Latest / Hallmark Mysteries & More / Behind the Scenes of Hallmark Filmmaking: An Insightful Conversation with Director Ron Oliver

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Behind the Scenes of Hallmark Filmmaking: An Insightful Conversation with Director Ron Oliver · Hallmark Mysteries & More

• 0:00
  Eric Rutin: This podcast was created by fans or fans and is not affiliated with or sponsored by Hallmark or the Hallmark channel.
• 0:09
  Eric Rutin: This is Eric, this is Sydney and this is Hallmark Mysteries and more.
• 0:22
  Eric Rutin: Okay, well, we're really excited.
• 0:25
  Eric Rutin: We have a Hallmark legend with us today, legend on Oliver, director and writer for many, many Hallmark movies, as well as a couple of the mysteries, which is, as everyone knows, what we like to talk about.
• 0:42
  Eric Rutin: Well, thank you for joining us, ron.
• 0:43
  Eric Rutin: How are you doing today?
• 0:44
  Ron Oliver: Pleasure, pleasure, great to be here.
• 0:46
  Ron Oliver: Thank you for having me.
• 0:47
  Eric Rutin: Now you're out there in Palm Springs, right.
• 0:49
  Ron Oliver: I am yes.
• 0:50
  Eric Rutin: Okay.
• 0:50
  Eric Rutin: So we're probably having I'm in Phoenix, we're probably having some pretty similar weather, where now summers tapping us saying okay, we're getting ready, to get warm.
• 1:01
  Ron Oliver: That's it.
• 1:02
  Ron Oliver: Yeah, we have 102 today.
• 1:03
  Ron Oliver: So yeah, that's it no.
• 1:05
  Eric Rutin: Oh, you guys hit 100 today.
• 1:07
  Ron Oliver: Oh yeah, we've hit 100 a couple of days in a row.
• 1:08
  Eric Rutin: Oh yeah, I think today was the day we were supposed to, but I don't know if it has or hasn't been inside, so Okay.
• 1:17
  Eric Rutin: So one of the things that we like to do for all of our guests is we create a signature cocktail and we follow you on Instagram and we know you do like your cocktail, so I do.
• 1:28
  Eric Rutin: I tell you what a little bit of angst went into this, because we wanted to give you something that we think would be delicious, and you have a little style, so we couldn't just do, you know, straight up, like dirty martini or something like that.
• 1:44
  Eric Rutin: Well, it could be delicious.
• 1:45
  Eric Rutin: We thought we needed to go a little bit more.
• 1:49
  Eric Rutin: So what we did is we developed the Kincaid after one of our favorite characters, carnegie Kincaid, and with that it is a martini and it has two ounces of vanilla vodka, three ounces of pineapple juice, some champagne and a Marchino cherry.
• 2:09
  Eric Rutin: So you do is you put the vodka and the pineapple juice in the shaker, some ice, give the good shake, order the martini glass, hop it off with that champagne, drop the cherry, which will go down the bottom and create this nice little red glow and something like that, and then bottoms up and enjoy it.
• 2:27
  Eric Rutin: So we thought it's great, we thought it kind of, you know, is a little bit different, a little bit a little bit fun, and that's how we kind of view you fun.
• 2:38
  Ron Oliver: I'm flattered that you would go to the trouble of creating a cocktail.
• 2:41
  Ron Oliver: It sounds great.
• 2:42
  Ron Oliver: I have a friend who loves pineapple martinis, so I'm going to I'll concoct that next time.
• 2:47
  Ron Oliver: They're over and well do you know the?
• 2:49
  Ron Oliver: Actor Udo Kier.
• 2:50
  Ron Oliver: You're familiar with Udo Kier.
• 2:51
  Eric Rutin: I'm not.
• 2:53
  Ron Oliver: Udo played Dracula and Andy Warhol's Dracula and he played Dr Frank Stern and Udo's credit well known character and and he's a big pineapple martini fan.
• 3:03
  Ron Oliver: So I'll make a point.
• 3:04
  Eric Rutin: All right.
• 3:04
  Eric Rutin: Well, yeah, you got that little vanilla hint to it and then that champagne to top it off gives a little bit of effervescence and, you know, just a little bit different.
• 3:12
  Eric Rutin: So hopefully, hopefully, when you guys have one, you'll share and you go, wow, this is fantastic.
• 3:19
  Ron Oliver: So we will.
• 3:20
  Ron Oliver: It is pretty good.
• 3:23
  Eric Rutin: We are doing this in the middle of the afternoon and why I have nothing against day drinking.
• 3:26
  Eric Rutin: I did spend yesterday day drinking.
• 3:28
  Eric Rutin: I today I did not get a chance to make one, but I will rush a shirt.
• 3:34
  Eric Rutin: I think it's delicious, Okay.
• 3:36
  Eric Rutin: I can't wait to try it.
• 3:37
  Eric Rutin: Okay, all right, so let's get going into it.
• 3:40
  Eric Rutin: So one of the things and I saw you post this, I think it was today, right, today is Alfred Hitchcock's.
• 3:46
  Eric Rutin: Is it his birthday or the milestone for Alfred?
• 3:50
  Ron Oliver: Hitchcock.
• 3:50
  Ron Oliver: Yeah, his passing.
• 3:53
  Ron Oliver: It was yesterday, it was passing.
• 3:55
  Ron Oliver: It was like 43 years ago that Mr Hitchcock passed.
• 3:59
  Eric Rutin: Okay, I'm a huge, I'm a huge fan of his movies as well, and you know, as time goes on I would say younger people may not quite be.
• 4:08
  Eric Rutin: You know, they see the black and white and this I can't do it.
• 4:11
  Eric Rutin: But tell me a little bit about why you're such a fan of Alfred Hitchcock, because you know, once again, I'm just a schmo who watches movie.
• 4:20
  Eric Rutin: You're an actual director who you know can appreciate him at many levels that I can't even be aware of.
• 4:28
  Ron Oliver: Well, I mean, sir Alfred essentially rewrote the grammar of cinema.
• 4:36
  Ron Oliver: He was a big proponent of subjective filmmaking.
• 4:39
  Ron Oliver: So when you're watching a picture you're very often in the shoes of the protagonist, no more so than in rear window where you literally are in that chair with Jimmy Stewart watching everything happen.
• 4:54
  Ron Oliver: So it's very subjective filmmaking as opposed to the objective idea of the camera stays back a little bit and watches the world, so the God's eye point of view.
• 5:01
  Ron Oliver: Mr Hitchcock said let's go right inside of there and take you there.
• 5:05
  Ron Oliver: And Spielberg has followed that greatly and I mean many filmmakers have taken that part.
• 5:11
  Ron Oliver: But Mr Hitchcock was the first one really to get us into that world.
• 5:14
  Ron Oliver: So you felt that, and from his earlier films, even from the lodger, you were in it with the characters and you felt the things that were happening because he would use the subjective camera point of view.
• 5:22
  Ron Oliver: So you felt what was going on.
• 5:24
  Ron Oliver: You'd see the actor reacting something and then cut to what they're seeing and that reaction, counter reaction, would put you in that place, plus the fact the movies are wildly entertaining and my mother swore for her entire life that she went into labor when they were at a drive in showing of psycho, which timed out about right in terms of when I was born.
• 5:48
  Ron Oliver: So she swore she went into labor during psycho and then I was born not shortly after.
• 5:54
  Eric Rutin: A little tidbit for you psycho.
• 5:56
  Eric Rutin: The hotel where she goes to and gets killed is right down the street from my house.
• 6:00
  Eric Rutin: I live in Central Phoenix and that was, that's right downtown Phoenix, so it's about I don't know five minutes right down the the road.
• 6:09
  Eric Rutin: So every time I go by it I have no idea because obviously the outside doesn't really look anything spectacular, but I, for some reason, I always think about that when I found out that that was the building.
• 6:21
  Ron Oliver: So that first hotel, when the camera first goes in.
• 6:23
  Ron Oliver: Yeah, that's great, that's cool.
• 6:27
  Eric Rutin: So now, do you remember as a kid what your first offered Hitchcock movie was, when you just all of a sudden were like whoa.
• 6:35
  Ron Oliver: It was probably psycho.
• 6:36
  Ron Oliver: Yeah, because I remember it came on television.
• 6:40
  Ron Oliver: I would have been maybe six years old perhaps and it came on television and there was a big disclaimer on the TV that you know you shouldn't watch this very easily shocked or horrified or have a weak heart or something.
• 6:52
  Ron Oliver: And I remember my parents watching television oh yeah, my parents watching on television in the in the living room, in the family room, and I was.
• 7:01
  Ron Oliver: I got out of bed.
• 7:02
  Ron Oliver: I remember this, got it.
• 7:03
  Ron Oliver: Wow, I haven't thought of this a long time Got out of bed and walked down the hall and like kind of listened around the corner to someone's up, and I can remember seeing those opening titles with the sort of fragmented, zigzagging pattern of Saul Bass with psycho.
• 7:17
  Ron Oliver: I remember seeing that and seeing the opening shots in the hotel that you're speaking of in Phoenix and that's it.
• 7:24
  Ron Oliver: But then I think they came and said no, no to bed.
• 7:26
  Ron Oliver: So that was that.
• 7:27
  Ron Oliver: But that was like the first experience of it and as an adult you know they.
• 7:32
  Ron Oliver: They did a reissue of the pictures back in the early to mid 80s probably early 80s, because they have been off the radar for a long time and then they did a big reissue and a restoration of the films like rear window and north by northwest and a bit of a push and strangers on a train and so on.
• 7:51
  Ron Oliver: And then we got to see them again on big screens.
• 7:54
  Ron Oliver: They did a release of all that stuff and vertigo, I mean it was amazing.
• 7:57
  Ron Oliver: So that's really kind of where it kicked in for me, because I had been writing for a while by then.
• 8:02
  Ron Oliver: But and new of his stuff, but you, it wasn't easily accessible because they weren't even released on VHS back at that time, because that was like early 80s and that that hadn't really kicked in in terms of the release of these films.
• 8:16
  Ron Oliver: So anyway, so that's when it sort of hit.
• 8:20
  Eric Rutin: Which, which is your favorite?
• 8:22
  Ron Oliver: Oh, that's like asking.
• 8:23
  Ron Oliver: You know you got to pick one Everyone has her favorite kid.
• 8:26
  Eric Rutin: Come on, they may lie, but they do.
• 8:30
  Ron Oliver: I would say north by northwest is the one that I go back to all the time.
• 8:33
  Ron Oliver: I love north by northwest.
• 8:34
  Ron Oliver: When we did Christmas to the Plaza, the movie we did for Hallmark, I wrote director that thing and we there are all kinds of little mentions in there about north by northwest because part of that movie takes place at the Plaza Hotel in New York City.
• 8:48
  Ron Oliver: So we put little inside jokes and actually the fans found we got lots of emails and lots of messages from people because they found little jokes, little Hitchcockian jokes inside the movie.
• 8:58
  Ron Oliver: So that was kind of a pleasure.
• 9:00
  Eric Rutin: So yeah, I agree, I'm a rear window.
• 9:04
  Eric Rutin: It just really freaks.
• 9:06
  Eric Rutin: Oh yeah, I shouldn't say freaks me out, but it the angst I just call so much angst in that, in that movie.
• 9:15
  Ron Oliver: It's just a great film.
• 9:15
  Ron Oliver: I mean, they're all you know they're a bad.
• 9:17
  Ron Oliver: Hitchcock is better than most of the films are going to see anyway, so I agree, I agree.
• 9:22
  Eric Rutin: So you're talking about like being a little kid and you know, when you're six or seven, or like peeking through the, my parents took me to see Jaws when I was seven, of which you know you're talking to Spielberg, the, the head down underwater and coming out to this day.
• 9:39
  Eric Rutin: You know you have a major shark phobia and you know in now, modern days, like a parent who took their kid to see Jaws in their youth would be like ostracized.
• 9:50
  Eric Rutin: But back in I grew up in the 70s and 80s, back in the 70s, at the, you know that time when I think it was 74, you know is whatever we're going to see it, you know you'll be emotionally scarred for life.
• 10:02
  Eric Rutin: Don't worry about it.
• 10:04
  Ron Oliver: You know the head.
• 10:04
  Ron Oliver: The head pop out of the hole of the boat, the underwater head pop.
• 10:08
  Ron Oliver: You know they.
• 10:09
  Ron Oliver: You probably know this, but they as a reshoot that they did in Spielberg's pool.
• 10:14
  Eric Rutin: Oh, I did not.
• 10:16
  Ron Oliver: Yeah, because they there was.
• 10:17
  Ron Oliver: They need an extra oomph, an extra bam moment in the movie and I was like, well, what if we did this and they went back and they did a reshoot, just like they built a hole, put under the pool and did a little reshoot there in his pool.
• 10:29
  Eric Rutin: All right, I did not see.
• 10:30
  Eric Rutin: I learned something fantastic.
• 10:32
  Eric Rutin: I plan to learn a lot of things today, but there we go.
• 10:34
  Eric Rutin: That's one of my favorite movies of all time.
• 10:36
  Eric Rutin: Okay, it's good to hear.
• 10:37
  Eric Rutin: So when you go through your IMDB, you have a very interesting career.
• 10:43
  Eric Rutin: You have a lot of like love and romance, but then you also have a lot of like in there and stuff.
• 10:50
  Eric Rutin: So do you have an?
• 10:52
  Eric Rutin: I know we're talking home American stuff, but do you have like a preference?
• 10:56
  Eric Rutin: Do you like that light, fluffy stuff, or do you tend to like that little more dark, sinister type stuff when you're, you know, just out there cranking out stuff?
• 11:06
  Ron Oliver: It's, it's funny I, I like both, I really do.
• 11:09
  Ron Oliver: I mean I love a good romcom I, but it has to be the classic style of romcoms, like I love the door stay, rock Hudson style, of those films as old fashioned romcoms because they're just great fun and and I really enjoy that.
• 11:23
  Ron Oliver: I like the complexion of a romance can be really fun to to play with and watch and watch it happen because you know they're going to get together.
• 11:32
  Ron Oliver: The trick is how do you keep them apart to the end?
• 11:34
  Ron Oliver: You know I like that a lot but I do, I mean I love I.
• 11:38
  Ron Oliver: Obviously I started in a horror and I love it.
• 11:41
  Ron Oliver: I love horror movies and I love thrillers.
• 11:43
  Ron Oliver: I love, I love a good.
• 11:44
  Ron Oliver: If you can give me a good comic thriller with a romantic subplot, I'm in heaven.
• 11:49
  Ron Oliver: You know, if you get the young lovers who've just met and they're meet cute as a dead body and they got to get rid of it, that to me is I mean you know that's fantastic, and when we, when we talk a little bit later, we will be talking a little bit about, about just that.
• 12:06
  Eric Rutin: So was the wedding planner mysteries.
• 12:09
  Eric Rutin: Was that your first homework project?
• 12:12
  Ron Oliver: No, the first homework thing I did was I think it was bridal fever, Back in like oh I don't remember what it was, but bridal fever with Andrea Roth and Delta work, Okay, and that was fun.
• 12:36
  Ron Oliver: Yeah, that was the first one.
• 12:38
  Eric Rutin: Okay, I'm not familiar with that one.
• 12:40
  Eric Rutin: I knew this.
• 12:41
  Eric Rutin: I mean 2014.
• 12:42
  Eric Rutin: Yeah, I guess there are a handful before then.
• 12:47
  Ron Oliver: Yeah, things didn't really.
• 12:48
  Ron Oliver: I mean, Paul Maher didn't really start firing on all cylinders until about, I want to say, like 2010,.
• 12:56
  Ron Oliver: Roughly 2009, 2010,.
• 12:58
  Ron Oliver: They sort of went.
• 12:59
  Ron Oliver: Let's start really.
• 13:00
  Ron Oliver: You know, let's reinvent the rom-com genre, let's do it for Ross and let's do it in this way.
• 13:05
  Ron Oliver: And they really started to pound them out then, which was great fun, you know, because it was like the old studio system where you're literally, you know, I did one year, I did like five movies one year, because you're just jumping into it and, okay, here's a project, you want to do it.
• 13:19
  Ron Oliver: And I guess it wasn't like a studio system, because if you didn't do it you'd get suspended, but you didn't get that problem.
• 13:25
  Eric Rutin: Yeah, yeah, but no, you jump in Modern day.
• 13:28
  Ron Oliver: Yeah, yeah, you get these great projects and you get to go from picture to picture to picture and it was great Like.
• 13:34
  Eric Rutin: I had a crew.
• 13:36
  Ron Oliver: I had a DP that I worked with on 12, 13 movies in a row, basically, and we just worked together.
• 13:41
  Ron Oliver: Dr Vitagravi worked together a lot and it was just great because you got to.
• 13:45
  Ron Oliver: Really, you know, you got to work on your craft, which was terrific because you learn something new from every movie, and then you got to entertain people, which was fun.
• 13:55
  Eric Rutin: So yeah, well, actually it's funny you said that because when we talked to Benjamin Ayers, that's what he had said is that it has that feel of working at a well, he's not old enough to remember, but what he thinks of being the old studios where, because they had the same group of actors, is what he was talking about.
• 14:13
  Eric Rutin: So, and then you're saying, the same sort of people behind the, behind the camera as well, are probably all the same and you get to know each other and work together multiple times.
• 14:22
  Ron Oliver: Oh yeah, oh, it's great.
• 14:23
  Ron Oliver: Yeah, the same.
• 14:24
  Ron Oliver: We had a lot of the same studio executives.
• 14:26
  Ron Oliver: They worked with the same network executives on the pictures.
• 14:30
  Ron Oliver: So you, you know, and they knew what you liked.
• 14:32
  Ron Oliver: They knew what you did.
• 14:33
  Ron Oliver: Well, and they knew what you liked to do.
• 14:35
  Ron Oliver: And then they would bring the project to you and say, how about this, how about that?
• 14:38
  Ron Oliver: Or you could walk in with the project and say I've got an idea and they trusted you to bring it to fruition.
• 14:43
  Ron Oliver: So all right.
• 14:44
  Eric Rutin: Well, I would say you also are.
• 14:46
  Eric Rutin: As I started with a Hallmark Lodge, well, I guess I had to start somewhere, but you definitely have proven that you know how to make a good Hallmark movie.
• 14:53
  Eric Rutin: So I bet their trust level of you is probably a little bit higher than if I walked in with an idea.
• 14:59
  Eric Rutin: But I would hope so too.
• 15:01
  Eric Rutin: You're far more talented.
• 15:02
  Eric Rutin: But so I guess my question is, since you have been there, you know, since you know close to the beginning or the beginning, and to now, how has it really changed?
• 15:14
  Eric Rutin: Because movies now we're just talking that the latest mystery that was out there the cases of Mystery Lane it had as part of the core plot it had a guy who was secretly gay having an affair with a co-worker who was married to a woman and they had an open marriage.
• 15:36
  Eric Rutin: Now, that's not something that really would have happened in Hallmark a few years ago, and I'm just using that as an example of just differently right.
• 15:46
  Eric Rutin: And then the diversity, but there's also got to be a lot of other things that are just different because they are a machine producing 95 or whatever it is movies a year.
• 15:55
  Eric Rutin: So how has it been different from going back in time to like what it is now?
• 16:01
  Ron Oliver: I think probably what it is now is the.
• 16:03
  Ron Oliver: It reflects I would say reflect real life, maybe a little more in terms of the intricacies of the human heart.
• 16:13
  Ron Oliver: You know, because I love the twist.
• 16:17
  Ron Oliver: That's a great I don't know that story, I don't know the moment.
• 16:19
  Ron Oliver: That's a great fun twist.
• 16:22
  Ron Oliver: It's very death trap, but it's sort of.
• 16:25
  Ron Oliver: You know, I guess you had to expand the palette over there.
• 16:30
  Ron Oliver: It had to happen because you couldn't continue in that kind of vacuum, sealed world that Hallmark existed in for a very long time and successfully, you know.
• 16:39
  Ron Oliver: But as things changed and it wasn't just Hallmark's change, it's also the culture has changed, and for the better, because suddenly people woke up and one day I went you know, my neighbors are this and my friends are this and the world is bigger than you can maybe necessarily perceive.
• 16:57
  Ron Oliver: And I think that scared a lot of people because the idea of new and different and change freaks people out a little bit.
• 17:04
  Ron Oliver: But I like that they've done that at Hallmark.
• 17:07
  Ron Oliver: I think it's really important to see it happen and it's definitely a change for the better, that's for sure.
• 17:13
  Eric Rutin: So I've talked to.
• 17:13
  Eric Rutin: You know a couple other people.
• 17:15
  Eric Rutin: Do you know Tracy Andrine, I don't, okay, she's written a bunch of Hallmark movies, but she was and then a couple other people who have just been, whether they've been behind the scenes, but they have said also, there's just a lot more freedom to do things, where it was pretty much you had this, you had the formula and you had to kind of stay in there and you, being a writer, which is a very creative profession, was it like kind of, when you got the chance to be a little more free, was it just kind of like a big sigh of like wow, I can like push boundaries that I never could do before, or is it pretty much it is a Hallmark movie at the end of the day, so you kind of do stay within a certain you know rails there.
• 18:05
  Ron Oliver: It's interesting I my experience with Hallmark was, I think, different than a lot of people's, because I didn't ever feel particularly constrained.
• 18:17
  Ron Oliver: Because there's, there are story mechanics that are simply that's what, that's how a story works, and I never, I've never particularly felt any serious pushback.
• 18:29
  Ron Oliver: The occasionally, you know, they'd say, well, maybe that was too passionate.
• 18:32
  Ron Oliver: A kiss when you're directing a scene or whatever you know like little things like that.
• 18:36
  Ron Oliver: But that was because Hallmark at the time had a perception of their audience that was not necessarily entirely accurate.
• 18:43
  Ron Oliver: Their audience and their audience has changed, obviously, to.
• 18:46
  Ron Oliver: Their demographic has changed a little bit.
• 18:47
  Ron Oliver: They've tried very hard to age down demographically.
• 18:51
  Ron Oliver: But I remember actually really feeling terribly constrained because you're going, this is the brand you know, when I go and I would make a movie over Universal and the Universal brand for the division I was doing movies there their brand was this and so you knew, over there you do this and over there you do that.
• 19:09
  Ron Oliver: And when you do like lifetime, I did a bunch of lifetime thrillers and it'll blast right and they were fun.
• 19:15
  Ron Oliver: But they're also also another brand.
• 19:16
  Ron Oliver: So if you're aware of, it's like going to Warner Brothers back in the day in the 40s, 30s and 40s was a gangster studio and MGM was the musicals you know, and Universal was the horror and monsters.
• 19:27
  Ron Oliver: So every different network has its own brand and Hallmark's brand was always, you know, happy endings.
• 19:34
  Eric Rutin: Right.
• 19:36
  Ron Oliver: And so I never really felt constrained, to be honest with you.
• 19:39
  Ron Oliver: Occasionally you'd go there's got to be a way to do this.
• 19:42
  Ron Oliver: It's like the old days when the in the old censorship days in the 30s, you know, in the Hayes code and everything, and you had to curtail some elements of a story in order to work in that mold, which sometimes made you more creative, because you're like, okay, I'm forced to do this, I got to, I have to figure a way to tell this story in this way.
• 20:06
  Ron Oliver: Does that make sense?
• 20:07
  Ron Oliver: And so there was a certain amount of you know, here's the box.
• 20:11
  Ron Oliver: You can do anything you want to the box, but this is the box, right, everything has to fit inside the box.
• 20:16
  Ron Oliver: And when they say now we're going outside the box, truthfully it's all just window dressing anyway, really, because all the elements and the diversity and so on and so forth which is very important because obviously it reflects the world we live in but at the same time you fall in love with somebody, you fall out of somebody.
• 20:32
  Ron Oliver: You know you're going to murder somebody.
• 20:34
  Ron Oliver: It doesn't really matter who they are, it doesn't, it matters how it works.
• 20:39
  Ron Oliver: So you can put any character into the mix you want to and everybody goes ooh, how brave and interesting.
• 20:43
  Ron Oliver: Not really, because at the end of the day, you still have to get rid of the dead body.
• 20:46
  Ron Oliver: So you know.
• 20:48
  Eric Rutin: I love that.
• 20:48
  Eric Rutin: That's awesome.
• 20:49
  Eric Rutin: All right, so you, as we've been talking, you get, you write and you direct.
• 20:55
  Eric Rutin: I imagine that there's a lot of similarities but there's also a lot of very different diversity, or diversity on this very way to put it, but they're very different.
• 21:05
  Eric Rutin: Skill sets, right?
• 21:06
  Eric Rutin: Do you find like it's very helpful that you're a writer when you're directing, because you kind of can do there, or are you like, oh, doing your own, like rewrites, because you know how to do it and you know how to make it work better?
• 21:24
  Ron Oliver: Yeah, so I, generally speaking, if I hadn't written the script, the original script, to direct, I almost invariably rewrite whatever has been given to me in a script or come in as a rewrite guy, because very often certainly with a Hallmark movies they would come to me with a script that they've been sitting on for a while and go this isn't working, we need to fix this, can you help us?
• 21:44
  Ron Oliver: And then direct the movie.
• 21:44
  Ron Oliver: And so I would do that, and it's always better because you're on set.
• 21:49
  Ron Oliver: What happens is many writers not all writers, but many writers have absolutely no idea how physics work, or the real world, or human emotions, or relationships, or really physics.
• 22:04
  Ron Oliver: So trying to explain to somebody on a film set that you have to walk from here, from this chair, over to that door, to make the scene work, if I don't in my head know why they have to do that, it's really hard for me to explain to the actor why they have to do it, and those are the kind of things that in a screenplay you need to have those questions answered.
• 22:24
  Ron Oliver: All the motivations have to be answered in the script.
• 22:27
  Ron Oliver: So when I'm standing on a set, I'm not trying to work out the story on set.
• 22:32
  Ron Oliver: I've already done it at my laptop, if that makes sense, because you just go to the script and make here, here's the movie, now it works.
• 22:38
  Ron Oliver: Then you go on the floor and you shoot it, and that's my preferred method is to walk on set and not have any questions at all, just go.
• 22:45
  Ron Oliver: This is exactly how it works, and the actors I've worked with have always seemed to appreciate the idea that we don't stand there looking at each other going well, I don't know how this works.
• 22:54
  Eric Rutin: Wait, does that actually happen.
• 22:56
  Ron Oliver: Oh God, yeah, oh, yes, oh, wow, oh yes.
• 23:00
  Ron Oliver: There are legendary stories and not just in the hallmark world but in every possible film world of standing around set trying to figure something out because the script doesn't work and nobody knows the script doesn't work.
• 23:12
  Ron Oliver: But they went to the floor, they go to the set with the script ready to shoot because they're like okay, we have an air date or we have a premiere date, we got to make this movie, we have the actors, we have the script and like script doesn't work, I know we'll make it work, we'll figure it out as we go and like oh, will you though, really?
• 23:27
  Ron Oliver: And then you end up going into overtime and it's crazy.
• 23:29
  Ron Oliver: So I try in my work, I've tried, with varying degrees of success.
• 23:35
  Ron Oliver: I have tried to make sure that never happens.
• 23:37
  Eric Rutin: So Okay, Wow, yeah, wow, that was one normal movie coming up in the August, almost the comical, you know, scene of just seeing people trying to figure it out.
• 23:48
  Eric Rutin: But then also in the back of my mind just seeing that little, not the cash register, but the expense of just standing around trying to figure it out.
• 23:59
  Eric Rutin: Oh, yes, so, oh, yes, that's interesting Urban day.
• 24:04
  Ron Oliver: Way, way back in the day, early, early on, and I was doing a lot of episodic TV shows.
• 24:07
  Ron Oliver: You would get a script coming from the writers, who clearly had, and they were very strict about this.
• 24:13
  Ron Oliver: The writers would send a script to the set and the producers would be there and they're like no, no, this is the script, this is gospel, it must be shot this way and you couldn't change it.
• 24:22
  Ron Oliver: So you'd stand there and go how is this supposed to work?
• 24:25
  Ron Oliver: But someone liked to explain to me how this physically happens, because there's no logic to it at all.
• 24:31
  Ron Oliver: And you would stand there and there were days back in those early days when you would just stop and you would clear everybody out the set, except for yourself and the writer and the actors, and say, okay, writer, explain to me.
• 24:42
  Ron Oliver: I brought one down one day.
• 24:43
  Ron Oliver: I brought a writer from upstairs down to the set and said show me how this is supposed to work.
• 24:47
  Ron Oliver: And the guy's like, oh, I didn't really think it was like no, no, show me how it works, because you wrote it and I have to direct it.
• 24:54
  Ron Oliver: And that's a long time ago and I haven't dealt with that sort of thing in decades, but I remember those days and go oh yish, and that was a good lesson, because then you go, I will never go on a film set without a script that works 100%.
• 25:09
  Eric Rutin: So I guess that it does definitely help your writing the fact that you have directed it, that you probably write very differently than a lot of writers do.
• 25:18
  Eric Rutin: So even if you're writing something that you're not directing, it's probably appreciated.
• 25:23
  Ron Oliver: Yeah, I think.
• 25:23
  Ron Oliver: So I've had those things said to me and I learned more from the very first movie ever made.
• 25:30
  Ron Oliver: I wrote I didn't direct it and then the director made the picture it came back didn't quite work, probably because of my writing, because it was my first script and it was stuff I should have done better, but then also the director wasn't necessarily the guy for the kind of material it was.
• 25:45
  Ron Oliver: So it came back and the director had long gone and the producer not dead.
• 25:52
  Ron Oliver: He just went on another show and the producer and I sat down with the editor and he said, okay, go figure this out.
• 25:57
  Ron Oliver: So we cut the movie down to the absolute, like bare bones, of what it needed to be in terms of a story.
• 26:05
  Ron Oliver: And I learned so much about writing from that experience because you cut all this stuff that you put into the script, thinking was like oh, and it was unnecessary, and took it all out and took it right down to the bones and then rebuilt the thing and then did reshoots to bring the movie back to what it needed to be.
• 26:20
  Ron Oliver: And that was a massive learning curve for me.
• 26:23
  Ron Oliver: I was like 25, but that was a massive learning curve and it changed the way I wrote scripts.
• 26:29
  Ron Oliver: It changed the way I saw movies from that point on.
• 26:31
  Ron Oliver: So, for better or for worse I mean I'm no genius but it was a good learning curve for that moment.
• 26:36
  Eric Rutin: So that's cool, all right.
• 26:39
  Eric Rutin: So we are a mystery focused podcast and maybe I can stretch this to say that, hey, this is a mystery, but one of my favorite Christmas movies is one of yours.
• 26:50
  Eric Rutin: It's a timeless Christmas and it has Aaron Cahill in it, who I absolutely adore, aaron Cahill.
• 26:58
  Eric Rutin: So, even though it has nothing to do with the mysteries, but I can say it was a mystery of kind of a sense.
• 27:04
  Eric Rutin: Right, can you just tell me a little bit about that movie and how?
• 27:10
  Eric Rutin: Just some stories about that one, mostly about Aaron Cahill.
• 27:15
  Ron Oliver: I love making that movie.
• 27:16
  Ron Oliver: So Aaron and I hadn't worked together before, but the male lead-in was a guy named Ryan Pavey and Ryan and I had made Christmas the Plaza and then bonded during that experience and became fast friends and we still are and that picture came along and they had a script that wasn't working but they had the original book.
• 27:36
  Ron Oliver: So they said why don't you take this thing and figure it out?
• 27:40
  Ron Oliver: And the fellow who wrote the original draft of the script who has just passed recently, unfortunately was a wonderful, wonderful writer but and he loved the story but he didn't the mechanics of the story were, I think, alluding a little bit.
• 27:51
  Ron Oliver: So and I got fresh eyes.
• 27:54
  Ron Oliver: So I jumped in and I said, yeah, I'll do it.
• 27:55
  Ron Oliver: If I can have Pavey in the lead, I'll totally do it.
• 27:57
  Ron Oliver: So we'll give you Pavey and you're gonna have Aaron Cahill.
• 27:59
  Ron Oliver: So I'm excited, I got my two leads.
• 28:01
  Ron Oliver: So then I and then obviously Nelson Wong is Kenny Gwan, so I've got those three people in the movie.
• 28:05
  Ron Oliver: So then I take the book, I deconstruct the thing, go back to the book.
• 28:09
  Ron Oliver: And we were living in a hotel because our house was undergoing a renovation.
• 28:13
  Ron Oliver: So we were living in a hotel at the time here in Palm Springs.
• 28:16
  Ron Oliver: I remember sitting there and sitting in the hotel, in the room, you know, type, type, type, and I remember taking the thing apart and just thinking, okay, what are the elements that really make this work?
• 28:26
  Ron Oliver: And what was great was being able to, in my head, see Aaron in the lead and Ryan in the lead and be able to put those things together as they went through the, through rerun of the script and that was during COVID.
• 28:37
  Ron Oliver: That was like right in the heat of the pandemic.
• 28:40
  Ron Oliver: That was the first movie I did coming back out of pandemic, because that was pandemic started like March, middle of March of 2020.
• 28:46
  Ron Oliver: And we were back on the floor on that movie in July of 2020, up in Vancouver.
• 28:51
  Ron Oliver: So it was, you know, pretty soon in.
• 28:53
  Ron Oliver: But making it was great because we shot it in this big, beautiful mansion in Vancouver, right in downtown Vancouver, shot the whole thing in it, except like one day we went out into a house, out in the boondock someplace.
• 29:04
  Ron Oliver: But it was great and I mean Pavey and I have a shorthand oh and oh okay.
• 29:10
  Ron Oliver: So then during the, during the making of it, we were staying in a hotel in downtown Vancouver and Pavey's upstairs for me and we had balconies and we weren't supposed to like see each other because we're supposed to be in quarantine, so we couldn't actually go visit each other.
• 29:28
  Ron Oliver: But we would like raise and lower Like if I was out of gin, he would lower a bottle of gin down to me, or if he needed to like take away food, I would be, like, you know, put up to him.
• 29:37
  Ron Oliver: So we were able to and we would talk back and forth up down the balcony and talk about the story and like what we're gonna do with the script and everything.
• 29:43
  Ron Oliver: And then Aaron came along and then so it was.
• 29:46
  Ron Oliver: We had to be like really isolated.
• 29:47
  Ron Oliver: So it was me, Pavey Nelson, aaron, aaron's husband, and I think that was it.
• 29:54
  Ron Oliver: And like we could hang out together because we were all in the bubble, could be quarantine for two weeks, but we couldn't really hang out with other people.
• 30:00
  Ron Oliver: So we have to, you know, eat in restaurants together by the window and all that crazy stuff that happened during the pandemic.
• 30:05
  Ron Oliver: So we became really close during that experience and to this day we still talk on the phone everybody.
• 30:11
  Ron Oliver: It was a really great bonding experience, an unusual filming experience, to be sure, cause it was a weird line, cause you're all masked up and it was hard to communicate, but the movie came out really well.
• 30:21
  Ron Oliver: I'm very proud of that picture because it was made under difficult circumstances.
• 30:26
  Ron Oliver: But I think it's very romantic and it's funny cause there was a.
• 30:30
  Ron Oliver: The only criticism I've ever heard about was people said, well, I wish they'd gone out someplace else you know the beyond the house and he would have gone out of the world.
• 30:37
  Ron Oliver: I said, well, yeah, we've totally done that.
• 30:39
  Ron Oliver: Everything wasn't closed because of.
• 30:42
  Ron Oliver: COVID.
• 30:42
  Ron Oliver: So you know there was that.
• 30:44
  Ron Oliver: I think we did a good job with that picture, given we had to work with, I guess.
• 30:47
  Eric Rutin: Hey, it's one of my favorite, I loved it and you know it's funny that you mentioned it.
• 30:51
  Eric Rutin: I didn't actually really think about it being that you didn't go out to other places because obviously the house was such a big part of the story that it wasn't like I wasn't needing like the little bakery or anything like that.
• 31:09
  Eric Rutin: But, like I said, now that you mention it.
• 31:11
  Eric Rutin: Next time I watch it I will be like it is all in the house, isn't?
• 31:15
  Ron Oliver: it.
• 31:15
  Ron Oliver: Yeah, yeah, yeah, we went to this little the downtown, the little downtown village, which was actually a museum in Vancouver.
• 31:25
  Ron Oliver: So again, everything was contained in this environment, right, but it was just.
• 31:29
  Ron Oliver: It was really interesting time to make a picture.
• 31:32
  Eric Rutin: Yeah, I didn't realize that you guys had started.
• 31:34
  Eric Rutin: I thought it was like the fall before you started shooting again.
• 31:38
  Eric Rutin: So you guys should have so that means everything was hardcore rules at that point.
• 31:44
  Ron Oliver: Yeah, and then you literally would come out of the hotel, get into the van.
• 31:47
  Ron Oliver: You just sit in the back of the van with your mask on, the windows all open, the driver takes you to a place and you had to drive separately, like normally.
• 31:54
  Ron Oliver: We'd all be together in a van talking about the day and then get there, but we couldn't even do that, so it was really crazy.
• 32:02
  Ron Oliver: You know, until I think, middle of May, of this year they're still wearing masks on film sets up in Canada, for sure.
• 32:09
  Ron Oliver: The last one I did was in Greece and we didn't mask up down there yeah.
• 32:15
  Eric Rutin: Both times of the wedding veils, the the Alison Sweeney ones and Victor Webster's were my favorite of both sets of the trilogy.
• 32:25
  Eric Rutin: Oh, nice so.
• 32:27
  Ron Oliver: Well, we had a good time making that.
• 32:28
  Ron Oliver: That was.
• 32:28
  Ron Oliver: That was an amazing adventure, so so Okay, all right.
• 32:34
  Eric Rutin: So now we're going to, we're going to get back and we're going to get back into the mystery world that we'd like to talk about.
• 32:41
  Eric Rutin: And it's funny because, as you were describing earlier, sort of the physics of a script and some sort of making things happen.
• 32:49
  Eric Rutin: We're going to talk about wedding planner mysteries and we just reviewed we did, we don't, I guess we reviewed recapped wedding planner mysteries and picture perfect mysteries, which, coincidentally, wasn't planned, but are both movies and series that you had directed, and so that's why I was like wait a minute, let's reach out and see if he'll talk to us.
• 33:11
  Eric Rutin: So I greatly appreciate it.
• 33:12
  Eric Rutin: But wedding planner mysteries both Sydney and I really enjoyed it, we had a lot of fun with it, but there also seemed to be a lot of chaotic humor, like yeah, elements in it.
• 33:25
  Eric Rutin: So I'm wondering if this was a movie where you were handed a script that you were trying to make things work that maybe didn't fit on the paper, because there were like some things like we watched and we're like we said you said you kind of have to like just say, just suspend some things, because if you dive into like wait, how did this happen?
• 33:45
  Eric Rutin: It just didn't make sense, but the overall what happened was fun and entertaining, but it was like definitely, yeah, a difficult one to you know, dissect.
• 33:56
  Eric Rutin: So was that kind of like the script you were dealing with there?
• 34:00
  Ron Oliver: Well, you, just, you basically just nailed it.
• 34:01
  Ron Oliver: So what happened on that movie was they had a script.
• 34:07
  Ron Oliver: I was an outside company came to Hallmark with a script wedding planner mystery because they were looking for a mystery wheels and they brought this script in and it was an incoherent mess and the network said, okay, well, we're going to, we're going to fix it.
• 34:21
  Ron Oliver: So they gave notes to the writer and the producer of the thing and said, okay, just fix that up.
• 34:27
  Ron Oliver: So we, where did we shoot that thing?
• 34:29
  Ron Oliver: Was that Vancouver, isn't it Vancouver?
• 34:31
  Ron Oliver: So so I I'm like, okay, sure, they're going to fix the script, because I read it and I was like, well, I'm not a big who done it guy, I prefer that.
• 34:40
  Ron Oliver: I like to know who did it and then I get to watch it, get, you know, dissected during the movie.
• 34:45
  Ron Oliver: But anyway, in this case I said, sure, went up and Erica Durantz was casting the thing and I really love Erica, she's fantastic.
• 34:53
  Ron Oliver: So let's have a little fun, we'll do it.
• 34:55
  Ron Oliver: So we get up there and the script comes back from rewrite land and the writers writer, writers haven't addressed any of the issues and it's still the no coherent mess.
• 35:05
  Ron Oliver: But by then we're three weeks away from shooting.
• 35:07
  Ron Oliver: So they're like, okay, and normally what happens, I jump in, I would rewrite the thing, figure it out, and would it be genius and new, but it would at least work.
• 35:16
  Ron Oliver: So I thought, okay, that's what I'm going to do.
• 35:18
  Ron Oliver: But the producers didn't want me to do that because they the writer was a friend of one of the producers and they're like no, no, just give us some notes.
• 35:26
  Ron Oliver: So okay, here are the notes, 10 pages of notes.
• 35:28
  Ron Oliver: Later, your notes fix it.
• 35:31
  Ron Oliver: Script comes back again.
• 35:33
  Ron Oliver: Still doesn't work.
• 35:34
  Ron Oliver: So by then it's too late.
• 35:37
  Ron Oliver: So I'm like, okay, we'll figure this out, we'll just, let's just go.
• 35:39
  Ron Oliver: And they cast Karen Hollnes.
• 35:41
  Ron Oliver: First time we're with Karen, karen comes on board.
• 35:44
  Ron Oliver: I've got my DP, I've got a bunch of people I know, because it's a crew I have up in Vancouver.
• 35:48
  Ron Oliver: So we're like, okay, this is going to be nuts, but let's see what happens, because what's the worst could possibly happen.
• 35:53
  Ron Oliver: So we go to the thing, we start making the movie and it is literally like these scenes are just incoherent and you're trying to figure out.
• 36:00
  Ron Oliver: So I get a phone call about three days into the shooting of this thing because the Russians have started going back to the network and I get a phone call from one of my executives.
• 36:08
  Ron Oliver: He goes what is happening?
• 36:11
  Ron Oliver: What is this script?
• 36:12
  Ron Oliver: I thought you were going to rewrite it.
• 36:13
  Ron Oliver: And I said I tried and they wouldn't let me do it.
• 36:16
  Ron Oliver: Who's they?
• 36:16
  Ron Oliver: The producers?
• 36:18
  Ron Oliver: They wouldn't let me do anything.
• 36:19
  Ron Oliver: So I'm just trying to make the movie work.
• 36:20
  Ron Oliver: He's like, oh my God, okay, I'll call you back.
• 36:23
  Ron Oliver: So then, about five days into the shoot and it's only a 15 day shoot, five days into the shoot they're like okay, so go ahead, you fix it.
• 36:34
  Ron Oliver: And I said, okay, it's a little late in the game right now because we're a third of the way into shooting.
• 36:38
  Ron Oliver: But let's, we'll play as we go along, see if we can't find the answers to things, and there was just a bunch of nonsense, but anyway, so we make the movie.
• 36:45
  Ron Oliver: So then the movie's done and it's like, oh my God, the movie ran.
• 36:49
  Ron Oliver: There's supposed to be 85, 86 minutes, these movies.
• 36:52
  Ron Oliver: I think the movie ran at like 99 minutes, some insane long film.
• 36:57
  Ron Oliver: And you go, oh my God.
• 36:59
  Ron Oliver: So we're in the editing room and you know, trimming and trimming, trying to make the thing work, and I remember the producer, who wouldn't have let me do the rewrite before, comes to me and says how do we fix this?
• 37:09
  Ron Oliver: What do we do?
• 37:10
  Ron Oliver: I said, well, we'll do this, this and this, and then you can send it to Hallmark see what they think.
• 37:15
  Ron Oliver: So then the notes come back from Hallmark and they're like what is going on?
• 37:19
  Ron Oliver: Like it doesn't make sense.
• 37:21
  Ron Oliver: So then I said, okay, what if we just do a bunch of voiceover narrative like an old fashioned detective movie?
• 37:27
  Ron Oliver: We'll do that, let Eric do the voiceover and I'll just, you know, write a bunch of voiceover that sort of addresses the nonsense you're seeing on screen, and do it with kind of an ironic, semi-detached voice from her, which she kind of did really well.
• 37:40
  Ron Oliver: And then they put it together and then, by the sheer magic of cinema, the thing kind of worked and people actually really liked the movie.
• 37:47
  Ron Oliver: So we were all kind of in shock when it worked.
• 37:49
  Ron Oliver: But on the flip side of it, it was, you know, one of those really great adventures where you come out of it and go, boy, you can fix things, can't you, you know so.
• 37:58
  Eric Rutin: So the whole voiceover was a 11th hour, or actually not even 11th hour.
• 38:02
  Eric Rutin: It's a 13th hour.
• 38:04
  Ron Oliver: 13th hour my friend oh, yes, it was, because that movie was, that print was locked, and we're like what are we going to do?
• 38:10
  Ron Oliver: Well, I'll do it, and you know so.
• 38:12
  Ron Oliver: And it was funny because the producer had come to me and he's a really good guy actually, the producer, really good guy and he came to me and said you know, can you do this?
• 38:18
  Ron Oliver: He said we don't have any money to pay you to do this thing.
• 38:21
  Ron Oliver: And I was like you know what?
• 38:22
  Ron Oliver: I'll just fix it, don't worry about it, it will make it work, because I love Erica and I love Karen and I want it.
• 38:28
  Ron Oliver: You want the actors to look good, because this is the thing the audience, when they watch a picture, they'll like they relate to the actors they're seeing on screen and to them to.
• 38:37
  Ron Oliver: Much of the audience is like this is the actors are making it up as they go along.
• 38:40
  Ron Oliver: You know they're saying these words from their own creative Right.
• 38:43
  Eric Rutin: So you want the actors to look good.
• 38:44
  Ron Oliver: You want the performers in the movie to at least be well represented.
• 38:48
  Eric Rutin: You don't want them to look like they're stuck in a turkey, so you got to fix it so yeah, well, like I say it, it it was chaotic, but we had to say it's like when we were reviewing it it was kind of funny because we were like not sure how to review this one because we shouldn't like it as much as we do, but it just came across as so much fun and part of it too.
• 39:08
  Eric Rutin: Like you said, erica was just adorable in the movie, like her, and it's because most of the roles we see her in hallmarks she tends to be a much more serious person.
• 39:21
  Eric Rutin: She doesn't really get to show that comedic side of her and, like I say it just, it's a shame because she does have a very nice comedic yeah, she does.
• 39:32
  Ron Oliver: She's very funny and and it's funny, I what.
• 39:35
  Ron Oliver: I think what you're feeling when you watch that thing is how much?
• 39:38
  Ron Oliver: Because, like, we literally were laughing all the time, Like we're going, this is crazy.
• 39:43
  Ron Oliver: And there was a chaotic energy and a chaotic humor to the stuff, Cause if a scene wasn't working we would just throw something.
• 39:50
  Ron Oliver: I'd go, well, let's come up with some bits of business or some gag or something that will make it make sense and make it all kind of play, Cause at least it's entertaining.
• 39:58
  Ron Oliver: And that's really what happened with that movie and I think that's why people ended up and why you're reacting to it the way you are.
• 40:03
  Ron Oliver: It's just cause we had such an incoherent, crazy time making it so much and it was fun.
• 40:08
  Ron Oliver: It was the energy and the fun of it all was really carried through.
• 40:12
  Eric Rutin: Now I had not.
• 40:13
  Eric Rutin: I've been trying to lately the mysteries that are related off of the book, read the book as well, and one thing I've discovered is, as you as writers tend to take like I don't know four scenes of a book and turn it all into the mystery, and the books tend to have nothing to do with the actual movie when we make a movie off of it.
• 40:34
  Eric Rutin: Was the wedding planner mystery?
• 40:37
  Eric Rutin: Was it supposed to be a more of a comedic Like type mystery, or is it just kind of that's based on what you had?
• 40:44
  Eric Rutin: This is the direction we're going.
• 40:47
  Ron Oliver: Yes, I think that's the.
• 40:50
  Ron Oliver: Your second part was correct, Cause I don't remember it was.
• 40:53
  Ron Oliver: I guess it was a book.
• 40:54
  Ron Oliver: Was it a book?
• 40:55
  Ron Oliver: I had no idea.
• 40:56
  Ron Oliver: Okay, Cause all I ever read was the script.
• 41:00
  Eric Rutin: But that wasn't intended to be like a humorous mystery.
• 41:04
  Ron Oliver: I don't think it was supposed to be Is it turned out to be, at least not intentionally.
• 41:07
  Ron Oliver: Not intentionally.
• 41:08
  Ron Oliver: I don't think it was supposed to be as humorous as they thought it ended up being.
• 41:13
  Eric Rutin: One of our my favorite lines in it was when I'm going to bring that on what her name is the competitive wedding planner.
• 41:22
  Eric Rutin: When she gets knocked out, oh yes.
• 41:25
  Eric Rutin: And when Erica's calling 911, she's like a woman in her fifties I'm 39.
• 41:30
  Eric Rutin: That movie, that line was brilliant.
• 41:33
  Ron Oliver: That was one of mine, because you know cause?
• 41:35
  Ron Oliver: It's an old Jack Benny joke, right, I'm 39.
• 41:38
  Ron Oliver: And I have totally had to do that.
• 41:40
  Ron Oliver: I remember that moment.
• 41:41
  Ron Oliver: Now she lay on the floor.
• 41:42
  Ron Oliver: I love that actress.
• 41:43
  Ron Oliver: Was that Karen Krupper?
• 41:44
  Ron Oliver: I think it was Karen Krupper, but she's laying on the floor.
• 41:46
  Ron Oliver: That was a funny thing.
• 41:47
  Ron Oliver: I'm 39.
• 41:50
  Eric Rutin: Yeah, yeah, I love that line.
• 41:51
  Eric Rutin: So one of the things and this gets back to maybe the cat Sydney's favorite scene in there was when, uh, when Erica's driving the van down and the brakes go out and it's just sort of going there and all the stuff in the van is like flying forward and getting all over her and stuff.
• 42:07
  Eric Rutin: Was that something that was like part of this script, or was that something once again where you just thought up it and said, hey, make it work, because it does seem like it was kind of out of control?
• 42:19
  Ron Oliver: Right, yeah, and that was the humor of it.
• 42:21
  Ron Oliver: Yeah, no, definitely.
• 42:23
  Ron Oliver: Uh, you know, we just again that was just a bit of business we threw him in because probably on the page said, you know, she drives down the thing, the brakes go out.
• 42:30
  Ron Oliver: And having the brakes go out Like that's a thriller moment.
• 42:33
  Ron Oliver: You're like, oh my gosh, I'm going to crash into a tree or whatever.
• 42:35
  Ron Oliver: And if you have crap falling all over the place as you're doing it, then that moves it into comedy.
• 42:40
  Ron Oliver: So, again, a comic thriller with romance in it.
• 42:43
  Ron Oliver: I'm, I'm.
• 42:44
  Eric Rutin: I'm yeah, yeah, love it, love it, okay.
• 42:47
  Eric Rutin: So last thing about about, uh, that one was you had Andrew Walker pretty, I would say, early in his career.
• 42:55
  Eric Rutin: When you're working with him, did you like look at this guy and go, damn, this guy is going to end up being like one of the kings of Hallmark, could you, could you just sense it from him in that movie?
• 43:06
  Ron Oliver: You could, and Andrew and I did that one, and we did a movie called um a date with love, or something had been called promposal originally, and he came back in on that one too.
• 43:20
  Ron Oliver: Yeah, you can see cause he's got that he's the boy next door kind of a guy, you know, and that's what they love at Hallmark.
• 43:26
  Ron Oliver: They like the boy next door who's not terribly threatening handsome, you know, romantic, charming, that stuff.
• 43:33
  Ron Oliver: So and Andrew's all that stuff.
• 43:34
  Ron Oliver: He's actually a great guy, he's the real deal.
• 43:36
  Ron Oliver: He's a very wonderful, wonderful man too.
• 43:39
  Eric Rutin: So it's funny when you see him, cause he just looks so young.
• 43:44
  Eric Rutin: Well, they both look so young in that movie.
• 43:48
  Ron Oliver: Was that?
• 43:48
  Ron Oliver: What year was that?
• 43:49
  Ron Oliver: Was that 2012?
• 43:50
  Ron Oliver: 2014.
• 43:51
  Eric Rutin: 2014, wow, I think it was for, yes, either 12 or 14.
• 43:54
  Eric Rutin: I don't, yeah.
• 43:56
  Eric Rutin: Yeah, it was a decade ago at least.
• 43:59
  Ron Oliver: A decade ago.
• 43:59
  Ron Oliver: Yeah, yeah, it was funny.
• 44:01
  Eric Rutin: I didn't even recognize that as Erica at first, until I, like, looked up the role, just because once again she's so much younger than she is now and once again the woman's just drop dead gorgeous, beautiful, but yeah she's a beautiful young lady.
• 44:18
  Eric Rutin: So it's funny, it's kind of you'll answer this Do you think that could have had the potential to turn into a series, or was it just because of the chaos?
• 44:28
  Eric Rutin: That was a one and done and let's have fun and move on With better if you like.
• 44:34
  Eric Rutin: If you say you'd take it over the writing, do you think I had?
• 44:36
  Ron Oliver: legs.
• 44:37
  Ron Oliver: Well, someone had, if I you know.
• 44:39
  Ron Oliver: I don't know, Probably you know, because there's always something.
• 44:44
  Ron Oliver: But see, I'm not big on sequels because I think that if you tell the story really well, it has beginning and the middle and an end.
• 44:51
  Ron Oliver: And unless you're gonna like I like a contained world for a story and something like that that had a nice ending, like you finish up nicely and then you go, okay, that's all you really need to know the character, erica's character in the movie.
• 45:04
  Ron Oliver: She's a fun character, for sure, but I think at a certain point you're gonna get into the Angela Lansbury scenario where every time she goes to plan a wedding somebody ends up dead.
• 45:17
  Ron Oliver: You're starting to go, maybe she's the one doing it.
• 45:20
  Ron Oliver: So, you know, I think that's a contained environment that maybe wasn't gonna work over and over and over again, I think.
• 45:28
  Eric Rutin: So that's like the Aurora Tea Garden with its like 20-some episodes.
• 45:31
  Eric Rutin: I'm like I don't wanna hang out with her because Angela, I'm gonna end up dead.
• 45:36
  Ron Oliver: You'll be ended up dead, yeah.
• 45:37
  Eric Rutin: All right.
• 45:37
  Eric Rutin: Well, you did do a series, though with Picture Perfect, and that was with three, and I have to say when I first watched them a few years ago it may have been when they first came out I wasn't like in love with them by any means.
• 45:50
  Eric Rutin: I was like, eh, and then we rewatch them because we were going to review them, and I have to say I totally saw a whole bunch of stuff that I just didn't the first time absorb, and one of them is just how stylized that movie was.
• 46:05
  Eric Rutin: Whether it be the dress in it, the music, the scenery, it just was an extreme and like the color palette and everything, it was just really a stylized movie.
• 46:17
  Eric Rutin: And as I walked through it and I appreciated it, the second go round so much more like, I guess, were you trying to do this like real stylized movie, or is it just kind of like those things came together and that's?
• 46:32
  Ron Oliver: what it was.
• 46:32
  Ron Oliver: No, no, there's nothing just comes together in my world.
• 46:35
  Ron Oliver: Well, wedding planner day, yeah, yeah, but even there, the madness in it, yeah, picture Perfect was.
• 46:44
  Ron Oliver: So the Pena Vegas they're great friends of mine and this project came along the first script that they had, and I looked at it and I didn't really want to do at that moment I was doing something else.
• 46:59
  Ron Oliver: That's like I'll do it.
• 47:01
  Ron Oliver: But can I make it like the Pink Panther?
• 47:03
  Ron Oliver: Can I make it like a 1960s styled?
• 47:06
  Ron Oliver: If breakfast at Tiffany's had a murder in the middle of it, can I make that style of movie?
• 47:12
  Ron Oliver: And they're like, yeah, sure.
• 47:13
  Ron Oliver: And I said okay.
• 47:14
  Ron Oliver: So when we sat down the very first meeting, we sat down and I opened up, there's the designer, saul Bass, who did Mr Hitchcock's title cards and so forth.
• 47:23
  Ron Oliver: I laid this big book of Saul Bass's designs on the table at the first production meeting.
• 47:28
  Ron Oliver: I said we're gonna make the Pink Panther meets breakfast at Tiffany's and there's a murder in it and it's gonna be stylized.
• 47:35
  Ron Oliver: And the font of the lettering we took from Hitchcock yep, the color palette was very specific.
• 47:42
  Ron Oliver: I picked them out, all the color palettes.
• 47:44
  Ron Oliver: We laid it all out on the table.
• 47:45
  Ron Oliver: The production designer came in.
• 47:47
  Ron Oliver: We did everything and that thing was of that world, right down to the camera angles, like the structure and the scenes.
• 47:53
  Ron Oliver: Everybody knew it, they all got it, they got the feel of the movie and there's a reason why there's only three of them, because that also has a beginning and a middle and an end.
• 48:02
  Ron Oliver: And you watch their relationship arc and if you remember, the last shot of the first movie is the camera pulls back through the doorway and we see Carlos sitting there playing his guitar by himself in the house.
• 48:16
  Ron Oliver: And we pull through the door and he's framed perfectly in the middle, all alone by himself, and you go and that's the end of the movie.
• 48:22
  Ron Oliver: The last shot of the third movie, the final movie, the bunch it's exactly the same shot.
• 48:28
  Ron Oliver: I mean this time they're together painting the walls in that room he was alone in originally.
• 48:32
  Ron Oliver: We do the same pullback, same frame, everything and we end with the two of them together now, because the whole movie's, the three movies, are a love story and that's really what it is.
• 48:40
  Ron Oliver: The murders are inconsequential, but the romance, that relationship is the whole thing of it.
• 48:46
  Ron Oliver: So, yeah, that thing was stylized and that was the whole point of it was just to stylize a crap out of it.
• 48:50
  Ron Oliver: And the music selection was because I was driving over one morning when we started pre-production and the producer on it, jim Wilber, and I've been friends a long, long time and I got there and I said I walked in and I said, jim, this movie is gonna be a bossa nova.
• 49:08
  Ron Oliver: It feels like a bossa nova to me.
• 49:10
  Ron Oliver: Three movements and it's gonna be a bossa nova.
• 49:12
  Ron Oliver: Let's make it like that's the music.
• 49:14
  Ron Oliver: And so we got the composers like the opening title music for that thing.
• 49:18
  Ron Oliver: We got these great composers to come in and I said I want a theme song from like a 1960s spy movie.
• 49:25
  Ron Oliver: Make it like that.
• 49:26
  Ron Oliver: And they did a great job with that.
• 49:27
  Ron Oliver: So everything about it was designed.
• 49:30
  Ron Oliver: It was all very, very stylized.
• 49:32
  Eric Rutin: Okay.
• 49:32
  Eric Rutin: Well, like I said, when I first saw it, I missed it.
• 49:35
  Eric Rutin: Upon watching it again, totally got it, and we did.
• 49:39
  Eric Rutin: Actually, when we had the review, we had another Hallmark fan who's got her own podcast, dear Hallmark.
• 49:47
  Eric Rutin: I'm not sure if you know Dar or not, but it's her favorite mystery and that's one of the things we all were commenting on.
• 49:54
  Eric Rutin: It was just how much style was just in this movie.
• 49:58
  Eric Rutin: It's funny.
• 49:59
  Eric Rutin: You kind of like address the next two questions.
• 50:02
  Eric Rutin: I had one of them that I felt and I guess you did your job well was the ending of it when they were painting Cause we were, you know, people are all like, oh, they're gonna be more, we're gonna be more, and the thing that I felt was that was such a like beautiful ending because they were, you know the typically we always have to have the kiss at the end, right, which we didn't get, but the painting side by side, quietly, just the unspokenness of it, I think, was more intimate than a kiss and it was a wonderful conclusion and obviously, like I said, it was something that you had and not to say you like I just randomly throwin' shit at the wall, but it was obviously very thought out to be exactly that moment and I'll say I did get it and that was what I had talked about.
• 50:54
  Eric Rutin: I thought it was a beautiful, intimate, romantic ending.
• 50:58
  Eric Rutin: They didn't say a word, they just grabbed those brushes or roller I forget what it was and they're just side by side doing true blue, you know the perfect color, kind of.
• 51:07
  Eric Rutin: So I totally got it.
• 51:08
  Eric Rutin: Now I will say I did miss the guitar, tying the first episode in with the last one.
• 51:13
  Ron Oliver: But so now if you watch it again, you'll see the shots of the same composition, but the but what's.
• 51:19
  Ron Oliver: Thank you for that.
• 51:20
  Ron Oliver: I appreciate that.
• 51:21
  Ron Oliver: You appreciate all that stuff, cause it was a lot of thought when that obviously ends, but it's also there was.
• 51:27
  Ron Oliver: You were asking me before about Hallmark.
• 51:28
  Ron Oliver: You know how much freedom you have.
• 51:30
  Ron Oliver: I had complete freedom with those three movies.
• 51:32
  Ron Oliver: You know the scripts were the scripts, where I think I might have tweaked the scripts a little bit, but I don't remember doing any significant work.
• 51:39
  Ron Oliver: I think I did a polish on them just for pacing or maybe locations or something, but I didn't have to get deep and dig into it at all Cause they were really well thought out.
• 51:48
  Ron Oliver: And then the obviously Carlos and Alexa are terrific together and fun.
• 51:53
  Ron Oliver: And the music at the end, the last song in the three movies, when they're painting that song you're nobody until somebody loves you is essentially the theme of all three pictures, because she's looking for love, as is he and you know, and it's sung by my friend Jessica Molasky, who is a wonderful singer.
• 52:12
  Ron Oliver: She's married to a jazz guitarist named John Pizzarelli and we see them at the Carlisle in New York every year.
• 52:19
  Ron Oliver: But she's a wonderful singer and I've used John's music in Christmas of the Plaza.
• 52:23
  Ron Oliver: So when it came time for this one, I thought I'm going to give Jessica kick out at this time.
• 52:29
  Ron Oliver: So we went and got that song and it was.
• 52:32
  Ron Oliver: I think it worked really nicely at the end of the picture that way.
• 52:35
  Eric Rutin: Yeah, I'll say it's definitely a home run because one of the things and you know not to knock Hallmark, but we'll knock them a little bit is like the graphic artists when they do something like make their little you know business card or the sign they look like.
• 52:47
  Eric Rutin: It was like the graphic design guy intern kind of just had to crank out something and with their like the picture, perfect the signage they had her car, like it was done so well, like the details of it were just really like not typical hallmarky and I don't mean to sound negative, cause I love obviously hallmark movies you kind of know what you get and that one was this movie.
• 53:12
  Eric Rutin: Just like I say, it was such a different level of any other hallmark experience I think that I've really seen.
• 53:19
  Ron Oliver: So that's very kind of you to say, and all of us thoroughly enjoyed making those three pictures.
• 53:25
  Ron Oliver: We just loved every second of it.
• 53:28
  Eric Rutin: And you kind of did touch on this a little bit.
• 53:31
  Eric Rutin: But one of the things.
• 53:32
  Eric Rutin: So Sydney sent me her question that she wanted me to ask of you.
• 53:35
  Eric Rutin: So she's a big fan of Palm Springs.
• 53:37
  Eric Rutin: She lives in Orange County, she goes out there and gets away all the time and one of the things she really loves is that mid-century vibe that's in Palm Springs and she really got that out of pitch perfect.
• 53:51
  Eric Rutin: So were you taking some of like home and thinking that's?
• 53:55
  Eric Rutin: You know, you're taking it over to Rhode Island and that's what you were creating?
• 54:00
  Ron Oliver: Yeah, absolutely 100%.
• 54:02
  Ron Oliver: You know you're like, okay, let's you know, I'll bring it as I have, let's say, matured as a filmmaker.
• 54:11
  Eric Rutin: You're 39, right.
• 54:13
  Ron Oliver: Yeah, 39, thank you.
• 54:14
  Ron Oliver: You find a freedom to express yourself in the work in a way that maybe earlier on you didn't necessarily, and then at a certain point in your life you just go, you know what, I'm just gonna go for it.
• 54:30
  Ron Oliver: And so you just, there's a freedom to it, and it started really some years back when I was doing the picture of the universal, when I did the Beethoven movies and Big Fat, liar and all this stuff.
• 54:43
  Ron Oliver: They gave me so much freedom and it really allowed you to exercise that muscle.
• 54:48
  Ron Oliver: So then, coming back when I did Christmas at the Plaza, every frame of that movie is not to sound schmaltzy, but comes from the heart, because every moment in that picture is something that meant something to me or to my husband or to our relationship with the Plaza, and so that experience was so exhilarating that you wanted to keep it going.
• 55:09
  Ron Oliver: And that's part of the reason why I think timeless works well and why the picture of perfect mysteries works so well is because I had a bunch of people around me, a bunch of creatives around me with me, who are everybody's cooking on all four cylinders as sort of whatever that makes that metaphor.
• 55:22
  Ron Oliver: But we got, we were all together on stuff and everybody had a common vision for this thing.
• 55:28
  Ron Oliver: So I mean, you're the director.
• 55:30
  Ron Oliver: The idea as a director is that you take all these really talented, creative people around you and you direct them to the goal of the movie, whatever that goal is.
• 55:39
  Eric Rutin: So Okay, nice, Like I say it's fantastic.
• 55:42
  Eric Rutin: And it's funny that how I, like I said the first time I saw it, I just missed it, Maybe I wasn't the right frame of mind or just wherever.
• 55:51
  Eric Rutin: And then that second one, I just was like boom, hit with, hit with it, and so, like I say, it was really good, so all right.
• 56:03
  Ron Oliver: Well.
• 56:03
  Eric Rutin: I'm going to wrap up now.
• 56:04
  Eric Rutin: Is there anything that you've got coming up that you can share with us, whether it be Hallmark or just other projects?
• 56:15
  Ron Oliver: Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where you can talk about stuff that you never know what's going to happen or not, especially where we are right now.
• 56:20
  Ron Oliver: I'm doing I'm developing an RL Stein project right now, the guy who wrote, obviously, goosebumps and that sort of thing on Fear Street.
• 56:31
  Ron Oliver: We have a project together there and there's a again, a Christmas picture at Hallmark that I'm developing with a talented and a lovely writer producer named Anna Chi.
• 56:40
  Ron Oliver: And because I really wanted to do something, I kind of, you know, I feel I don't not to disparage it, but I don't really want to go make a movie in some field in rural British Columbia.
• 56:51
  Ron Oliver: I've just I don't, I've done that, I don't like doing it again.
• 56:54
  Ron Oliver: So I'm trying to find stuff like the Greek movie which was like yes, I will, or the movie we did last.
• 56:59
  Ron Oliver: We did Love in the Limelight with the Penaveli.
• 57:02
  Ron Oliver: I guess we did that in Utah, again, gorgeous.
• 57:05
  Ron Oliver: So it's I'm interested in, kind of like you know, let's go places interesting.
• 57:09
  Ron Oliver: I didn't get in the picture business to stand in a small warehouse someplace with a green screen.
• 57:14
  Ron Oliver: I want to go into the world and make movies with people and stuff like tangible stuff.
• 57:17
  Ron Oliver: So so that's kind of what we're looking at with this, the project with Anna, because we're going to set it in some Asian country and as part of the, it's a family story.
• 57:26
  Ron Oliver: But yeah, there's a couple of things floating around.
• 57:29
  Ron Oliver: But, you know, when I know what's going to go, when I get a phone call saying we're green lit to do it, I'll let you know.
• 57:35
  Eric Rutin: I greatly appreciate it, all right.
• 57:38
  Eric Rutin: Well then, when you, after you, also have your concade with your friend, let me know.
• 57:45
  Eric Rutin: Let me know what you thought.
• 57:46
  Eric Rutin: All right, I will be.
• 57:48
  Ron Oliver: I will Thank you.
• 57:49
  Ron Oliver: Well thank you very much for joining us.
• 57:51
  Ron Oliver: We'll talk to you my pleasure.
• 57:52
  Ron Oliver: Thanks everybody, bye.