Interview (Part 1): Juliet Giglio and Keith Giglio
My conversation with the screenwriting couple whose first novel The Summer of Christmas has just been released to the public.
My conversation with the screenwriting couple whose first novel The Summer of Christmas has just been released to the public.
Juliet Giglio and Keith Giglio are a husband-wife screenwriting duo who cover a lot of territory of interest to Go Into The Story readers. They write everything from studio features to TV movies and now novels with the release of The Summer of Christmas. They also teach screenwriting: Juliet at SUNY Oswego and Keith at Syracuse University.
Recently, I had an entertaining and informative interview with the pair. Today in Part 1 of a 6-part series to run each day through Sunday, Juliet and Keith talk about when they met at film school, their sojourn to Los Angeles, writing TV movies, and how they ended up signing a two-book writing deal.
Scott Myers: Congratulations on the publication of your first novel The Summer of Christmas. There’s a lot to cover with you all. Screenwriting, writing about screenwriting, writing theatrical movies, writing TV movies, teaching screenwriting.
I’d like to start with this. Legend has it that you two had a meet‑cute in an elevator at NYU. True or myth?
Keith Giglio: That is true.
Juliet Giglio: It is absolutely true.
Keith: 721 Broadway.
Juliet: On the 10th floor.
Keith: I was in my second year of the program.
Juliet: I was in my first year, and I had just come out of a conference with a notoriously difficult professor. Keith had had her the year before.
Keith: At that time, NYU grad film school was probationary.
Juliet: 30 percent of kids in the first year got kicked out. At the end of the first year.
Keith: There was a lot of stress in the first year. Our professor didn’t really alleviate that stress. She made it more manic. Anyway, Juliet was there, and I walked in.
Juliet: Got in the elevator. I was looking upset. I might have been teary‑eyed.
Keith: I said, “It looks like you had a meeting with Roberta Hodes.”
[laughter]
Keith: “How did you know that?” I started laughing. My friends started laughing. Then I tried to talk to Juliet.
Juliet: I could still remember I was wearing this red sweater. I remember thinking, “I don’t think I look so good in this red sweater.”
Keith: About six months later we wound up on a set together, and we started making fake drinks.
Juliet: I thought he was really funny, and he made me laugh, and I wanted to hang out with him.
Keith: That was it.
Juliet: I also knew he was a good writer, and I needed help with that.
Keith: Then we just started hanging out at school.
Juliet: We started dating. After dating a year, we got engaged. A year later, we were married. We actually got married when we were still in an MFA program. That’s kind of weird. Nobody else was doing that.
Keith: That same teacher said, “At least you got something out of this place.”
Juliet: We wrote a script as we were driving cross‑country, and we ended up getting an agent out of that. We didn’t sell it, although we did sell that one 12 years later. But we got this screenwriting career going and that kept going until 2011.
At that point, it was post Writer’s Guild strike. We thought, let’s jump and let’s become professors. We’ve got these MFAs. We’ve never really utilized them. Keith got on the tenure track at Syracuse. I got on the tenure track at SUNY Oswego, which is about…They’re 40 minutes apart.
Keith: Amazing, yeah.
Juliet: Then in 2018…we got introduced to Paula Hart, and we pitched her an idea which we then sold to Lifetime. It was called A Very Nutty Christmas, starring Melissa Joan Hart. That was a lot of fun. From there, we sold another one called Christmas Reservations, also with Melissa. From there, we sold another one called Dear Christmas.
Keith: Which we had to adjust for COVID. That was fascinating. We were the second or third movie made after everything shut down.
Juliet: Right. During that summer of 2020 we actually had a film in production.
Keith: We went from big set pieces to having seven people in the movie.
Juliet: Right. And Dear Christmas became a very character‑based story, which wasn’t the worst thing.
Keith: Yeah.
Juliet: In some ways it became better. After that, we had a script that Lifetime thought would be great for Reba McEntire. They sent it to her, and she really liked it. Then we did some tweaks for her. That became our most recent movie, which is called, Reba McEntire’s Christmas in Tune. It was just nominated for an HCA (Hollywood Critic’s Association) award for best tv movie. That was great.
Keith: And then book happened….
Juliet: During that period, as we were writing the last two Christmas movies, a literary agent from WME came to us and said, “I love, love your Christmas movies. Would you ever consider writing a Christmas book?” We scratched our heads and we were like, “That’s an interesting idea.”
Keith: But we’re from Hollywood, so could we just pitch it instead?
Juliet: Yeah. Normally, when you write a novel, you have to write the whole thing, and then the book agent takes it out to publishers and tries to sell it. But we didn’t know that at the time and we said, “Hey, could we just write three chapters, and then we’ll give you the outline for the rest of the book and see what you can do?”
She said, “Sure.” We got lucky, and our agent sold our proposal with the three chapters and outline to Sourcebooks. Sourcebooks is based in Naperville, IL.
They’re the 11th largest publisher in the United States. Female owned. Terrific place, especially for rom‑coms and romance. We ended up getting a two‑book deal out of that. The first book is The Summer of Christmas, and then we’re currently working on the second book, for which we’re currently doing the edits.
Tomorrow in Part 2, Juliet and Keith discuss the differences between writing a screenplay and a novel, and how they used their screenwriting skills to write The Summer of Christmas.
Juliet and Keith are repped by WME.
The Story of Christmas: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Good Reads.