Greg Berlanti accepted the inaugural Greg Berlanti Social Impact Award at the UCLA Center for Scholars and Storytellers’ annual Teens and Screens Summit on Thursday in Los Angeles. The writer, director, producer and showrunner behind films and shows including “Love, Simon,” “Dawson’s Creek,” “Riverdale,” “You” and several CW “Arrowverse” series delivered a heartfelt acceptance speech reflecting on his journey to self-acceptance, which led him to create shows that help audiences feel represented, seen and loved.
“As storytellers in Hollywood, we can heal our own old stories, creating new ones that are honest and vulnerable, and those stories, in turn, can change hearts and minds and remind audiences how the human experience is more universal than different,” explained a dewy-eyed Berlanti, “We all still want to connect. We all still want to be seen and understood. We all want love.”
Berlanti shared some of those “old stories” that he has had the opportunity to heal and develop throughout his illustrious career. He began with his own childhood, remembering his childhood love of television while realizing “there was still a big void. I was a closeted gay teenager and there were only a handful of LGBTQ characters on television.”
He reflected on how a chance encounter with an AIDS march in New York gave him his first positive representation of queer people, but when one of the protesters extended his hand, he rejected it. “He waited for me to take it, but I didn’t. I didn’t have the courage. I was afraid that my parents or someone would find out my secret if I took that hand, so I just looked away,” he said. “I spent much of my youth running away from that outstretched hand, at first afraid, then, over time, finding the strength to come out and ultimately love myself.”
It came full circle decades later, when Berlanti screened “Love, Simon” in Olathe, Kansas in 2018. After the screening, a 14-year-old boy came out publicly and thanked Berlanti for providing him with shows and movies that made him feel a little less alone. “As he reached out his hand to shake mine,” Berlanti recalls, “it was not lost on me that I was going to receive a second injection to make up for the hand I had not taken so many years before.”
Berlanti’s writing partners Julie Plec and Kevin Williamson introduced the award and its namesake. “When you work with Greg, you cry a lot, and that’s no accident. There’s always a lot of heartfelt emotion at the center of Greg’s work, because that’s what Greg is,” Williamson said, and Plec added, “He’s given us some of the most heartfelt, most diverse, most ambitious stories and shows on television. Whether it’s a superhero in a cave, a a teenager falling in love for the first time or a family finding their way, his shows don’t just entertain. us. They see us.
Molly Ringwald, who starred in “Riverdale,” also sent a video comparing Berlanti to John Hughes. She said his iconic collaborations with Hughes in the 1980s have “withstood the test of time, but they are also of their time,” adding “Greg Berlanti built on that legacy, shaping our modern representations of adolescence in the same way, but with greater representation of our diverse society.” »
The ceremony’s focus on Berlanti’s contributions to the YA space was an appropriate focus for the summit, which follows the Center for Scholars and Storytellers’ annual Teens and Screens report. The report provides insight into the media tastes and consumption habits of Gen Z Americans. Among the findings were that younger Americans still enjoy traditional movies and television, even though they are often consumed in bite-sized chunks on TikTok and YouTube; they have a notable preference for animation; they dislike overly sexualized love stories; authentic lives like theirs.
The summit presented these findings through several panels and discussions bringing together media executives, content creators and academics. Perhaps the most memorable panel was the “Ask The Teens” panel, where four teens took the stage for a conversation about their tastes, moderated by Andres Cuervo, head of Roblox’s youth engagement program. The young panelists confirmed much of what the study suggested, expanding on teens’ aversion to “trend-seeking” media that seems contrived and disconnected in lieu of more serious storytelling. As 14-year-old Hollyn Alpert said, “Teenagers, like adults, are not monoliths. They all have different opinions. They all have different viewpoints, beliefs, races, sexualities, religions. You just have to explore that and accept it.” A room full of seasoned Hollywood professionals listened intently.
Berlanti summed up the importance of listening to these young voices by saying: “What a gift it is to have a positive influence on the young lives of the public by reminding them of these things and giving them a sense of belonging, empathy and self-esteem. In turn, they give us hope. It is the young people who give me the most hope these days. No matter how bleak things seem today or how difficult the journey to our future may be, I believe that the future will be brighter thanks to our young people.
