Filmmaker Sam Irvin has had one amazing career.

He was Brian DePaulma's assistant. He directed films for full moon in their prime.

And most importantly for this podcast, he has directed a boatload of Christmas TV movies.

Sam was nice enough to take time out of his day to answer a bunch of questions that I had

about what it was like making all of these holiday themed films.

Do you remember how you got to that first job directing a Christmas movie?

It was around 2005, I guess. It was a film called Too Cool for Christmas,

also known as a very cool Christmas. And I was working for Here TV, which was a gay premium network.

And I was directing their series, Dante's Cove, which was a very sexy, gay, supernatural series.

And they also had a production company called Region Entertainment that made mainstream,

made for TV films for clients like Lifetime and Hall Park and that sort of thing.

And they decided that we want to have a Christmas film that can appeal directly to our gay viewers on here TV,

but we don't have enough money to really fund a gay Christmas film just for our network.

We need to make it commercial so that it could be bought by one of the mainstream

network. And so basically the story is about a teenage girl who befriends the mall, Santa,

and she decides that he's too fat and too old-fashioned and needs a huge makeover. And so she

puts him on an exercise regimen, a diet, gives him a tan and a tanning booth,

and he comes out looking like George Hamilton in a business suit because he's played by

George Hamilton.

Oh, that's brilliant.

In one version, her parents are a mom and a dad, in the one for the gay network, she has two dads.

And so whenever we did, we were shooting any of the domestic scenes at home with the parents,

...