Trailer release: "Holidate" enters the Netflix Holiday romcom smorgasbord

I’ve been waiting a full year to see this trailer. We wrapped and delivered “Holidate” at the beginning of December of 2019 and crossed our fingers that it would squeak into that year’s Netflix Christmas movie slate but alas, the decision was made to hold it until 2020.

Truth be told, “Holidate” isn’t specifically a “Christmas movie” anyway. It takes place over an entire year with most of its scenes set on pretty much every other major commercial holiday. So, for that reason they’re calling it a “holiday” film instead and debuting it in time for Halloween. I imagine the plan here is to trot this back into the featured content section at every major holiday for maximum eyeballs.

I love working on comedies because they always take full advantage of music. Not only do they tend to use a lot of it but comedies also often incorporate music into the plots and punchlines.

Holidate lived up to both of those expectations and I got to dig for plenty of great songs to sync and put on my producer hat and create some pretty cool moments with some original productions. The film is set in Chicago (where I lived for nearly 6 years) so when I first read the script I was excited to see that there was going to be a gospel choir performing on camera.

I looked forward to returning to Chicago and finding a legit local gospel choir to cast and record. Sadly, it turned out we would be shooting in Atlanta instead. Ultimately, it made more logistical and financial sense to put a choir together here in LA and produce original arrangements for them to pre-record and then cast extras for the choir in Atlanta so that’s what we did.

I think the biggest thrill for me however was convincing hip hop legend Dan The Automator to write the original score for the film. Our director John Whitsell had said that he wanted someone comfortable with both traditional scoring techniques as well as having a flair for something more gritty and hip-hop-inflected. A little-known fact is that Dan is also a classically trained violinist.

It just so happened that the day after this conversation with the director I went to see the movie “Book Smart” in the theater by myself and stayed through the credits to see who the composer was. When I saw the title card “Composer, Dan The Automator” it brought back so many memories from the late 90s and early 2000s of records he had produced and performed on that I loved so much. I had the cassette tape of “Dr Octagon” Literally stuck in the tape player of my 91 Ford Explorer for over a year in college so it was seriously the only thing you could listen to in my car for quite a while. The idea of maybe being able to call him up and having him consider working with me on this was a trip…so I did it. Well, I called his agent first but then we all sat down and had a great talk. Ultimately Dan clicked with the director as well and we were off to the races.

Dan lives in San Fransisco in a cool house with a fantastic recording studio in the lower levels full of a lifetime of collected gear and records. So, Dan worked between LA and SF on this film but at one point I was able to visit him at his home studio and check out his incredible collection of analogue synths, samplers and records. See below for a few snaps I took at his place.

Without belaboring this much further, here is the official Netflix trailer for “Holidate” coming this October 28th. And below that I’ve included a little behind the scenes treat…

I thought it might be interesting to see this little video snippet that I captured on the set in Atlanta when we were rehearsing the gospel choir for their choreography. We were filming in an abandoned shopping mall that had been re-styled to look like a fully functional Chicago mall at Christmas time, complete with hundreds of extras roaming around “shopping.” The choir was to be at the center of all of this.

I got to the set that morning at about 5 AM and quickly became aware that somehow the playback music files had never been delivered to the audio department so neither the choir extras nor the choreographer had ever heard the music they were supposed to be dancing and lip-syncing to in a few hours. Luckily I had a flash drive in my pocket with the audio files and we scrambled to get set up to rehearse just as the director strolled into our little corner of the set to say how much he loved the songs. We all gave a panicked thumbs up and then somehow the choreographer was able to whip 25 people into dancing shape within probably an hour and a half. Pretty amazing!