Juliet Giglio, an Oswego State screenwriting assistant professor, had her most recent project, “A Very Nutty Christmas,” brought to life by Lifetime after just 10 months of writing, revising and production.
Giglio co-wrote the screenplay with her husband, Keith Giglio, Syracuse University Newhouse associate professor. After a six-year recess of years writing together to focus on their teaching careers as professors, the two began collaborating once more. Together, they worked on “Noah,” “Pizza My Heart,” “Return to Halloweentown” and “Tarzan,” among others.
“We bounce stuff off each other very well,” Giglio said. “The great thing about working with a writing partner is if you write something that is funny and they laugh, then you know it’s funny, and if they don’t laugh, you know it’s not funny.”
She said in the beginning of their careers, they faced challenges with writing together because they did not quite trust each other entirely in terms of writing yet. But, with this project, they trusted each other’s writing abilities completely and enjoyed the writing process.
“I think collaboration is great because it just makes it a stronger script and I think also, because we are putting in the male and the female point of view, that helps us as well,” Giglio said.
About a year ago, an opportunity arose for the couple to pitch a Christmas screenplay, and they thought of the premise: What if a nutcracker came to life?
While the movie is not an adaptation of the ballet, “The Nutcracker,” which is often performed around the holidays, it does include Easter eggs that allude to the ballet and includes Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s score.
Giglio said she does not know where the idea came from, but said it could have been from when they were putting away Christmas decorations last year.
“You’re never quite sure where the spark is because you quickly start building on it, and it starts developing into this other story, and so we spitballed back and forth,” Giglio said. “By the time we pitched it to the producer, we’d already worked on it for about a month.”
They pitched the idea of the screenplay to Paula Hart, the mother and producing partner of the leading actress, Melissa Joan Hart, and then pitched it to Lifetime, which bought it and greenlit the project. She said they were able to write the lead role to match the comedic abilities of Hart, whom Giglio compared to Lucille Ball of “I Love Lucy.” They continued to mold the story and revise it until they sat down to write the full script in March during spring break.
“There was a huge snow storm over spring break, which was actually ideal for writing a script because we couldn’t go anywhere; Giglio said. We stayed in our house and we just wrote nonstop. We listened to nonstop ‘Nutcracker’ music.”
After the script was completed by April 1, they revised it an additional three times. Giglio said the project, which was filmed in Mystic, Connecticut, went into pre-production May 1 while they were still finishing the final draft and went into post-production by June.
“Ten months is unheard of. To go start to finish to airtime: amazing,” Giglio said. “We were so lucky.”
Giglio said she is very happy with how the director, Colin Theys, and everyone on the crew has brought the script to life.
“We were on the set for about three days, and that was a lot of fun because we got to see our words come to life,” Giglio said. There’s nothing more magical for a screenwriter than getting their script produced.”
The film airs for the first time Friday, Nov. 30 at 8 p.m. on the Lifetime network, and Giglio said they are already in the works of pitching more projects and hope to do more Christmas movies.
Photo provided by Juliet Giglio
