Greg Berlanti reflects on how 'Broken Hearts Club' was able to open wide and achieve what was seemingly impossible just two decades ago
Decades after his 'Broken Hearts Club' played in about 100 cinemas, the prolific creator shares his journey:"I got the satisfying film ending I always wanted."fulfilled a career goal 18 years in the making. Since writing and directing his feature debut, 2000's romantic comedy, the prolific producer had wanted to see a movie with a gay lead in wide release.
It landed in the hands of Mickey Liddell, who was the first person to tell me I should direct it and who pushed me to do it. We cast it over a couple of months and shot the movie in 13 days. It was a wild ride. Clint Culpepper, who was running Sony's Screen Gems at the time, greenlit it and gave us the money to go make it.
One of the essential moments in getting it put together was getting John Mahoney. I wrote the part with him in mind. I wrote him a note with the script, and he asked for a couple of changes and signed on. Tim Olyphant was exploding at the time, and he chose to forgo some other possibilities to make the movie. The cast built itself out from there, but we definitely had guys who turned us down — most of them straight who just didn't want to play gay at the time.
We had a cut in a month and a half. There was a real burgeoning gay, independent film scene at the time, but our hope was to go as wide as possible and get it on as many screens as we could to see what would happen if you had a film with all-gay characters as the leads in the mainstream marketplace. Would it open?
We went to Sundance, and Sony Pictures Classics loved the movie and thought it should be in its division. As wonderful as the experience was, one of the things that didn't work out quite the way I wanted it to was that we never really opened on that many screens. I don't think we ever got to more than 100. I went to 30 or 40 different independent cinemas around the country and got the movie out there, but it never quite broke through.
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