“A Very Vermont Christmas” will premiere on the Hallmark Channel, Saturday, July 20
By Adam Davis
One night about five years ago, Killington resident Steve Kent told his partner Pam Rice that she had seen so many Hallmark Channel Christmas movies that she should try writing one herself. That playful remark became a challenge to themselves to do just that. The result is the new Christmas movie “A Very Vermont Christmas” premiering on the Hallmark Channel on Saturday, July 20 at 8 p.m.
Rice and Kent are not screenwriters by trade. They’re best known in Killington as the owners of Furry Child Daycare, a dog-sitting business. Kent also was a former producer for Killington TV. However, “A Very Vermont Christmas” isn’t their first journey into the world of Hallmark Christmas movies.
“We had some luck after a couple years of brainstorming and pitching with one producer where we were able to sell a concept, which is just a couple of pages,” Rice said. “It was called ‘Warming Up to You’ and it appeared on the Hallmark Channel about two years ago.”
“We had the opportunity to write it but we were both working full-time jobs, as well as running our doggie-daycare business,” Kent continued. “We just didn’t have the time at that moment so we had to pass on writing it. But we did get the ‘created by’ credit.”
“This is our first writing credit for a produced movie,” Rice added.
As their first official writing credit, “A Very Vermont Christmas” is about a champion skier/Vermont brewmaster who teams up with an unlikely match to create a seasonal microbrew in order to save her family’s business by Christmas. While the plot is influenced by Vermont’s culture generally, the time that Rice and Kent have spent in Killington was their biggest inspiration.
“It was definitely inspired by living in Killington. In fact, the brewpub from the set features a famous characteristic from a particular Killington bar. Anybody that’s familiar with this bar will recognize that feature of it,” Steve said. “A lot of it is based on our experiences here at the resort. We’ve both worked in restaurants and bars in the area, and that was a big part of it. We didn’t know too much about brewing when we first started writing, but once we did, we decided to make one of the main characters a cicerone, which is basically a sommelier but with beer.”
– The Killington written Hallmark film will debut Saturday. The film poster shows acting star actors Katie Leclerc and Ryan McPartlin.
While the pair had the movie written last year, the Screen Actors Guild strike put the production of the movie on hold until late winter of this year. Pre-production started in February, and filming began in March at Wachusett Mountain in Massachusetts as the stand-in for a Vermont ski resort.
“They have really good tax credits for film production in Massachusetts,” Kent explained. “They were originally going to film it around Christmas time, but it was delayed again until March. We were really lucky to get it in this year, at all.”
Once filming had finally begun, Rice and Kent took a day to visit the set and see their words come to life, as well as meet the stars of the movie, actors Katie Leclerc and Ryan McPartlin.
“Watching real actors say the words that we had put on the page, it was just so much fun,” Rice said.
“A Very Vermont Christmas” began to become a reality last year after a mutual friend of theirs put them in contact with a director who could help them develop the movie.
“I was visiting their house and told them how we had previously sold an idea to a producer of Hallmark-type movies. And she (Slate Casting’s Julie Arvedon Knowlton) introduced us to her friend John Stimpson, a director at H9 Films, and the rest was history,” Kent said. “He helped guide us through the writing process, and we worked with his team to make it the most marketable product that we could.”
The rewarding experience, as well as having a foot in the movie business, has the writing duo champing at the bit to do more projects in the future.
“We’ve got about a half-dozen pitches ready to go, as well as working on our own rom-com, a dark comedy and a crime thriller, as well,” Kent added.
