Cobbler Elves In Hollywood

I've been thinking about fairy tales recently. Not the Disney-fied versions suitable for modern sensibilities, the Grimm versions, the oral history of German folklore full of blood and guts and betrayal. Not at all suitable for today's pansy children. Lord knows we don't want to expose kids to the real world until they get knocked on their asses by it.
   Anyhoo... I was thinking about the story about the poor cobbler* and the elves. This is the story where the destitute cobbler shows kindness to someone even less fortunate than he and the elves reward him with their shoe-making genius. The cobbler sells more elf shoes and the elves have a place to live, bada-bing, bada-boom story's over. If it were a cartoon - and it was - it would be eight minutes long or less.
   I got to thinking. Since evidently Hollywood has run out of new ideas and they've started releasing more sequels and remakes than ever, why not put in my two cents on a 'Elves and the Shoemaker' big-budget tentpole cinema event?
   First, let's work on the story. It doesn't come from the mind and MacBook of an established Hollywood hack, it's from German peasants 200 years ago. It's too... old world. Too grandpa and grandma, too preachy with almost no explosions or chase scenes. We need to fix that. Besides, no one knows what a cobbler is any more (unless you're Malaysian), so that's got to go. And helpful elves? Where's the conflict there? They need to be unhelpful elves. And they can't be tiny, that kind of CGI costs too much, they need to be person-sized. We can keep them elves because all that otherworldly stuff is playing really good these days, all that vampire, werewolf, zombie crap, the kids eat it up with a spoon.
   So we have person-sized elves who are hindering a... genetic researcher - that's a modern shoemaker, right? - who is trying to find a cure for cancer or something. They don't want him to find the cure because... well, we'll figure that out in a rewrite. The important thing is that the genetic researcher is being kept from his goal by person-sized elves. And... he falls in love with one of them. Yeah, that's good. Elves are hot, right? We'll have the female lead work out until you can see her ribs. It's all about getting the shot, right?
   That's the first act, genetic researcher falls in love with hot elf chick who is supposed to be keeping him from completing his work for some reason. They go on the run - that's the second act - while the elf commando squad comes after them. They don't use regular guns they use... something elfy. Leaf guns or magic beans or something. But the hero and his girl evade capture until... the elf girl has a change of heart. She realizes she needs to be true to her elf nature and leads him into a trap.
   End of second act. Now for the third act. The cobbler/ genetic researcher is in the hands of the elf commando squad and the head elf bad guy has orders to kill the scientist. Only he can't, see, because the scientist was kind to him earlier - we gotta keep the core of the original story, after all - and elf rules are to return kindness with kindness. So the commando squad ends up helping the scientist with his research, and since elves are really, really good with genetic research they complete his experiment in one night.
   It turns out that the research actually helps the elves who are... I don't know, dying or something... and if they'd killed him that would have sealed the fate of their entire race. The genetic researcher gets the hot elf chick, and everybody knows hot elf chicks are dynamite in the sack.
   Of course now the title has to go. In the original Grimm book the title in German was 'Die Wichtelmänner,' whatever the hell that means. We need something big, something with punch, something high-concept and relatable. So I'm thinking it's now called 'Hammer' since cobblers use hammers.

And there you are. One movie remake of the Elves and the Cobbler story, done up in Hollywood style. Why I don't have a high-rise office in Century City I'll never know.



* kids, a cobbler was/is a shoemaker, but not the kind of Malaysian child slave labor shoemakers Nike employs to make the $150 LeBron Air Max you're wearing