Guide To Lighterly Painting (For Movies)
Vanity Fair has reproduced a rambly, sixteen-point stylistic guideline produced by Thomas Kinkade for folks working on his movie about, I guess, being him, which is getting a straight-to-DVD release just in time for this holiday season's consumer spending collapse. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)
Even in West Coast time it's getting pretty close to the point where I need to change out of my pajamas and go to work, so I won't summarize the list myself, but it's a pretty good read for the armchair aesthete who, like Kinkade, doesn't know much about making movies but has maybe seen "Barry Lyndon" a couple of times. (A couple of preceding notes on Kinkade's more private woes are fun, too; do a search for the word "codpiece".) The basic takeaway is that you should approach making a Thomas Kinkade film exactly the same way you would make a Thomas Kinkade painting: gauze up the lighting, create well-balanced but unchallenging compositions, pour on the anachronistic nostalgia signifiers. Also keep the camera movements and editing slow, almost as though your characters are walking around inside a painting; very slow. In fact the pacing should go so slow that the movie... just... stops. That way you can LaserJet it onto a two-by-three canvas and sell it at the mall.
The "Thomas Kinkade's Christmas Cottage" trailer gives you a taste of the outcome of the above principles: It looks like (TRAILER SPOILER ALERT) a maudlin, indifferently photographed story about a young man who makes a terrible public mural for Christmas. And somehow I feel a much more pronounced "oh, how his acting prospects have diminished" feeling for Chris Elliot than for Peter O'Toole, for whatever that's worth.
I remember hearing a Christmas Eve sermon some years ago that featured an anecdote about Thomas Kinkade discovering that his warmly lit paintings could make lots of people happy; I guess this is the movie version of that. It wasn't the most inspirational Christmas sermon, though I did prefer it to the "you'll go to Hell if we don't see you back here before Easter" angle.
Even in West Coast time it's getting pretty close to the point where I need to change out of my pajamas and go to work, so I won't summarize the list myself, but it's a pretty good read for the armchair aesthete who, like Kinkade, doesn't know much about making movies but has maybe seen "Barry Lyndon" a couple of times. (A couple of preceding notes on Kinkade's more private woes are fun, too; do a search for the word "codpiece".) The basic takeaway is that you should approach making a Thomas Kinkade film exactly the same way you would make a Thomas Kinkade painting: gauze up the lighting, create well-balanced but unchallenging compositions, pour on the anachronistic nostalgia signifiers. Also keep the camera movements and editing slow, almost as though your characters are walking around inside a painting; very slow. In fact the pacing should go so slow that the movie... just... stops. That way you can LaserJet it onto a two-by-three canvas and sell it at the mall.
The "Thomas Kinkade's Christmas Cottage" trailer gives you a taste of the outcome of the above principles: It looks like (TRAILER SPOILER ALERT) a maudlin, indifferently photographed story about a young man who makes a terrible public mural for Christmas. And somehow I feel a much more pronounced "oh, how his acting prospects have diminished" feeling for Chris Elliot than for Peter O'Toole, for whatever that's worth.
I remember hearing a Christmas Eve sermon some years ago that featured an anecdote about Thomas Kinkade discovering that his warmly lit paintings could make lots of people happy; I guess this is the movie version of that. It wasn't the most inspirational Christmas sermon, though I did prefer it to the "you'll go to Hell if we don't see you back here before Easter" angle.
2 Comments:
That is absolutely fantastic.
Does it count as "a couple of times" if you've seen the first hour and a half 3 times but the end only once?
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