Michael Cunningham can’t forget the sting of walking out of the Gannett building in downtown Rochester after being laid off from his advertising job there a few weeks before Christmas in 2007.
“It doesn’t ever leave you because of the indignities that went along with it,” he said.
The humiliation, as he recalls it, included carrying a cardboard box stuffed with the contents of his desk and being asked by the human resources officer who escorted him whether he’d prefer to go out the back door or the front.
“I said, ‘I’m going out the front door because I’ve already been backdoored,’” he recalled. “Then, no lie, I said, ‘Have a Merry Christmas,’ and walked through the revolving door, and almost like on cue this blizzard came sweeping down.”
But 17 years later, Cunningham laughed at the scene along with an audience of about 2,500 people as a version of it played out on the silver screen of the majestic Stanley Theatre in Utica, where a film he wrote premiered on a recent November evening.
The scene was the inciting incident of “The Christmas Letter,” a low-budget flick with big-budget flair featuring the likes of actors Chevy Chase, Randy Quaid and Brian Doyle-Murray appearing in the movie, which was filmed in the Mohawk Valley.
The plot is a “what if” version of Cunningham’s life after being laid off had he acted on his longtime yearning to one-up a real-life wealthy friend, who chronicles his family’s globe-trotting escapades in an annual holiday letter.
They ski in the Alps. They summer on the French Riviera. There’s seemingly nothing they can’t do. The yearly mistletoe missive grated on Cunningham, who for a time regarded it as a gnawing reminder of everything he wasn’t and would probably never be.
“I got home the day I got laid off and there was his letter,” said Cunningham, 62, who lives in Webster. “I always remembered that and thought it would make a good jumping-off point for a movie.”
He wasn’t alone.
Two years ago, the premise caught the eye of Angus Benfield, an actor, director and producer, who found Cunningham’s script on InkTip, a website that invites writers to publish their screenplays for a fee in the hope that a producer might take notice.
Benfield, an Australian who makes his home in Los Angeles, explained in a phone interview that he was combing the website for “fresh voices and fresh scripts” when he happened upon “The Christmas Letter.”
“I really enjoyed it,” Benfield said. “But it was the final monologue about the true meaning of Christmas and what to focus on in life that cemented it for me. That was the clincher.”
Benfield and Cunningham cut a deal on Father’s Day 2022, 11 years to the day that Cunningham’s father died and that Cunningham started writing the script.
“I figured my dad had something to do with it,” Cunningham said.
“The Christmas Letter” hit streaming services on Nov. 12. The synopsis: “Every year, unemployed copywriter Joe Michaels reads his wealthy friend’s annual over-the-top Christmas letter and feels like a loser. But this year’s going to be different.”
With a budget of under $1 million, the film was a do-it-yourself venture and had little to spare for distribution.
Cunningham, who grew up in the Mohawk Valley, scouted many of the locations used and raised a good chunk of the financing, earning himself a producer credit.
It was during a chance phone call to the Buffalo Niagara Film Commission in search of an airplane that Cunningham learned the commission had recently worked with Chevy Chase, and that the star of the holiday classic “Christmas Vacation” could be persuaded to appear in “The Christmas Letter.”
On a lark, Benfield inquired with Chase’s agent about his availability. He was told Chase could spare a day, which was serendipitous, since a day was all Benfield could afford of his time anyway. When word got out that Chase was doing a Christmas movie, his “Christmas Vacation” co-stars, Quaid and Doyle-Murray, wanted in. The three of them got top billing, although each occupies just a few minutes of screen time.
Cunningham, a married father of two adult children, continued writing advertising copy for other companies after his layoff until the making of “The Christmas Letter.” Now, he’s working on other filmmaking projects.
He’s reconciled the feelings about his own self-worth and his wealthy friend, whom he said has been “very kind” about being lampooned in the film as a pretentious snoot. Indeed, the friend plays a background extra in a French restaurant scene.
“I’m very grateful,” Cunningham said of the project. “I’ve always been a dreamer and I’ve come to this realization that if you kind of let go and just put good stuff out there in the universe, it’ll come back to you.”
David Andreatta is a contributor to CITY.
This article appears in Dec 1-31, 2024.
