Saturday, November 16, 2019

"A 2004 Christmas Movie With Two Versions — One With Two Dads And Another With Straight Parents — Has Gone Viral"

Noticed by someone on Twitter, and further investigated by Buzzfeed:
The director said in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he worked closely with Here TV, an American television network for LGBTQ audiences, on original content and projects. According to Irvin, Here TV didn’t have the funding to finance an entire TV movie in the same way a channel like Lifetime could because their “subscriber base was still in its infancy.” So they created two versions of the movie to help make the project financially feasible.

“The executives at these companies decided, if we could have some gay content in a movie that could run on Here TV that would satisfy our subscribers that are expecting gay content, but we could also repurpose it and do a quote-unquote straight version and try to sell that to Lifetime or those types of networks, that would be beneficial,” he said.

...

“We would shoot a scene with the mom and the dad, and when we’d get a good take I would say, ‘Okay, let's have the mom set aside and bring in the alternate dad’ and we’d shoot another take,” Irvin said.