This is a big week for us, or rather big weekend, as we’re having the premiere (aka advance screenings) of Death by Fruitcake at the Palms in Muscatine, Iowa, on Nov. 1 and Nov. 2. Start time both nights is 7 pm, and there will be a Q and A with cast and crew members after the movie.

Those of you familiar with the Antiques novels that Barb and I write as “Barbara Allan” will recognize the character names in what follows. On both nights (Nov. 1 and 2), Paula Sands – the legendary Midwest broadcaster, recently retired from Channel 6 in Davenport (KWQC) – will be on hand as part of the Q and A; she plays Vivian Borne, aka Mother. Rob Merritt, who stars in our other Christmas movie (Blue Christmas), will be here; he plays Chief of Serenity Police Tony Cassato. And Midwestern pop star Alisabeth Von Presley (of American Idol and American Song Contest fame, among much else) will be on hand Saturday night (Nov. 2).

The Friday night screening has reserved seats and is already 61% sold. Saturday night is at 38% sold. Get those tickets now (and I do apologize to regular readers of these updates/posts for showcasing this local event…but it’s a big deal to us).

Tickets are available here.

In further exciting Palms Theater news here in Muscatine, Blue Christmas is opening on Nov.8. Tickets for the run are available here.

Other Iowa theaters in the Fridley chain will be running Blue Christmas as well, and we should have more info by next week.

If all of this Christmas movie stuff confuses you, here’s the skinny: we had such good reaction early this year when we premiered Blue Christmas at the Palms in Muscatine, the Last Picture House in Davenport, and the Fleur Cinema and Café in Des Moines, we right away started thinking about doing a follow-up of sorts. When we landed a deal for VCI and MVD to bring Blue Christmas out on Blu-Ray and DVD, and to take it out to streaming services, that cinched it.

But we didn’t want to do a sequel or any similar film. And Barb and I have been frustrated by how close we’ve come to a network or streaming service sale for the Antiques/Trash ‘n’ Treasures novels that we decided our next movie would bring that series to life. I wrote a script expanding on (and somewhat loosely adapting) the novella Antiques Fruitcake in the three-novella collection, Antiques Ho Ho Homicides.

Barb liked the script, and of course had great suggestions and notes – the series has always been her baby – and we started putting Death by Fruitcake together right away. We called upon many of the cast members of our two previous productions, Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder (with Gary Sandy) – available on DVD from VCI and also a special feature on VCI’s Blu-ray of the revised expanded Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane.

Key to the project was producer/director of photography/editor Chad Bishop, who I got to know doing the edit of Encore for Murder. Chad was a producer among much else on Blue Christmas. Both it and Death by Fruitcake would not exist without his hard work and artistic inspiration.

We’ve had a bit of an unintended (if there is such a thing as an intended) collision course between Blue Christmas and Death by Fruitcake, when it became clear the release of Blue Christmas in Iowa theaters and nationally on physical media would collide with our premieres of Death by Fruitcake. Not much we could do about that but hope you good people out there can sort them out.

Death by Fruitcake will, we hope, we given a Quad Cities premiere at the Last Picture House yet this year – our star, Paula Sands, spends half of the year away in Arizona with her husband David, so we have to work around her availability for personal appearnces. The real marketing of Death by Fruitcake begins now and it’s unlikely to be streaming or on physical media till well into next year (holiday season 2025, most likely).

Blue Christmas and Death by Fruitcake, despite some shared cast members, are very different animals (albeit both being reindeer friendly). Blue Christmas, as you may already know, is a mash-up of sorts of A Christmas Carol and The Maltese Falcon, two of my favorite novels and movies (the Sim Scrooge, the Bogart Falcon).

Death by Fruitcake has been called a zany episode of Murder She Wrote or a low-budget Knives Out. And we are low budget – actually micro-budget. But my feeling is if the writing and acting are there, and the cinematography does them justice, a minuscule budget – if the script has been written toward such a budget – is beside the point.

I continue to be frustrated but mostly amused by the people who attack Blue Christmas based on its meager budget without having seen it. As the star of A Charlie Brown Christmas says, “Sigh.”

Here’s a nice write-up about the coming event from the Muscatine Chamber of Commerce.

There’s been a ton of coverage on the Net but much of it is similar, so I won’t put all the links here.

Finally, however, here’s what our local paper, the Muscatine Journal (where I once worked) has to say.

And this just in:

M.A.C.