Over at VanityFair Daily’s Culture and Society Blog, Paul Cullum posts about the truly horrific-sounding film, “Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage.” Specifically, about the ridiculous memo Kinkade apparently sent to his crew – which posted in it’s glorious entirety at the end of Cullum’s commentary.
Cullum writes:
Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light™, extends his purview to motion pictures with this week’s release of Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage, an inspirational holiday pastiche based on one of his paintings. Produced by Lionsgate, the film stars Peter O’Toole and Marcia Gay Harden. But not even a name cast could stop it from being unceremoniously dumped to home video a year after its planned release.
One reason might be that Kinkade, a postmodern Norman Rockwell for the evangelist set, instructed the crew to adhere to an aesthetic code that wouldn’t have flown in a first-year film class. The list of 16 “guidelines” on how to create “The Thomas Kinkade Look” on film, which was circulated to crew members in memo form, has been obtained exclusively by VF Daily.
I was trying to figure out what sort of things sounded less pleasant than working on this movie. Do you remember Truth Be Told, the pilot episode of Alias? Having a molar yanked out with a pair of pliers seemed pretty awful, didn’t it? That didn’t make my list.
Kinkade’s instructions are incredibly funny, but I think my favorite item is his “advice” to the cinematographer, who must have consumed his weight in diazepam not to strangle the man:
10) Short focal length. In general, I love a focal plane that favors the center of interest, and allows mid-distance and distant areas to remain blurry. Recommend “stopping down” to shorten focal lengths.
Hooboy.