The Projection Booth Podcast
Special Report: Bruce Vilanch Makes the Yuletide Gay
By Mike White
Dec 25, 2023

The podcast episode features an interview with Bruce Vilanch discussing the holiday special “Making the Yule Tide Gay” and his experiences working with Paul Lynde.

The post Podcast: Bruce Vilanch on Paul Lynde first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

Geek Girl Authority
8 Queer Christmas Romcoms That Don’t Totally Suck
By Melis Amber
Dec 11, 2023

Christmas romcoms: you either love them, or you hate ’em. Even if you love them, a good one is hard to find. The same can be said of queer cinema. Combine the two, and holy moly, is it difficult to find anything worth viewing? 

The eight movies we’ve featured below are far from cinematic masterpieces. But they are fun to watch and will get you in the Christmas spirit. Also to note, many of them feature queer actors!

There are spoilers below, but then again, being Christmas movies and all, they spoil themselves. 

Make the Yuletide Gay

Make the Yuletide Gay (2009) is cheesy in the best way possible. Directed by Rob Williams, the movie follows Gunn (Keith Jordan) as he brings his boyfriend Nathan (Adamo Ruggiero) home to meet his family. The trouble is Gunn wants to keep it all in the closet. While still having his cake. It’s a typical LGBTQ+ romantic comedy with a sprinkle of Christmas flair. Plus, if you’re a Degrassi fan like me, seeing Ruggiero is a treat. 

Rated: Not rated (content warnings)

Streaming: dekkoo; rent: AppleTV & Amazon

Ghosting: The Spirit of Christmas

Ghosting: The Spirit of Christmas (2019) epitomizes holiday silliness. While not front-and-center gay, Kimiko Glenn plays queer sidekick to ghostly protagonist Jess (Aisha Dee). This bonkers fantasy-comedy is a whacky, out-there twist that spins A Christmas Carol and Freeform-vibes into something truly awful in the best way possible. I mean, there is a tea shoppe. Even better, this film isn’t as much of a “white” Christmas as most holiday fare, featuring many actors of color. 

Rated: TV-14 (content warnings)

Streaming: Prime, Fubo, FreeForm

The Holiday Sitter

The Holiday Sitter (2022) was Hallmark’s first holiday (read: Christmas) romcom led by a gay couple. The movie stars Mean Girls‘ Jonathan Bennett as Sam Dalton, the wealthy perennial bachelor from The City. He has to give up his annual holiday to Hawaii when his sister needs an emergency babysitter. Turns out, he’s a pretty good guncle when the hot dude (George Krissa) next door lends a hand. Maybe he won’t leave after all… Bennett is genuinely funny in this film, making it worth a watch.

Rated: TV-G

Streaming: DIRECTV

Dashing in December

Directed by Jake Helgren, Dashing in December (2020) throws Wyatt (Peter Porte), a big-shot New York dude, back to his family’s ranch for some Christmas shenanigans. Enter Heath (Juan Pablo di Pace), the ranch hand with serious charm, and throw Andie Macdowell as Wyatt’s mom, and you’ve got your classic holiday “Hallmark” romance.

The big question is, will Wyatt save the ranch in time to salvage his burgeoning relationship with Heath? (Spoiler: Yes, of course, yes; it’s a Christmas movie)

Rated: TV-14

Buy: Amazon

Merry & Gay

Merry & Gay (2020), also known as Christmas With Love, has all the familiar plot threads of a holiday romcom: childhood best friends kindle a romance when the New York big shot returns home to the small town. But in this case, the small-town grumpster, Sam (Andi René Christensen), is nonbinary! This leads us to my only real issue with the film (I mean, it’s a pretty innocuous holiday romcom): Why are these characters called gay/lesbian if one of them is nonbinary? In any case, the leads have great chemistry.

Rated: 13+

Streaming: Prime, Peacock, Tubi, Xumo

Scrooge & Marley

This film, lol. Scrooge & Marley (2012) should not be mistaken for a cinematic masterpiece, but if you like offbeat gems, add it to your watchlist. Another play on A Christmas Carol, this film follows Scrooge ( David Pevsner), a grumpy bar owner, being led through his gay life as he comes to realize what a jerk he’s been. And when I say offbeat, I mean offbeat. Think: Bruce Vilanch plays Fezziwig. 

Rated: Not rated (content warnings)

Streaming: Tubi, FreeVee, HereTV

Tangerine

Tangerine is only nominally a Christmas movie, as the film takes place over Christmas Eve. It’s also only nominally the “rom” part of “com.” Directed by Sean Baker, Tangerine is the height of indie filmmaking, shot on iPhones in the grungy streets of Hollywood for that extra touch of sophistication.

The movie follows Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor), two trans sex workers, as they get into what can only be described as shenanigans. However, they’re some pretty serious shenanigans (getting out of jail, smoking crystal meth and having sex with your pimp). Tangerine might have rough production values, but the story is compelling.

Rated: R (content warnings)

Streaming: Fubo, Paramount, Showtime, Hoopla, Kanopy, DIRECTV, Magnolia Selects

The Christmas Setup

The most interesting, fun, and recommend-worthy part of The Christmas Setup (2020) is that its two leads are played by a real-life couple, Ben Lewis and Blake Lee. They have good chemistry and all that, but this is another film about, you guessed it, a big city guy going back home for Christmas. Hugo (Lewis), a New York lawyer, returns home to Milwaukee (ohmigosh! It’s not a tiny town), where his mom (“secretly”) sets him up with Patrick (Lee).  They fall in love as they try to save the local train station from being torn down. Also, Fran Drescher is in the film.

Rated: TV-PG

Streaming: Hoopla; rent: Amazon

The post 8 Gay Christmas Romcoms Worth Watching first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

Whether or not the weather outside is frightful, your DVD player is delightful with this fortnight of holiday flicks that appeal to gay and lesbian sensibilities — just in time for our Hollywood issue of movies, coming this Friday.

Home for the Holidays. Claudia Larson (Holly Hunter) navigates dysfunctional family dramedy during her solo trip home for Thanksgiving when her teenage daughter opts out of the year’s celebration. Tensions predictably boil over at the family table, but the weekend is wrapped nicely in a bow when the special guest of Tommy, Claudia’s gay brother, offers a second helping of stuffing. The Jodie Foster-directed Home for the Holidays celebrates its 20th anniversary this year.

Make the Yuletide Gay. Astonishingly, there are few holiday films that feature LGBT characters (this list is fairly comprehensive as a result), let alone films that have gay main characters. But out Texas-native director Rob Williams changed that in 2009 by adding the spritely sweet Make the Yuletide Gay — about an in-the-closet college student (Keith Jordan) whose boyfriend (Adamo Ruggiero) suddenly shows up on his doorstep — to the Christmas-movie canon. MTYG has earned several awards, including Best Narrative Feature at FilmOut San Diego, Festival Favorite at Philadelphia QFest, and the Jury Award for Best Men’s Feature at the Long Island Gay & Lesbian Film Festival.

Holiday Heart. Ving Rhames stars as a Christian drag queen (how’d that fly under your radar until now!?) who takes in a drug addict (Alfre Woodard) and her daughter after his police-officer boyfriend dies. Based on the Cheryl L. West stage play of the same name, this made-for-Showtime movie has an astonishing 92 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Scrooge & Marley. A modern-day variation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, this reimagined version depicts Scrooge as a bitter old queen whose bah-humbug attitude gets a makeover from the ghosts of Christmases Past, Present and Future… and Bruce Vilanch.

Love, Actually. Widely regarding as one of the best holiday movies of the new millennium (by straight girls, at least), this romantic comedy told via 10 separate-but-intertwining stories throws the gays a bone with Billy Mack (Bill Nighy) and Joe (Gregor Fisher) — a rock star and his manager, respectively — who decide that getting drunk and watching porn together for Christmas is better than being alone. Because duh. (The writer-director recently revealed he had intended to include a lesbian relationship in the film.)

24 Nights. An unlucky-in-love gay man (Kevin Isola) thinks his new co-worker (Stephen Mailer) may be a gift from Santa Claus himself after making a Christmas wish for a boyfriend. Mental illness works in mysterious ways, y’all. David Burtka — before he was ever a twinkle in NPH’s eye — also stars in this 1999 romantic comedy.

Red Lodge. An impromptu marriage proposal is given at a train station en route to a holiday celebration with family in Montana. In lieu of an engagement ring, there’s a cock ring – because these dudes are classy AF.

Holiday in Handcuffs. There’s not a chance you missed this ABC Family staple that premiered in 2007 – what with all the endless promotion the initial season (Clarissa and A.C. Slater are together on your TV for the first time — watch!) and the subsequent showings during the channels “25 Days of Christmas” schedule. It’s about as well acted as any Melissa Joan Hart/Mario Lopez vehicle should be, but they’re cute, so there’s that.

The Family Stone. As if Carrie Bradshaw’s alter ego, Sarah Jessica Parker, isn’t enough to get you on board with this Home for the Holidays-esque romantic comedy-drama, the brood’s deaf, gay son Thad (Tyrone Giordano) and his interracial partner Patrick (Brian J. White) should be. Plus Dermott Mulroney, Paul Schneider and Luke Wilson!

Too Cool for Christmas. Perhaps the Christmas film with the most interesting backstory, Too Cool for Christmas (a tale about a teenage girl who shuns the reason for the season — and her gay parents — in favor of a ski getaway with friends) actually has a straight-parent companion version that appeared on Lifetime in December 2004. Not much has changed since then — there are still no holiday movies with prominent gay characters on Lifetime — which is why you should support this festive anomaly all the more.

Miracle on 34th Street. Shirley Temple! Do you need another reason?

Holiday Inn. If it’s an Irving Berlin musical, it must be Christmas! There’s a void of LGBT characters in this 1942 black-and-white musical starting Mr. Holiday Bing Crosby and the light-on-his-feet Fred Astaire — well, none that are specifically labeled as such, at least. But we’d be fooling ourselves if we thought there’s nary a nancy-boy singing and dancing around that hotel all day.

Rent. A year in the life of Bohemian New Yorkers set between Christmas Eve 1989 and 1990. You’ll come for the story, but you’ll stay for the soundtrack.

Love the Coopers. Technically you won’t be able to pick up this newly released film on DVD until next year, so instead you’ll have to head to your local cinema to watch yet another dysfunctional family handle the holidays the best way they know how: with binge eating and alcohol. But between bickering and laughing and crying — and more bickering — there’s Anthony Mackie (one of only a handful of black gay characters in a holiday film) as a closeted cop who doles out life advice… even if he should be practicing what he’s preaching.

The post 14 gay-appareled Christmas movies to make your holidays merry and bright first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

1) Howard the Duck

Prominent in the pantheon of Lucas-related misfires is his 1986 pet project Howard the Duck. Scripted by his frequent collaborators Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, it destroyed the considerable underground cred of Steve Gerber’s wisecracking creation and turned him into a running joke that endured at least until Jar Jar Binks could come along to take some of the heat. Huyck, Katz and executive producer Lucas somehow thought it wise to take a gonzo sendup of ‘funny animals’ cartoons and repackage the concept as two hours of strained quirk, inane duck jokes and bland adventuring that sees Howard teleported to Cleveland to hit on a hapless Lea Thompson and fight a possessed Jeffrey Jones.

2) Captain EO

When Michael Eisner and Frank Wells were appointed to run Disney in 1984, one of their mandates was to revitalize the company’s theme parks. That year also saw Michael Jackson at the height of his popularity, prompting Eisner and Wells to engineer a collaboration between George Lucas and his moonwalking superfan to see what delirious excess could come of such an endeavor. The result was a 17 minute 3D film, co-written and produced by Lucas (and directed by Francis Ford Coppola), that starred Jackson as the titular commander of a ragtag starship crew tasked with delivering a gift to the evil Supreme Leader of a decrepit planet. Met with hostility, the Captain nevertheless decides to reform the locals and their Leader with the Power of Song. Exhibited in Disney’s theme parks, the film stunned audiences with then-cutting edge special effects and 3D technology. Less of a technological marvel today, Captain EO is more striking for its camp value, catchy musical hooks and the impressive design of Angelica Huston’s vaguely H.R. Giger-ish space queen.

3) Wolfman Jack‘s Cameo In American Graffiti

When Lucas was a young film student, one of his great heroes was disk jockey Wolfman Jack. So when Lucas made his big film, set in the early 1960s, he made sure to give Wolfman Jack a huge cameo — in which Wolfman Jack is sort of a disk jockey version of Obi-Wan Kenobi. He tries to pretend that he’s not actually Wolfman Jack, although he doesn’t actually say “Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.” And he’s sort of mysterious about his relationship with the reclusive Wolfman, while also dispensing strange wisdom. Wolfman Jack told New York Magazine he only took a flat fee to be in the film, and actually spent $10,000 of his own money to promote it. “We wanted this picture to take off,” Wolfman said, “It’s what I’m all about. Nonsensical, but loving.” (Related: See Wolfman Jack meet the Cylons in Galactica 1980.)
4) “Nuking the Fridge“

Actually, both Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have tried to take the blame for the infamous sequence in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull where Indy shelters from a nuclear explosion inside a refrigerator. Lucas says Spielberg is lying about the fridge thing being his idea, because “he’s trying to protect me.” In fact, Lucas put together a whole “nuking the fridge” dossier to prove that it was plausible and quiet the concerns of Spielberg and star Harrison Ford. (And to bolster Lucas’ story, here’s an interview with the librarians at Skywalker Ranch, where they explain that they were assigned to call a nuclear physicist and get more information on how a fridge really could protect you from an atomic test.) Lucas also takes a certain amount of blame for Crystal Skull in general, since he nixed a previous script by Frank Darabont that might have been slightly better.

5) The Star Wars Holiday Special

We couldn’t possibly leave this one out, although Lucas has tried to have it suppressed. We only wanted to have one Star Wars item on this list, and there’s one clear candidate that stands out above everything else — the prequels, the Ewok cartoon, everything. To be fair, Lucas didn’t oversee the filming of the Holiday Special, but he does bear a significant amount of blame for its legendary awfulness.

This 2008 Vanity Fair article goes into insane detail — basically, Lucas had been convinced by various people that a holiday special would keep interest in Star Wars alive and sell some toys. And Lucas was originally quite involved — he ” knew the tales he wanted to tell and planned to work with the show’s team of seasoned TV writers to develop his ideas into a viable script.” And that’s where things went wrong:

When [writer Bruce] Vilanch heard Lucas’s storyline at a development meeting at Smith and Hemion’s L.A. offices, he quickly realized that a “big challenge” lay ahead. Lucas was intent on building The Star Wars Holiday Special, as it would be called, around Wookiees—specifically, the family of Chewbacca, Han Solo’s shaggy sidekick, as they outwitted Imperial forces to come together on Life Day, the Wookiee equivalent of Christmas. Suddenly, Vilanch says, the special was in danger of looking like “one long episode of Lassie.”

“I said: ‘You’ve chosen to build a story around these characters who don’t speak. The only sound they make is like fat people having an orgasm,'” the 250-plus-pound Vilanch recalls. “In fact, I told Lucas he could just leave a tape recorder in my bedroom and I’d be happy to do all the looping and Foley work for him.”

Lucas met these comments with a “glacial” look. “This was his vision, and he could not be moved,” Vilanch says.
Lucas insisted on the Wookiee life day story, and then got swamped working on other stuff, letting the Holiday Special happen more or less unsupervised. And it “metastasized,” as the Vanity Fair article delicately puts it:

Onto the body of Lucas’s sentimental and irony-free Wookiee plotline, the producers and writers grafted a campy 70s variety show that makes suspension of disbelief impossible. In between minutes-long stretches of guttural, untranslated Wookiee dialogue that could almost pass for avant-garde cinema, Maude’s Bea Arthur sings and dances with the aliens from the movie’s cantina scene; The Honeymooners’ Art Carney consoles Chewbacca’s family with such comedy chestnuts as “Why all the long, hairy faces?”; Harvey Korman mugs shamelessly as a multi-limbed intergalactic Julia Child cooking “Bantha Surprise”; the Jefferson Starship pops up to play a number about U.F.O.’s; and original Star Wars cast members Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill walk around looking cosmically miserable.
The whole Vanity Fair article is well worth reading.

6) Willow

Lucas dreamed up the idea for Willow as early as 1972 and, during production on Return of the Jedi, approached Warwick Davis (who also played Wicket the Ewok) about playing the lead role. But it wasn’t till the mid-80s – by which point FX technology was sufficiently advanced – that the film was finally shepherded into production with Ron Howard as director and Lucas as EP. Davis plays the hobbit-like lead, tasked by a wizard to safeguard a magical child from a witch queen. Somewhat of an ersatz Lord of the Rings, the film’s archetypal characters and narrative broad strokes also bear more than a passing resemblance to Star Wars. That said, a few lively performances and action set-pieces redeem the tired story beats to some extent. Extra points for (perhaps not so) affectionate swipes at movie critics Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel and Pauline Kael.

7) Chronicles of the Shadow War

Lucas, apparently, wasn’t quite done with the Willow universe. He hired famed X-Men comics writer Chris Claremont to collaborate with him on a trio of novels – starting with 1995’s Shadow Moon – that continued the story begun in the 1988 movie. Lucas clearly wanted the novels to stand on their own merits, repainting what was once a straightforward, almost childlike fictional universe in much darker tones. He and Claremont go Alien 3 on the story from the very beginning, killing off half the old cast in brutal fashion, then going on to detail — via some ornate and sometimes explicitly violent prose — a deeply troubled world in which the film’s characters appear almost incongruous.

8) Twice Upon A Time

Lucas has made more than a few contributions to the animation industry over the years but the first animated film he ever produced was 1983’s all but forgotten Twice Upon A Time. A marvel of surreal stop-motion animation, it follows shapeshifter Ralph the All Purpose Animal and his mime sidekick Mumford as they try to save their world from nightmare-creator Synonamess Botch. The film sank unfairly from trace after a brief theatrical release that was mishandled by the floundering Ladd Company. That commercial failure, however, does nothing to negate the value of its distinctive aesthetic, unique ‘Lumage’ animating technique and imaginative worldbuilding.

9) The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles

One of Lucas’ more successful (creatively speaking anyway) forays into television, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles brought the epic historical sweep of the films to the small screen. Following a teenage Indy as he traveled the world and encountered numerous historical figures, the show was intended in part as educational programming but still managed to pack enough action to draw accusations of being too violent. Despite the inclusion of many clunky dialogue exchanges that are basically thinly disguised classroom lectures, the show was buoyed by its production values and a colorful supporting cast featuring franchise veterans like Harrison Ford, Roshan Seth and John Rhys-Davies as well as stars-to-be like Daniel Craig and Catherine Zeta Jones. Among other things, Young Indiana Jones goes to India and meets Krishnamurti, who was being groomed as the young World Teacher by the Theosophical Society, and also befriends a young slave named Omar in Tangiers, getting captured himself by slavers. Alongside producing, Lucas also came up with the blueprints for many of the stories and, once ABC cancelled the show, was invested enough in the end-product to finagle a deal with the Family Channel for four additional TV movies.

10) The George Lucas Museum

This massive development, which will dominate Chicago’s lakefront, is “going to look like a tent monster that’s slowly devouring the city,” as the AV Club put it. This collection of Lucas’ art and movie memorabilia is being described as a “vanity museum,” and has been challenged by environmentalists among others. The Chicago Tribune’s architecture critic called it the Temple of George, adding:

Our First Look at the Radical Design of George Lucas’ Art Museum
A few months ago, noted traditionalist George Lucas surprised everyone by announcing he had chosen…
Read more gizmodo.?com
The plan represents a fumbled essay in “blob architecture,” a school of design that uses computer modeling to achieve amorphous, amoebalike buildings that defy conventional, right-angled geometry. In its present state, it lacks the visual excitement of a blob masterpiece like the billowy Selfridges department store in Birmingham, England. Overly abstract and under-detailed, it looks, from some angles, like a giant lump…

The real problem is that Lucas has saddled Ma with an overly ambitious program that calls for the museum to house everything but a re-creation of the fictional “Star Wars” bar habituated by freight pilots and other dangerous characters.

In addition to galleries for Lucas’ eclectic collection of paintings by artists like Norman Rockwell, “Star Wars” memorabilia and digital art, the museum would contain archives, an education center, four movie theaters and, atop all that, a circular restaurant and a halo-shaped observation deck. At 400,000 square feet, it would be more than four times the size of the one that Lucas unsuccessfully tried to build in San Francisco.

The post The Ten Weirdest Projects That George Lucas Has Been Involved With first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

At the time, THR deemed the two hour special as an “inventive diversion that stood on its own merits”

On Nov. 17, 1978, the cast of Star Wars hit television screens with a holiday special that has been derided ever since it aired. Days after it premiered, however, The Hollywood Reporter reviewed the two-hour CBS show, saying that it “was a welcome surprise.” Read the original review below:

If the prospect of a two-hour Star Wars Holiday Special conjured up visions of “May the force be with you” repeated ad nauseam in your head, this show on CBS was a welcome surprise.

For the most part the special was [an] inventive diversion that stood on its own merits. The film’s stars, Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Peter Mayhew, and, of course C-3P0 and R2D2, were on hand. However, the special effects were the real stars of the show.

Writers Rod Warren, Bruce Vilanch, Pat Proft, Leonard Ripps and Mitzi Welch devised a story involving Chewbacca’s family waiting for him to come home for Life Day, a kind of space-aged merging of Thanksgiving and Christmas. Since he’s late they fear he’s been imperiled by Empire forces, an accurate assumption, confirmed when Empire police search their home for evidence of rebel activity. All this gives Chewbacca’s wife a good excuse to contact the various Star Wars characters, and makes for a touching reunion when the big Wookiee returns home safely. The plot smacks of sentiments typical of The Waltons, but the time waiting for Chewbacca is filled with cleverly integrated musical numbers and amusing special effects.

Diahann Carroll’s sensuous number, “This Minute,” with original music and lyrics by Mitzi and Ken Welch, was by far the highlight of the show, incorporating some spectacular visuals. A fanciful dance number featuring miniaturized hologram creatures, choreographed by David Winters, was also very effective. The Jefferson Starship appeared in a rock number greatly enhanced by computer-generated lighting effects. Jeff Chang and Fred McKinnon handled the impressive lighting for the show.

Harvey Korman added humor as a handy cooking instruction and Art Carney provided warmth as a Santa-like shopkeeper. Beatrice Arthur sang her way through an overly long number in a bar full of bizarre creatures.

Everyone involved in the technical accomplishments of The Star Wars Holiday Special deserves acknowledgement, with Brian Bartholomew’s art direction, Garrett Lewis’ sets, Bob Mackie’s costumes, and Ed Green’s audio effects all adding considerably to the production. Video animation was by Jean DeJoux and Elizabeth Savel. Steve Binder directed, and Joe Layton and Mitzi and Ken Welch produced this Smith-Hemion presentation in association with 20th Century Fox TV. — Gail Williams

The post ‘The Star Wars Holiday Special’: Read THR’s 1978 Review first appeared on We Got Bruce!.