Interview (Part 2): Bill Holderman and Erin Simms
My in-depth conversation with the co-writers (Holderman and Simms) and director (Holderman) of the comedy Book Club.
My in-depth conversation with the co-writers (Holderman and Simms) and director (Holderman) of the comedy Book Club.
“Four lifelong friends have their lives forever changed after reading ’50 Shades of Grey’ in their monthly book club.” That’s the logline of the Paramount comedy Book Club which opens in theaters across North America beginning Friday, May 18th.
Recently, I had an hour-long conversation with the co-writers of the movie: Erin Simms and Bill Holderman. Bill also made his directing debut with the film. Today in Part 2, Bill and Erin share how they came up with and wrote the script for Book Club:
Erin: For A Walk in the Woods, Bill wrote the script, but we were working very closely on that it together. I think that’s when we realized that we had the same style…
Bill: Sensibility.
Erin: Same sensibility. When we went to actually produce A Walk in the Woods, I felt Bill was ready to direct. You could just see it. He was so deeply involved in every part of prep, development, production. It just seemed like the obvious next move. When the opportunity came up on Book Club, I thought, “Well, let’s put our money where our mouth is.”
Scott: Let’s jump into Book Club. I’m guessing this is the first thing you actually wrote together.
Erin: Yes.
Bill: It is.
Scott: I saw the trailer when it came out some weeks ago. It’s great, you just get what the movie is when you see the trailer. It rolls out in theaters across North America starting May 18th. Premise: “Four old friends played by Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen decide to spice up their adult book club by reading ‘Fifty Shades of Gray.’” What was the genesis of this story?
Bill: When the “Fifty Shades” books came out in 2012 and started to get a lot of attention, they were these risqué, sexy books. I, as any good son would do, thought, “You know what? I’m going to send the trilogy of books to my mother for Mother’s Day.”
[laughter]
Bill: Which I did. Erin and I were working together at the time, and she saw that I was FedExing these books to my mother for Mother’s Day. She thought that was absolutely ridiculous, which it is. After talking a little bit about who my mother is, we talked a little bit about who Erin’s mother is, and she decided to send the books to her mother and her stepmother as well.
Erin: We ended up getting into a conversation about how different our mothers are. We won’t go into too much detail, but sending “Fifty Shades” to Bill’s mother, she would find that to be…
Bill: Very amusing.
Erin: …And she loves it. My mother would think that was insane, more like me. I just thought it was hysterical. Basically, the next day we got together at work and said, “What about a book club?” The idea just came to us.
Scott: When was this?
Bill: It was 2012. Whenever Mother’s Day is.
Erin: First draft was summer 2012 and there were five women, not four in that draft of Book Club.
Bill: We wrote that first draft on‑and‑off and had a first draft done by December of 2012.
Erin: Yeah, it’s been a long journey.
Bill: We wrote it and sat on it for a while. We developed other projects and were trying to make other movies, but it was a story we really wanted to tell and we just kept coming back to it when we had free time.
Erin: Yes, and we sold the script in… The first time, when was it?
Bill: 2014.
Erin: But that person didn’t do anything with it for 18‑months. It was kidnapped for that period of time. During that phase, the first [Fifty Shades] movie came out. Then the second movie came out. We were feeling like, “Oh my God, we’re running out of time here.”
Bill: Our window was passing us by.
Erin: Somehow, miraculously, we made the movie, sold it to Paramount, and they rushed our trailer to get on the final Fifty Shades release, which we thought was pretty poetic.
Scott: For years, on my blog, I’ve been preaching about making movies for the baby‑boomer and senior set because those people grew up with movies. They love movies. They don’t have all the distractions of social media that young people do.
How much of your inspiration for Book Club had that in mind as a business opportunity and how much of it was simply you wanted to tell an entertaining story?
Bill: What’s interesting is, when we were coming up with it and writing it, we’d been in the mindset because I’d been working for Redford’s company for so long, and I was so entrenched mentally in the idea of coming up with ideas for that demographic and for those actors to play in.
At that moment, it was less like, “Ooh, here’s this audience that doesn’t get served enough and let’s go tap into that.” I think it was more about, “There’s great actors in this age range that don’t get service in terms of great stories being written for them.”
It felt like a really exciting opportunity to do something that has a real commercial angle to it, but with a demographic that doesn’t really get that style of movie written for them, for the actors and for that audience.
Erin: We were definitely not coming at it from a business angle.
Bill: In hindsight we could say, “Oh, look at how smart we were to write for this demographic that’s so underserved,” but I think the truth is the process was much more pure than that. Although, maybe in a couple weeks, we’ll shift and be like, “Hey, we planned this the whole time.”
Erin: I’m a huge fan of “Golden Girls.” I don’t know what it is about this age group, but I just completely love those kinds of stories. Best Exotic Marigold Hotel had come out… I guess we were in that frame of mind.
Tomorrow in Part 3, Erin and Bill reflect on how the movie may spawn a cultural conversation about sexuality among senior citizens, and the roles played by Diane Keaton and Jane Fonda in the movie Book Club.
For Part 1 of the interview, go here.
Erin and Bill are repped by WME.
Twitter: @200bill, @Erinsimms9.