How a $120,000 Chicago Indie Became Lifetime’s First Original Christmas Movie

"In the winter of 1992, I found myself standing in the snow at Chicago’s famous Six Corners intersection, directing a Christmas movie with borrowed lights, potato flakes, and more hope than resources. I had just poured the settlement money losing my leg from a near fatal accident into a deeply personal short film called “Solstice” — a story about loneliness, redemption, and the belief that even in the darkest season, light can find its way in.

I didn’t know it then, but I was about to make Lifetime Television’s first original holiday movie, a film that would become the quiet blueprint for the billion-dollar Christmas-movie genre we now take for granted.

What I also didn’t know was how brutally the industry would handle what came next — or how long it would take for me to reclaim my own work, my own history, and my own voice.

This is the part of the story that never makes it into the nostalgia pieces..."

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