Independent filmmaker Gloria Mercer joins us to talk about movies made for the Hallmark and Lifetime TV channels. The focus is on their best-known output, their romantic comedies, and we had a lot of fun chatting about how and why they’re made, their style and structure, their politics, and what we can learn from them.
If you're curious to check them out for yourself, the two movies we dive deepest into are The Flight Before Christmas (Lifetime) and Bottled with Love (Hallmark) — both can be rented or purchased online.
In this episode, we discuss:
The birth of a Hallmark movie — what impetus or inspiration kicks off their creation?
The story formula, i.e. which structure and character tropes recur throughout these romantic comedies.
Low budgets, fast shoots — how these movies get to the finish line with sparse time and resources, and the effect that has on the films themselves.
How Hallmark movies — supposedly “apolitical” objects — serve as intensely ideological defenders of certain conservative social values.
What we can — and can’t — come to admire about the craft behind these movies.
Additional resources:
Gloria’s home on the web can be found here.
The articles we mention at the start of the episode are:
How Hallmark Took Over Cable Television
There's a Reason You See the Same Women in All Those Hallmark Christmas Movies
Hallmark movies are fascist propaganda
Since we recorded this episode, some news has broken about a systemically enforced lack of diversity in Hallmark movies, you can read about that here.
Here’s a preview for Bottled with Love:
Photo credit for the episode cover and Gloria’s bio image goes to Brenda Nicole Kent.
Gloria Mercer
Gloria Mercer was born and raised in East Vancouver, British Columbia
She graduated from Simon Fraser University in 2016, majoring in film and minoring in gender, sexuality, and women’s studies.
Her short film Bombing screened at over 30 film festivals in North America and Europe, winning best in its category at the Whistler Film Festival, and screening at Geena Davis’ Bentonville Film Festival.
In May 2018, she completed All Happened Before, the inaugural project from her production company, See Horse Films, founded with her partner and collaborator, Aidan West.
She is now working on completing Hekademia, a science fiction short film that has been selected for support by the National Film Board and the Canada Council for the Arts.