Short on Elf-Esteem

When David Sedaris was a little Christmas guy, he thought the holiday ought to have another theme besides Santa and elves and yadda, yadda, yadda.

One year the theme was Louis Vuitton.

“He’d make us Louis Vuitton outfits and handbags made out of cardboard,” says his sister Tiffany. “We were his models and we were forced to exercise. . . . It’s not like you go home for Christmas and put your feet up.”

OK, so Sedaris was a bit of a holiday nazi. That is, if you believe Tiffany’s seasonal reminiscence during the recent taping of Ira Glass’ public radio show, “This American Life,” at the Veterans Wadsworth Theater.

Correction.

The “thrillingly large” Wadsworth, in Glass-speak. Who knew?

Anyway, now that Sedaris is a big Christmas guy, “This American Life” put together a special show of stories from his new book, “Holidays on Ice” (Little, Brown), about such Yule-time favorites as “Dinah, the Christmas Whore,” which for some reason wasn’t read.

Instead, “Saturday Night Live” alum Julia Sweeney and Matt Malloy (“In the Company of Men”) joined Sedaris to constitute the merry throng reading about such Christmas heart warmers as the woman accused of killing a tot in the spin cycle. Hear all about it on KCRW-FM (89.9) Saturday at 6 p.m. Tra la. Tra la.

As Sedaris experts know, the public radio cult leader first rose to Christmas prominence as an elf. With a bad attitude. In his classic story, “SantaLand Diaries,” he dissected his experience as Crumpet, one of Santa’s charming little helpers at Macy’s Herald Square in New York, whence he hails.

Of course, this was during high Santa season and seeing The Man meant a two-hour wait. “Standing in a two-hour line makes people think they’re not living in a democratic nation. . . . There was a line for Santa and a line for the women’s bathroom, and one woman, after asking me a dozen questions already, asked: ‘Which is the line for the women’s bathroom?’ I shouted that I thought it was the line with all the women in it.

“She said, ‘I’m going to have you fired.’ . . . I wanted to lean over and say, ‘I’m going to have you killed.’ ”

Not all is so fa la la in SedarisLand. A short while ago, he visited Phoenix, where he hung out in the medical examiner’s office for Esquire magazine.

“I just wanted to see a lot of dead people,” the boyish Sedaris said sweetly. “I was always afraid of dead people, and I thought if I see a lot of them, I won’t be.”

Smoker-drinker-hell-raiser Sedaris ended up going on a bunch of hospital pick-ups, which turned out to be an edifying experience.

“I learned what my lungs and my liver probably look like, that little scrap of a liver I probably have left and the blackened rags, which are my lungs.” He also learned about funeral etiquette. “If you don’t have a head, chances are they won’t give you an open-casket funeral.”

Ho, ho, ho.

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They came out in leather-clad hordes to celebrate the holiday and free eats at Alan Finkelstein’s Indochine last week. And a good salmon tartare canape was had by all, who included such HollywoodLand folk as Gabriel Byrne, Bob Evans, Scott Baio, Ted Field, Robert Graham, David Keith, Penny Marshall and Betty Page.

OK, someone who was Betty Page-like, not the actual ‘50s pin-up queen. And we do mean pin-up.

One of the revelers, raven-haired model Tillman Branner, plays Page in the upcoming Sine Qua Non film “I Woke Up Early the Day I Died,” which required that exotic resume credential, Special Skills.

“The other day I had to dance in those very, very high-heeled, hooker-stripper shoes they have at Frederick’s, which made me incredibly tall, probably about 6-foot-2 or -3. My scene didn’t go until midnight, and I wore them all day long, so when I got up to dance I wouldn’t fall on my face.”

How did you feel when you took them off?

“A lot shorter.”

Quel technique.

Aris Iliopoli directed the film from an unproduced script by the inimitable Ed Wood. This Wood work may be particularly inimitable.

“The interesting thing about this film is there’s no dialogue in it,” she says. “There are plenty of sounds, whistles, grunts, screams, music, but there’s no dialogue.”

Plot?

“Oh, sure. It has a whole story to it.”

What a Luddite. Look for co-silent-people Billy Zane, Tippi Hedren, John Ritter, Vampira and Sandra Bernhard.

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Horror auteur Wes Craven is mad as hell--a location he’s presumably familiar with--and he’s not going to take it any more. At the recent premiere of “Scream 2,” Craven took a break from being squashed at the cavernous Colonnade on Hollywood Boulevard, which featured a subway-at-rush-hour motif and screamers Courteney Cox, Neve Campbell, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Tori Spelling. The erstwhile philosophy scholar talked about how he and screenwriter Kevin Williamson used “Scream 2” characters to answer critics of movie violence.

“Do films cause violence or is it an argument clever people use to justify violence in real life? In the opening scene, there’s a frenzy while people are being killed. It’s not something to celebrate.

“People say, ‘Aren’t you afraid that your film will cause someone to pick up a baseball bat?’ If films had that much power, maybe someone should show ‘Mary Poppins’ in the federal prisons.” Is it just us, or does Craven seem so normal it’s scary?