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DigiGods Episode 247: How Christmas Rom-Coms took over the world - Part 1
52 Plays2 years ago
CineGod Ray Greene talks to ESX Entertainment Chief ALI AFSHAR on How He Became Streaming's Seasonal Kingpin
DigiGods Podcast, 12/16/22 (M4a) — 6.3 MB
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Transcript
Warner Backlot Before Christmas
00:00:07
Speaker
The Warner Back lot is eerily quiet in the run-up to the Christmas holiday. The gigantic urban facades the studio calls New York Park, Brownstone Street, and Midwest Residential Street are empty of actors, crews, and even signage. Thousands of films and TV shows have dramatized their car chases, bank robberies, and meet cute romances right here. But tonight, nothing moves on the lot. Save an occasional Warner logoed golf cart,
00:00:36
Speaker
carrying security staff and maintenance personnel on their ritual of nightly rounds.
ESX Red Carpet Gala
00:00:42
Speaker
But almost in the shadow of the famed Warner Bros. studio water tower, there's one small oasis of motion and light where a few hundred actors, producers and writers are gathered for an old-fashioned red carpet gala.
00:00:57
Speaker
And they aren't just laughing and posing here. They're singing. Stack the hall with boughs of holly Fa la la la la la la la la Tis the season to be jolly Fa la la la la la la la Don we now our gay apparel Fa la la la la la la la la Trow the ancient you'll take care of Fa la la la la la la la
00:01:20
Speaker
That's Missy and Meredith Pyle, singing sisters who are also fine comedians and part of a burgeoning stock company at ESX, a production company that's at the forefront of the Christmas rom-com boom. If you read the industry trade papers, you'd think that horror and comic book action are the only things that sell these
Celebrating 'I Believe in Santa'
00:01:40
Speaker
days.
00:01:40
Speaker
But subscribers to HBO Max and Netflix know better. They're watching titles like A Hollywood Christmas, A Christmas Mystery, and the backstage musical Holiday Harmony. Three new ESX productions that are dominating the HBO Max most watched charts.
00:01:57
Speaker
Do you believe in Santa? I do. Tonight I do. Tonight, ESX is celebrating their new Netflix comedy, I Believe in Santa, starring real-life husband and wife duo Christina Moore and John Doocy. It's wonderful to be in a movie with my wife. We had a great time working together. She is so sweet on set. I am difficult on set, so she takes all of my rough edges and makes them smoother.
00:02:22
Speaker
ESX president Ali Afshar likes to say he runs his company like a family as well as a business. And I believe in Santa is a perfect example. Christina Moore isn't just on screen opposite her husband. She also produced the movie. And Ducey isn't just starring as a middle-aged man who still believes in Santa Claus. He's also the screenwriter.
Ali Afshar's Journey from Racing to Film
00:02:43
Speaker
We wanted to find out how it is that Christmas rom-coms took over the world and the secret of the ESX formula for success. Digigods caught up with Ali and Christina at the ESX offices on the Warner lot. Ali and Christina were so articulate, we decided to run their interviews in two separate parts.
00:03:03
Speaker
Ali Afshar. So I used to do a little bit of acting and a little bit of racing cars. So that's kind of how I put myself through college and the racing became professional. So I stopped the acting for about seven years, raced for Subaru of America, touring all around all over the country, about 60 events a year, doing shows and races.
00:03:25
Speaker
And then I just missed the acting, so I came back. One of my first auditions back was for actually a Warner Brothers show coincidentally called He's Just Not That Into You. It was really fun, and I booked that, and I got to be on a movie, and I had met a friend that was unbeknownst to me at the time that he was a film financier.
00:03:43
Speaker
And he was involved in one of our Aston Martin race car projects. And he said, Hey, I didn't know you were an actor. If you ever want to make a movie, uh, you know, uh, let me know. And I was like, you're a banker. I don't need a home loan or something. I didn't know anything about it. He's like, no, dummy. I'm a, I'm a film financier. I was like, wow. So, uh, that was my life before, after that meeting, um, three months later, we made our first movie with Alex Renaravilla, our save director that's in, uh, that directed, um, I believe in Santa.
00:04:11
Speaker
And also, Christina, we had her play a small role in that movie as well. It was called Born to Race. So that was 20, 22 movies ago. Owning the race team and being able to put pieces together from all over the world, it taught me how to produce without going to producing school.
Pandemic Shift to Christmas Films
00:04:27
Speaker
Why Christmas movies?
00:04:28
Speaker
There's a gentleman here at Warner Brothers by the name of David Decker and David Graver. They're part of the—he's actually now the president of Content Sales and Licensing. So a few years back, he was always telling us, he's like, you know what, you guys should do a Christmas movie. You should do a Christmas movie. And we were always in action, and what was he like? Like American wrestler and motor sports and actions and feel-good drama, all that good stuff.
00:04:50
Speaker
But in 2020, when the pandemic hit, I said, you know what? Why don't we build a soundstage? Because we have a studio in Northern California. It was a ranch. We've turned into a studio, my childhood ranch, that I bought back after 30 years. So that's where I grew up. And it's 20 acres. And we said, you know what? It's COVID. Everybody's scared. Why don't we?
00:05:11
Speaker
We held a sound stage here. We kind of built a big barn. And then I said, why don't we hire Josh and Lauren Swickard, which were a couple that met on our other movie, Roped, that's on Netflix. They met on set. Their first kiss was on camera. They fell in love and real life. They got married afterwards. And now they're on their second child. But I was like, wait a minute. These two aren't going to be afraid of being together, because this was the height of the paranoia of COVID. It was very scary. This was like May of 2020. So I said, and I'll play the butler.
00:05:38
Speaker
And we'll do this little movie called A California Christmas. And we made it. And that same team of David Decker and David Graver sold it to Netflix, licensed it to Netflix. And it became the number one movie in the world for like two, three weeks straight, this little Christmas movie we did. So that led to Netflix ordering another slate for 2021. That led for HBO Max ordering another slate for 2022. And now we're already in pre-production working on a slate for 2023.
Diversity and the American Dream in ESX Films
00:06:06
Speaker
The themes have always been the same. American dream, shed a tear, leave with a smile, underdog diversity. I mean, our movies were diverse in 2014-15 when we started way before it was fashionable to be diverse. We had female leads in our first five movies. We had African-American leads in two right after that. We had Middle Eastern leads, which has never been done before. American wrestler was the first studio movie, studio-released movie ever to show an Iranian in a positive light as a lead. So it's really cool.
00:06:35
Speaker
That's a, you know, that's kind of the idea of that's where Christmas movies started from. So it was, you know, extension. It's not like we went from horror to Christmas. We always had, even our action movies had feel good American dream type of messages and me being born in Iran and coming to America. Again, the premise of American wrestler. I really appreciate and I think I value maybe more than some people that are American. They kind of take it for granted. Like it's not perfect. America's not perfect, but it definitely allows me to come from there and be able to do this.
00:07:05
Speaker
And I think a lot of other areas of the world and other countries don't allow that. And I think if you're born here and raised here, you don't fully understand how lucky you are.
Fostering a Family Atmosphere at ESX
00:07:13
Speaker
You know, when you talk about your projects and the interconnections between them, I get a real sense of whether it's conscious or unconscious.
00:07:24
Speaker
this idea of family within the professional unit. Can you speak at all about that being a priority? People usually do refer to ESX Entertainment as like a family, whether it's here at Warner Brothers or anybody that gets to know us really well. And we really, it's true, we are a family. Whether it was on the motorsport side, which some of our ESX Entertainment sites started in the motorsport side, like Christina Moore and we've been friends for 20 years.
00:07:50
Speaker
I think my being born in Iran, having a sick mom, my mom passed away from cancer when I was very young, I think what it did, it gave you a perspective of a no-asshole policy. So if you're not an – we've had a few assholes that are not around with us anymore, but it's like we're not carrying cancer. We're making movies.
00:08:12
Speaker
Cost nothing to be kind as my former partner Forrest Lucas of Lucas oil used to say that self-made, you know, uh, amazing man. Um, so if you're a good person and you like what you're doing and you like this business, you know, we've had, we've had the same producers on our movies for six, seven years. Now we're 20 movies. We, we rotate producers. We had a couple of directors that we become fond with Alex and Sean Piccinino and, uh, Brett Hedlund directed one, um, Gabrielle tag, Vivini. She directed a series we did. So.
00:08:42
Speaker
We have a handful of people, but I don't know. I like loyalty. I like family. I like taking care of people, and people take care of us. And I think that's kind of our foundation, and then that bleeds into the stories we tell.
Success of 'A California Christmas'
00:08:58
Speaker
At this moment, it seems like there's a limitless appetite for Christmas rom-coms. I mean, just limitless. I think there's multiple factors. I could be like a little big-headed and say it was us, but in 2020, there wasn't any. There's only like three, and we were one of the three. And that one, I think, with A California Christmas, the Netflix, the big number one on Netflix, I think because everybody was really fearful to shoot that year, there wasn't a lot of originals. Even like the smaller, more cheesy, you know, the Hallmark Lifetime-y Christmas movies, there wasn't that many that year.
00:09:28
Speaker
But California Christmas, I mean, got really big. I mean, it got like, I don't know, 600 million hours of watching. And you had Ryan Seacrest talking about it. And you had big stars tweeting and chatting about it. I think that might have opened up the eyes of a few network executives and people that are in charge to be like, wait a minute, this is a big thing. And it's not just limited to the predictable cheesy ones that you saw.
00:09:56
Speaker
I think people, the bigger studios ramped up, they're big ones. That's why you see these big, big, you know, the legacy spin-offs, like even Warner Brothers HBO Max's Christmas Story Christmas, big movie based on one of the biggest Christmas movies ever, a Christmas story. And then you have a lot of other people, I think, like the smaller, the Netflix, not the Netflix, sorry. I think the smaller ones, like the Hallmarks in the Lifetime, I think they came out with like 40.
00:10:22
Speaker
Yeah, I think I homework has like 40 Christmas movies. Now, mind you, ours are much more elevated than those are a broader as well. You know, we appeal to where our audience is definitely it's part of the flyover state, but we like to also connect the coasts. So we have a little bit of, you know,
00:10:41
Speaker
realism, a little bit more of some sexuality, some language, some like in California Christmas, the mother dies of cancer in the movie. Like that never happens in the cheesy ones. The worst case in those is, you know, the brownies get burned or the cupcakes get burned, overbaked. So I think bringing that realism
00:11:00
Speaker
might have opened up people's eyes to be like, wait a minute, these are different. I mean, when you read a lot of the reviews, they're like, oh, we thought this would be just a predictable, homework-y kind of movie. And no, this is great. Or it's funny. Or it's witty. Like, Hollywood Christmas is really witty. It's really smart. It's a meta movie within a movie. And then I believe in Santa is a whole other philosophical debate. Because it really can't be proven either
The Joy of Christmas Movies
00:11:25
Speaker
way. So faith, how do you
00:11:30
Speaker
In a general sense rather than talking specifically about your projects, why do you think the audience is responding so strongly to this type of material?
00:11:46
Speaker
you know, wicked subjects, which are cool, but also I think people need an escape. Life is tough right now. Life is hard. So when you get that hour, hour and a half, you get to sit with your family, hang out, smile, see a, you know, cute couple, whether it's you have your fantasies of you being in one of their positions or just
00:12:03
Speaker
getting out of your own world, and sharing an experience and an emotional attachment with something that's gonna make you laugh, maybe make you cry, but it'll leave with a smile, make you feel good. I think there's no shortage of wanting to make people feel good. I think people need it right now, a positive escape.