was the dog. I hesitated over including him at all, since he doesn't contribute anything to the plot in the movie, and as I mentioned above, I don't see Sherlock as the kind of person who would have gone out and got himself a dog. On the other hand, there is precedent for a dog in the ACD canon as well as in other adaptations, and I realized fairly quickly that having a dog would give Sherlock an excuse for going out, as well as for getting out of socially uncomfortable situations. So I started including the dog to see how it went. At first I only put him in the scenes he appeared in in the movie, but I was also making up lots of original scenes to get the private interactions between Sherlock and John going, and I realized at some point that Sherlock was neglecting his dog (i.e. I'd forgot about him). So I had to decide to either take the dog out of the scenes I'd put him in already, or to add him in here and there in the other scenes. I opted to add him in as it seemed less work, and I am very glad I did. Gladstone ended up being a real addition to Sherlock's character, as well as creating opportunities for a little humor in certain emotionally heavy moments. He was kind of a millstone in other parts, like when Sherlock was staking out John's flat, and I had to constantly remind myself to make sure he was walked and fed and accounted for at all times. But I think the dog ended up being an enrichment to the story. And lots of readers commented on him too, so I think he was well-received.
The Adaptation...
The deeper I got into this project, the more I was surprised by how many things mapped incredibly well from the BBC series onto the movie, and vice versa. There were, of course, many other things that I had to change one way or the other.
The first thing I ran into was Sherlock's housing situation. In the movie, the teacher lives in a semi-detached house, and I decided I wanted to keep that, rather than having him live in the flat at Baker Street. The main reason was because I wanted him to teach at the Baker Street School so that I could call the fic The Baker Street Nativity, and if I co-opted the name of the street, it seemed weird to insist on keeping him in a flat on a generic street when I had a perfectly good house standing empty, as it were. This also played into the casting of Mrs Hudson, since the teacher does not have a landlady, so I needed to find another role for her.
As long as we're on housing, I'll just mention John as well. In the movie, the teaching assistant lived in a trailer on the school grounds. Since John doesn't have any personal connection to the school – unlike the teaching assistant in the movie, who was the head teacher's nephew – I didn't see why he would be living there. I could have put the trailer in his sister's driveway I suppose, but the BBC series had John in a dingy bedsit, and that seemed easiest to stick with.
The next issue I ran into was which city to set the fic in. The movie is set in Coventry, and I would need to keep it there if I wanted the play to be put on in a spectacular bombed-out cathedral, as there isn't one of those in London. But... Sherlock Holmes in Coventry? That doesn't really compute. So I kind of took the squishy route and didn't name the city at all. However, you might notice that no one ever takes the Tube, and there are no other London landmarks named. The river is just a river, not the Thames, for example. I even went so far as to check that there are black taxis in Coventry (there are) so that when they take one to the studio, it doesn't unequivocally identify the city. You just have to imagine that London has something like the St. Michael's Cathedral ruins, if you have your heart set on Sherlock living in London.
Then there was the question of whether the school was private or state-funded. In the movie, as I said, it was religiously affiliated (Catholic, I think, although I could be wrong), which I assumed must mean it was a private school. I have since been informed that there are state schools with religious affiliation in the UK, and that the school in the movie was one of those. I think they made the school religious in the movie so that they could stage the Nativity in the first place; a secular school would presumably not do one. Anyway, as I started planning this fic, I had in mind that the Baker Street School was religious, albeit private. Then I started thinking about how Sherlock got into teaching. The extremely helpful members of sh_britglish on LJ gave me lots of tips on this, as on many other things. (As a side note, it's kind of fun – for me anyway - to look back through my posts on the community starting in January 2013 and watch my progress through writing this in the various issues that crop up.) According to what I gleaned from their discussion, probably the easiest thing would be for him to gain his certification while teaching, and a private school would be the best place for him to do that as they would have the greatest leeway in hiring. Once I'd established that, I couldn't justify him applying for a job at a Catholic school in my mind. I also really didn't want to turn this fic into any sort of statement on religion. So I scrapped any mention of the religious aspect and only said it's a private school. It's up to you if you want to read between the lines whether it's still a religious school.
The movie studio was another institution that needed to be adapted. Can we talk for a minute about all the problems with what they did in the movie, taking the two kids to California without their parents being aware of it? How did they get their passports? Visas? This wasn't just an afternoon jaunt. It would have required them to be gone for 48 hours, at the very least. One would presume the parents would have alerted the police within a couple of hours of the children not coming home from school. They obviously went there on a weekday, as the studio offices were open. So the teacher was missing from school. Maybe the assistant covered his classes, but someone would have noticed he wasn't there. So... teacher missing, students missing, maybe they are with him? But no one thought to try and contact him. And he was never even questioned by the police. Just chewed out a bit by the head teacher. Well, and fired. But that didn't even begin to balance out all the other plot holes.
I wanted to fix all of that. Since I'd decided Mycroft was the studio head, I didn't see any reason for him to be in California. I mean, Mycroft is quintessentially British. He would never move to California. So I kept the movie studio in England. I didn't want to use a real movie studio's name, but I started out basing it on Leavesden Studios (a movie studio near London most famous for being where the Harry Potter movies were filmed). I originally called it Bladeslair (leaf:blade, den:lair), but at a later stage changed it to Whitehall Studios, in a nod to Mycroft's government connection. (Whitehall is a street in London; from Wikipedia: "Recognised as the centre of Her Majesty's Government, the street is lined with government departments and ministries; the name "Whitehall" is thus also frequently used as a metonym for overall British governmental administration, as well as being a geographic name for the surrounding area.") Keeping the movie studio fairly local meant that the visit could take place in the course of an afternoon and could be done without parental involvement or anyone noticing at first that Sherlock and John were involved.
For the rival school, I wanted a name that had somewhat sinister connotations. I remembered that the villain in the 2009 movie Sherlock Holmes with Robert Downey Jr. was named Blackwood, and that appealed to me for a couple of reasons. There's the 'black', which suggests something dark and mysterious, and there's also the 'wood' that made me think of Westwood, which of course is the designer whose suits Moriarty wears.
One question that a lot of people have asked is about the lyrics. All of the lyrics are directly from the movie, except for the three lines of Sherlock's original version of Mary and Joseph's song, with the portents and shofarim. This was one of those areas where I was astounded by how well the lyrics suited my new interpretation of the movie and the relationship between John and Sherlock. It's as if they were written with this story in mind. ;)
In addition to the lyrics, several of the lines of dialogue and even some of the longer speeches are also taken directly from the movie. I neglected to make specific note of which bits, but there are a lot. Some of the ones I remember are: most of Lestrade's speech at the start of the play, the children's letters to Santa, all of the dialogue in the scene in the classroom where the two boys are fighting over who will be cast as Joseph, large chunks of the dialogue in the scene where Molly finds out about the movie not being real, quite a lot of the casting discussion, and most if not all of Molly's lines in the scene where John and Sherlock get fired. I'm sure there are more, mostly single lines here and there. Even given all that, measured against the total word count of the story, it's a miniscule percentage. I actually transcribed extensive portions of the movie while writing the fic, although I didn't keep those notes separate from the chapters, so the bits I didn't end up using got deleted.
