Are you there, Hollywood?
Lionsgate has won an auction for the film rights to the 1970 Judy Blume children’s novel Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret., according to Deadline. The movie has been greenlit by the studio, which will be adapted and directed by Kelly Fremon Craig, who also wrote and directed the 2016 coming-of-age film The Edge of Seventeen.
In the novel, sixth-grader Margaret Simon’s family moves from New York City to a New Jersey suburb, where she makes new friends. However, she’s deeply anxious about the experience of puberty and how it’s affecting her relationships with other girls and boys. She often talks to God to help her through her difficulties; she isn’t a member of an organized religion, but her mother is Christian and her father is Jewish, and she tries to come to terms with her feelings about faith. In a mixed review in 1970, Kirkus’ reviewer took issue with some aspects of the book: “There’s danger in the preoccupation with the physical signs of puberty….the effect is to confirm common anxieties instead of allaying them. (And countertrends notwithstanding, much is made of that first bra, that first dab of lipstick.)”
Relatively few of Blume’s books have been adapted for the screen over the years, although Deadline reported last month that a Hulu limited series of her 1998 adult novel, Summer Sisters, is also currently in development. Blume’s 1981 YA novel, Tiger Eyes, became a 2012 film, co-written by the author and her son, Lawrence, who also directed. The popular 1975 YA book, Forever…, was adapted as a 1978 TV movie starring Remington Steele’s Stephanie Zimbalist, and a TV production of Blume’s 1990 kids’ novel, Fudge-a-Mania, aired in 1995, followed by a short-lived series, Fudge, which ran from 1995 to 1997.
David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.
