Each and every year since we started Overthinking It in January 22, 2008, we have published a Gift Guide to support the site, collecting some recommendations as to what the overthinker in your life—even if it’s you—might like for the holidays.
But this year it doesn’t seem right. We’re doing just fine, largely thanks to our members, and if 2020 has taught us anything it’s that there are plenty of efforts even worthier than our little website in dire need of support.
So this year, we put our heads together to overthink of the most Overthinking It cause we could put our support behind. We settled on The Actors Fund, a national non-profit organization benefitting everyone in entertainment. The Actors Fund provides a range of services—workshops and training, social services, low-cost housing, a care home—as well as direct financial support to anyone in the entertainment industry who needs help.
On the podcast, we talk and joke a lot about Actors Who Work—those consummate professionals who could easily rest on their laurels, but instead pop up again and again in movie after movie or show after show. These are the artists you’re always happy to see, whose appearance feels like a visit from an old friend.
But what happens when the actors who work…can’t work? And what happens to the thousands or tens-of-thousands less established actors and craftspeople when the entire industry goes on pause and all the work dries up overnight? People involved in the production of the entertainment we love are, on the whole, not comfortably provided for. They work infrequently, they travel farm from home to do it, and only if they’re lucky can they rely on unions (such as they are) to provide any kind of benefits or stability. Given that these are the people who produce the work that nourishes and sustains Overthinking It—and the people who have made our pandemic isolation a tiny bit more bearable—supporting them is a great way for us to give back during the holiday season.
Here’s what you do
Join your smart, funny friends from the Internet and make a contribution to The Actors Fund here. Give generously!
Overthinking It will cover credit card processing fees and pool individual contributions into one (hopefully) large donation.
And that’s not all. Overthinking It will match the your gift 1:1 (up to $1000 total) to double the effect of our community’s support.
And here’s what Santa will bring you
For every $25 the overthinking it community contributes, we will watch one (1) bad holiday movie and write or podcast about it.
That’s right: We’ll start at the beginning of the 2020 Hallmark Christmas Movie catalog and take it right through Netflix’s A Christmas Prince VI: The Undiscovered Fictional Country That Has a Developed Economy But Is Somehow Still A Monarchy. We’ll travel with high-powered lawyers back to the small towns that reared them; we’ll get snowbound in a mountain chalet with nothing but a curiously attractive ski-bum for company; we’ll seem to neglect our families until an adorable puppy introduces us to Santa Claus and teaches us the reason for the season. And we’ll produce a review of each movie—and, who knows, maybe a bonus podcast about the experience. Magical things happen this time of year.
If together you contribute $250, that’s ten holiday movies. If the community makes it to $500, that’s twenty. God help us if we raise $1,000 (which we’ll double to $2000) — we’re going to have to quit our jobs and do nothing but watch the Hallmark Channel until 2021 puts 2020 out of its misery.
Give now to support The Actors Fund, and force us to live a tinsel-bedecked frozen hell of our own design. It’s a Christmas Miracle.