![]() “There are certain boxes you have to check: People to have to fall in love and they have to have a little bit of something that gets them apart - for only about two and a half. “The Lifetime movies are a nine-act structure,” Herzlinger explains. Herzlinger and Henry Herzlinger are both very hands-on during the outlining and writing process, adhering to some simple traits that are common to every Lifetime romance. Though, Herzlinger jokes, 189 days with in-laws, no matter how much you like them, is a long stretch. To be able to have a creative outlet and be surrounded by family during such a tumultuous time in the world is not lost on the family, which is why they ended up staying in Florida for so long. ![]() In the middle of the world being so crazy, to have this creative outlet and to be able to just dive in, it was it was great.” It was such a nice way to to go through that process. They would watch the kids swim, go to the beach - they live right on the beach - and then we would work on the outline and get it to where we wanted. “My parents have a guest house and we would go up there, get our coffees in the morning. “It was the most perfect situation,” Henry Herzlinger says. While they’d usually be headquartered at their Los Angeles home, this time the family packed up and headed to Henry Herzlinger’s parents’ house in Florida where they’d ride out the first six months of the pandemic together. After getting the green light to write the Catskills project, they were ready to outline and then write a full script. Lifetime brass got back to the Herzlingers in February - “right as things were changing in the world,” Henry Herzlinger notes. ![]() “Then we wait a couple months while Lifetime internally goes over all the pitches and decide how they want to fill up their slate,” Henry Herzlinger explains. In 2019, Herzlinger’s favorite was their Catskills idea. Henry Herzlinger and Herzlinger have worked with Lifetime on multiple occasions and usually submit four or five ideas to the network around October of each year. Here, the Herzlingers, Bleu, Coleman and executive producers Margret Huddleston and Stephanie Slack recount the years-long journey “A Christmas Dance Reunion” took to TV. ![]() In the spirit of another famous Catskills-set film, he and his co-writer, wife Megan Henry Herzlinger, envisioned “Dirty Dancing” - but set during Christmas. They had an arcade, they had horseback riding, they had ice skating,” he says. “My parents would take my sister and me up to the Catskills every summer to the Raleigh Hotel, and I thought it was the most magical place in the world. Director and co-writer Brian Herzlinger, who has made several movies for Lifetime, tells Variety that the genesis for this particular movie came from his childhood vacations. “A Christmas Dance Reunion” reunites “High School Musical” stars Corbin Bleu and Monique Coleman as a pair of childhood friends who rekindle their romance - and love for dance - when the hotel where they spent their childhood holidays announces it’s closing. In the case of “ A Christmas Dance Reunion,” COVID-19 precautions meant that the production, which filmed in November 2020 at the height of the pandemic, had a little extra wiggle room. The network has been making ripped-from-the-headlines films for three decades at this point and has the whole process down to a science: a few months for development and writing, 15 days for filming, a few weeks for post-production, and voila - a feel-good romance ready for air. While made-for-TV holiday movies have enjoyed an explosion in popularity in the past five years, they’re not a new phenomenon for Lifetime.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |