Welcome to A Cytations Needed News Brief. I am Neema Shirazi. I'm Adam Johnson.

We are excited about our news brief today because it is a direct follow up to our most

recent full length episode on Hallmark Christmas movies. When we posted that show on December

15th, 2021, we were contacted by a listener who Adam had an experience all their own with

the Hallmarks Cinematic Universe.

Yeah, so there are a union screenwriter now. Prior to that, though, they were trying

to, when they were working in the industry, they had gone deep within the sort of pitch

process with Hallmark. They did not actually make a Hallmark movie. To be clear, this

is not someone high up at Hallmark, but it is someone very familiar with the process

who had a bunch of rather amusing eternal documents, including content guidelines and

various emails about how the process works. And we thought it would be interesting to

have them on to talk about this now because of the way it's a very small world, very small

industry. They did not want to give their name. So this is anonymous, but we have double

checked all this stuff. It is legit. It's nothing necessarily blockbuster. There isn't

a secret human trafficking ring going on in Hallmark. But what it does speak to is that

broader the anti-labor lowest common denominator ways in which this kind of formulaic television

works.

Evily formulaic process and scripting.

And perhaps more relevantly how much of the streaming film and television production

is moving more towards that Hallmark model because it has proven to be so profitable.

So I'm excited to talk to them today and get the inside scoop Hallmark deep throughout

with how that process works and get a sense of how in many ways that conservative ideology

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