UP CLOSE WITH GREG BERLANTI

There's a scene in director Greg Berlanti's romantic comedy The Broken Hearts Club in which a group of average gay men grouse about the fact that there aren't any movies about guys like them.

Berlanti might as well have been sitting right next to them.

"[That scene] was more in response to what I was seeing when I was 21 or 22, than necessarily what's out there now," Berlanti says. "I wanted to see movies where somebody's sexuality was incidental, and where sex, quite frankly, was not something an entire plot was constructed around."

Which is exactly what the 28-year-old director set out to make with his directorial debut, The Broken Hearts Club. Timothy Olyphant and Dean Cain star in this slice-of-life look at friendship and love in which the central characters just happen to be gay. It's also the first major studio-funded film featuring predominantly gay characters since Mart Crowley's 1970 classic The Boys in the Band.

"I remember the first time I ever saw a gay character on the screen that I wanted to be ... and it was Rupert Everett in My Best Friend's Wedding, Berlanti says. "That's why he was such a phenomenon the summer it came out, because straight guys couldn't believe they were going to see a movie with a gay character in it that they wanted to be as smart as, as good-looking as or as charming as."

Berlanti certainly has the good-looking and charming parts down. Now add to that an impressive amount of success - after an early interest in acting ("I gave it up when I got to college and realized I didn't have the personality of an actor, let alone the talent of one"), he tried his hand at playwriting before eventually writing for the screen. He currently serves as an executive producer and the head writer on the WB's hit teen series Dawson's Creek.

His next project is directing the film Why Can't I Be Audrey Hepburn?

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