Last August, director and TV showrunner Greg Berlanti found himself in Olathe, Kansas in a multiplex located next to a church-supply center. He had recently finished work on his latest project, an adaptation of Becky Albertalli’s uber-popular Y.A. novel, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda—about a high-school senior’s coming-out journey. The marketing department of 20th Century Fox, which will open the film, re-titled Love, Simon wide on March 16, has since come up with a confident billboard campaign for the country’s largest markets; “Which Way to Boystown”; “Dear Boston, Cute Sox,” “If I Can Come Out Here, I Can Come Out Anywhere” are currently running in Chicago, Boston, and New York, respectively. But last summer, Berlanti wanted to know how it would play in the heartland.
To his surprise, the film generated the same scores and the same visceral audience response as it did in theaters in Sherman Oaks, California. It might have even mattered more in Kansas. During a focus-group session following the screening, a 14-year-old boy, sitting next to his father, answered whether or not he would recommend the movie to others. His reply: “I would, but just to girls . . . because only girls know I’m gay.” Then, as Berlanti was making his way back to the studio van, the same boy ran over to him. “Thank you so much for making this movie,” he said with a big smile before trotting back to his dad’s car.
“People are used to seeing two guys kiss on their TV set and in their art-house cinema,” said Berlanti, in a recent interview in his sizeable two-story office on the lot of Warner Bros. lot. “But it’s not really been in their AMC [theater] and treated as any other thing.”
Love, Simon marks the first time a studio, 20th Century Fox, has released a gay teenage romance wide across the country—2,400 theaters to be exact. (In 1997, Paramount Pictures released the In & Out, which stared Kevin Kline as its adult protagonist, in 2,452 theaters at its widest release.) The film stars an of-the-moment cast of up-and-coming actors including 13 Reasons Why star Katherine Langford as well as Alexandra Shipp (Storm in the upcoming X-Men: Dark Phoenix), with teen heartthrob Nick Robinson (Jurassic World) in the title role of Simon Spier, a more handsome-than-average high-school teen who’s keeping his sexuality hidden from everyone. That it is being treated like any other wide release is notable. And that is precisely why Berlanti, the producer behind such beloved shows as Riverdale, The Flash, and Supergirl, upended his busy schedule to fly to Atlanta for a 30-day shoot last January, smack in the middle of pilot season.
“I read that script and I thought, O.K., I really believe I’m the only person that should do this,” said Berlanti, 45, dressed in jeans, T-shirt, a red baseball cap, and with a boyish demeanor that belies the 18 years he’s spent in Hollywood.
Berlanti first garnered attention in 2000 with his directorial debut The Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy, an indie about a group of gay friends living in West Hollywood that was praised for centering on the universal themes of love and acceptance. From there, Berlanti found success in television, working on and then overseeing shows such as Dawson’s Creek, Everwood, and Brothers & Sisters before tackling the DC Comics television universe. During that run, he flirted briefly with films, directing the poorly received 2010 Katherine Heigl dramedy Life as We Know It, and writing and producing the disastrous 2011 Ryan Reynolds-starring Green Lantern. But television is where he’s thrived. Last year, his production company with partner Sarah Schecter had 11 shows on the air, and this year he hopes to add more, with four new pilots jockeying for a spot in the zeitgeist. There was no need for Berlanti to return to movie-making.
But then he read the Love, Simon script from This is Us writers Elizabeth Berger and Isaac Aptaker. Swept up by the story, Berlanti related to the young, gay protagonist and jumped at the chance to bring it to life. “I felt a burden from the start, because I felt like they don’t make a lot of movies like this,” he said. Love, Simon also had a bit of a kinship with Broken Hearts Club in that it treated the gay experience as normal. “My M.O. going into the whole process was just not wanting to mess it up and for it to live up to what I thought the potential of the material was,” Berlanti said.
For producer Wyck Godfrey (Fault in Our Stars, The Maze Runner), now the motion picture group president for Paramount Pictures, bringing Berlanti into the production was imperative, especially since the rest of the filmmakers on the project were straight. “The movie was just so personal to him, and he said he would drop everything in his life to do it,” said Godfrey. “Greg said, ‘People don’t realize that I’ve spent my whole life seeing other people getting to have their love stories [on screen] but never somebody who represented what me and my friends have gone through.”
Berlanti infused a lot of the script with his own experiences, specifically what he believes someone wants to hear when they are coming out: “I love you” and “You deserve to be loved.” He also inserted another gay character into the script to illustrate the varieties of gay life, and ended up revealing much of his own coming-out experience to his cast and crew.
“The more I actually shared about my own life, which is probably more than I ever have on any job I’ve been on, the more that everybody else felt comfortable to share things, too,” added Berlanti. “And that’s ultimately what the movie’s about.”
Growing up in Westchester County, New York, Berlanti was an altar boy as a child, joined a fraternity when he enrolled in the theater program at Northwestern University, and didn’t really confront his sexuality until he moved to Los Angeles with his fraternity brother, Pitch Perfect director Jason Moore, who was the first person to say to him,”I think you’re gay.” Berlanti finally came out to his parents the night Muhammad Ali lit the torch at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. “It was rocky at first, but then it went beautifully,” said the director. “By the time Broken Hearts Club came out, they threw a premiere party at a gay bar in New York.”
In fact, Berlanti’s mom, Barbara, became a bit of a guru to other mothers dealing with their children’s sexuality, often saying, “Oh, you’ll get over it” or “I can’t imagine my son straight. I wouldn’t take him back if he was straight.” A fierce champion of Berlanti’s career, she kept a running list of the people in her life she would notify ahead of each new Berlanti production. And she took it personally if they didn’t tune in. “She would ask people, ‘Did you watch Greg’s show?,’” said Berlanti. “She could tell if they didn’t [watch]. They’d be off the list.”
Berlanti fought back tears as he discussed his mother’s influence on Love, Simon. Previously diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer, she died 10 days after he finished shooting the film. Berlanti didn’t realize it at the time, but the movie is something of a tribute to his mother—specifically the speech that Simon’s mother (played by Jennifer Garner) delivers toward the end of the film about him deserving his own love story.
“She knew how important directing again was to me. She knew how important this subject matter and this story was, and she was incredibly supportive of me going to do that,” said Berlanti. “I’ll never think of this movie and not think about it in that context. . . . [By now] she would have already see it 20 times. She would have made these hats. She would have written out cards. I wish she could have seen it.”
Berlanti’s father, Eugene, has seen it. And it’s sparked a lot of conversation the two never had some 20 years ago, long before the director became a husband and a father himself.
“I hadn’t imagined the film being seen by the parent of a gay child,” said Berlanti, who was taken aback by his father’s response.
“I imagined it from the gay kid’s perspective,” he said. “But it allowed my dad so much more, to talk to me about aspects of my high school. To the point where I was like, ‘Stop asking questions!’”
