In 1986, Jean Feiwel, Editor of Scholastic Inc., and Ann Martin, one of the editors working for her, came up with an idea that they thought might have real potential: to create a book series about a group of friends -- friends who babysat, to be exact.
The club was to be based in a Northwestern suburb -- a fictional town they named "Stoneybrook, Connecticut." Kristy, the central character, was conceived as a straight-shooting, enterprising girl with an "idea" -- to pull three of her peers into a "club" that would provide baby-sitting services for neighborhood families -- a close friendship and fun times together, besides. The girls were to be, to young readers and to each other, "the best friends they'd ever have."
Thus was born Ann Martin's first Baby-sitters Club book -- "Kristy's Great Idea" -- first in a series Time Magazine dubbed, in 1988, "must-read literature for pre-teen girls." Within one year, "Kristy's Great Idea" turned into 30,000 copies in print -- a sell out, and a full-fledged, best-selling, ground-breaking book series that every pre-teen girl in America was reading and talking about!
Over the next ten years, 30,000 copies turned into 125 million copies -- 201 titles in all -- of Baby-sitters Club books, Baby-sitter's Club "Specials," Baby-sitter's Club "Mysteries", and a spin-off series, "Baby-sitter's Club Little Sister" books -- all now available in 19 languages.
The series' rise was meteoric. As early as 1988 -- just two years after its launch -- all Baby-sitters Club books had hit #1 on bestseller lists. 1988 also saw the development of the first Baby-sitters Club "fan clubs" -- membership clubs which gave girls from all over the country the opportunity to communicate with each other and author Ann Martin. Eventually, this 60,000 member group spawned a smaller sub-set of 1,000 baby-sitting cooperatives in 48 states, modeled after the BSC, each with approximately 4-7 members, ages 11-13, that provided community baby-sitting services.
Indeed, in a very short time, Baby-sitters Club grew from a few books into a phenomenon.
The early '90s saw the BSC's numbers soar to 50 million books in print, and a line of merchandise launched, including trading cards, Milton Bradley board games, and Kenner collectible dolls.
In those years, also, author Ann Martin established a foundation that bears her name and gives grants to benefit children, literacy programs and homeless people. (Each time the author visits a bookstore or school anywhere in the country, that organization makes a charitable donation that is matched by the Ann M. Martin Foundation.)
The early '90s also saw the creation of a live-action, ACE Award-nominated Baby-sitters Club video series, produced by two Scholastic Productions executives Jane Startz and Deborah Forte. The series, originally featured on HBO, now airs weekly on The Disney Channel every Sunday afternoon and is sold in stores all across the country.
It was with this well established recipe for success that producer and Scholastic executive Jane Startz set out to make a motion picture featuring America's most loved baby-sitters. "Our feeling was that the time had come to bring BSC to the big screen, in part because we all felt there hadn't been many movies that were aimed at and geared toward the interest of young girls," says Startz.
Startz mentioned the project to long-time friend Peter Almond. "Jane made one of her occasional trips to Los Angeles," Almond recalls. "to explore a variety of projects that Scholastic was developing from their own list and from acquisitions and "THE BABY-SITTERS CLUB" leapt out and grabbed me by the lapels, both for its commercial potential and because of the new ground that it represented -- the fact that it was a story about young girls."
Almond, an independent producer at Beacon Communications then took the idea to Beacon President Marc Abraham. "When I was shopping in the book store with my young daughter, who's a pretty avid reader," says Abraham, "I couldn't help but notice how much shelf space was taken up by the BSC and how much she liked the series. So, when Peter Almond came to me with the idea of making a movie based on the books, I first thought how wonderful it would be to make a movie that my daughter would certainly love, but also that it would probably be a pretty solid business decision."
Beacon's executive vice president, Thomas Bliss, made a deal with Scholastic for the rights to the series. "We negotiated with Scholastic's Jane Startz and Marty Keltz," Abraham remembers, "and they were great and very high on their franchise which they really valued and were pretty tough negotiators because of that. They were very careful about how we would exploit that franchise and made sure we did the right things, so that we wouldn't devalue the property in any way."
"We knew that we had something special," adds Jane Startz, "and that it could make a wonderful movie and the part of the audience we were concerned with attracting, namely the hundred and fifty million readers, had proven their interest in the material. Beacon and Columbia were much in concert with this and didn't try to dilute or change the story to reach a wider audience."
In a town where screenplays can sit dormant for years and projects get put into turn-around at the drop of a hat, the odyssey was relatively short-lived. "We had moved our deal to Columbia," says Abraham, "and the people there showed enthusiasm for the project. They seemed to have understood it and believed in it. I think it is no small part due to the fact that the President of Columbia Pictures is Lisa Henson."
http://hollywood.com/movies/baby/text/howa.html (Einblicke ins Internet, 10/1995)
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