If you had told Oswego State screenwriting professor Juliet Giglio that she would be writing Christmas movies with her husband, Keith, back in 2012, she would not have believed you. And yet, on Nov. 2, the Giglio’s celebrated the release of their second Christmas movie, “Christmas Reservations.”
Juliet and Keith met at New York University in the Master’s program for screenwriting. The two have been screenwriters for years, but stopped working in Hollywood in 2008.
“My last writing credit before 2018 was in 2006,” Giglio said. “In 2007 the Writer’s Guild strike happened, which lasted into 2008. During that period no guild members were allowed to write, and when the strike ended, we discovered that Hollywood wasn’t really making the kinds of movies we were interested in. Things had really shifted.”
She says that all throughout their years in Hollywood, they had not even removed their Master’s degrees from the document tubes they had come in.
The couple decided to use those degrees and become screenwriting professors on the East Coast, where they both are originally from.
Keith got a job at SI’s Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University on a tenure track, and Juliet taught as an adjunct at Syracuse their first year out of Hollywood. Juliet says that the adjunct professors job showed her how much she could enjoy teaching, and she applied for a job at Oswego State.
Juliet and Keith took a break from screenwriting to focus on teaching, until one night in 2018 when Juliet’s father told the two about a movie he had seen on Netflix that he had loved, and reminded him of the movies they had written years before.
“Out of the blue, my dad, an 80-year-old man, told us he loved the movie ‘The Christmas Princess’ on Netflix,” Giglio said. “He said that this was the kind of movie Keith and I used to write. We started considering Christmas movies after that.”
Juliet said that the process for getting their first Christmas movie, “A Very Nutty Christmas,” was shockingly quick. She said that a friend of hers had connections with Paula Hart, one of the owners of the production company Hartbreak Films. Hartbreak is owned by Paula and her daughter, Melissa Joan Hart, best known for her role as Sabrina in the hit TV show “Sabrina the Teenage Witch,” and as Clarissa in the show “Clarissa Explains It All.”
Giglio said that the idea for their first movie was very well received by Hartbreak, and the next step was to take it to a distributor. The Lifetime Network greenlit the movie quickly.
“That was unheard of, the speed with which everything happened,” Giglio said. “That’s what pulled us back into the game.”
Juliet and Keith began working on “Christmas Reservations” over winter break, turning in their first draft on Feb. 8. By mid-April, their three drafts were finished and the project went into pre-production, before being filmed in Lake Tahoe in May of this year. While the movie was being filmed, the Giglio’s pitched a few more ideas, and now have two more projects greenlit for 2020.
Giglio said that she feels that being a professor, and teaching students how to write, has improved her own work in the process. She said she is able to balance writing and teaching because of the long breaks for winter and summer. A lot of the Giglios’ writing is done over the winter break.
“When you talk about it all day long, and you’re explaining to students how to do something, you can’t help but think about it when you’re doing your own work,” Giglio said.
Photo provided by Juliet Giglio
