For Petaluma filmmaker Ali Afshar, ‘Christmas’ isn’t over

Despite a pandemic, growing economic anxieties and months of social and political turbulence, Christmas 2020 turned out to be very good for Ali Afshar.

Raised in Petaluma, the prolific film producer-actor saw his latest film, “A California Christmas” — which he produced here in Petaluma and in which he has a charmingly comic supporting role — become one of this year’s most-streamed holiday films on Netflix. The film, a love story starring “General Hospital” hunk Josh Swickard and Lauren Swickard (who also wrote the script), was produced by his own ESX Productions film company. It ended up outperforming big-budget seasonal films like Forest Whitaker’s splashy musical “Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey” and the Kurt Russell Santa Claus fantasy “Christmas Chronicles: Part Two.”

“People loved ‘A California Christmas,’” Afshar says, reached at home between meetings about other in-the-works film projects. “It was the number one movie in the world for almost two weeks on Netflix. It ended up becoming the 15th most watched film of the year, and that was with only 17 days of release in 2020. It was crazy!”

Afshar, who lives in Petaluma when not in Los Angeles, where he spends a good portion of the year, is clearly enjoying the success after years of working in the movie industry, having produced over a dozen films that sometimes struggled to find distribution and audiences. But aside from a few days off at his ranch, during which he still found himself working, Afshar shows no sign of slowing down to enjoying his current moment of cinematic triumph.

If anything, the opposite is true.

“I’ve got a lot of stuff going on right now,” says Afshar. “I’ve been working at this for a long time, and I’m just getting started. I plan to just keep my head down and keep on cranking away.”

That “stuff” includes the upcoming release of “Born a Champion,” a film Afshar calls “Our Dennis Quaid movie,” which he says will be coming out on Jan. 22. The film, about the beginnings of mixed martial arts, features Quaid, Sean Patrick Flanery (“The Boondock Saints,” “The Dead Zone”) and Katrina Bowden “The Bold and the Beautiful”), and was shot in Petaluma in August 2019. THis spring will see the release of the long-delayed “American Fighter,” filmed in 2017 as a gritty sequel to Afshar’s semi-autobiographical “American Wrestler: The Wizard.” “American Fighter” was released in the UK last summer, and will be finally available in the U.S. in May.

Then there’s “Casa Grande,” a television series Afshar created and produced five episodes of last year.

“‘Casa Grande’ is basically ‘Yellowstone’ meets ‘Downton Abbey’ with a Latinx infusion,” explains Afshar. “It’s about the different experiences of mostly white landowners, farmers, ranchers, dairymen and their Hispanic workforce, and how they interact. It’s very ‘Upstairs/Downstairs,’ if you remember that old series. It looks at issues of immigration and love and secrets.”

The series does not have a home yet, but once Ahshar and crew are done putting the first five episodes together, he plans to start showing it around Hollywood.

“Hopefully, we’ll get a Netflix or an HBO Max or someone to pick it up, and then we’ll shoot the other episodes, which are mostly all scripted,” he says, adding, “We’re ramping up to do some more Christmas films this year, too.”

Make that three more Christmas films.

“We’re doing a sequel to ‘A California Christmas,’ which we’re calling ‘A California Christmas: City Lights,’ then another with a Christmas theme, and then another really fun one, a romance about believing in Santa Claus, that we also have in our hopper.”

Afshar says the goal is to film all of them locally, at least in part.

“I mean, we’ll need snow,” he laughs, “so we might have to go up to Lake Tahoe for some of the scenes. But overall, Petaluma is where I like to make my movies.”

"A California Christmas,“ directed by Shaun Piccinino and filmed here in July 2020, was made under strict pandemic protections, at a time when almost no other film shoots were happening anywhere in the country due to COVID quarantines.

The movie was shot primarily at Afshar’s own eastside Petaluma ranch, with a few scenes filmed at The Washoe House, Hotel Petaluma and other noticeable local locations.

The stars of the film actually met and fell in love while making ”Roped,“ another locally-shot movie also now available on Netflix. They since been married, so were in each other’s ”bubble,“ allowing for much less concern during shooting of all the romantic kissing-and-eye-gazing scenes.

“We took a risk, to tell you the truth, being one of the first films to start up production during the pandemic,” Afshar notes. “My instinct was, nobody is going to shoot right now, so let’s try to do it safely, at my ranch, with a small crew and a small cast, with everything done in a quarantine-friendly way. We took the chance, and obviously it paid off, because we ended up being one of the few original Christmas films on Netflix this year.”

With a full year of productions set for 2021, of course, Afshar and his ESX team are anticipating a continuation of the COVID protocols employed in “A California Christmas.”

“I’d love it if we got past it and went back to something normal, but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards for the time being,” he allows. “We all have to be very careful, concerned and aware, following all health guidelines until there is no need anymore. For now, though, there are no plans to change what we’re doing for any of our upcoming projects.”

Asked if the positive response to “A California Christmas” came as a surprise, Afshar says no.

“We always believe we’ll get a good reaction to all of our movies,” he says, “and I knew we had something good. But I will say the response to it has been incredibly gratifying. It was amazing, once it was released in December, to watch as it all happened, going, ‘It’s number one in Albania! It’s number one in Greece! What the heck? How is it number one in Israel? This is awesome!’ It is pretty cool. It’s been such a tough year, so to end it like that was pretty great.”

For Afshar, part of the pleasure is in proving that the kinds of movies he likes to make can find an audience ready for the type of uplift he finds appealing in a script.

“These are all feel-good, inspirational, do-the-right-thing kinds of movies, and yes, I know they can be hits,” he says. “A movie doesn’t have to be dark, disturbing, and overly violent to find an audience.

“This is my 17th film now,” he adds, “and all these movies have been about underdogs, with diverse casts telling stories of good people doing good things and succeeding. I like those kinds of stories, and I’ve always believed that other people like them too. And it doesn’t have to have a big budget to be successful either. Not if the story you tell is a story people want to see. And I think we’ve proved that.“