Judy Blume had notes for her screen adaptation. Luckily, so did the director
For generations of women, Judy Blume needs no introduction. For the rest, she is the author of the magnificent 1970 young adult novel “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.,” among a host of other books for kids and adults.
A few years back, Blume sent out a tweet asking her followers which book they’d most like seen made into a movie. Kelly Fremon Craig, writer-director of the teen film “The Edge of Seventeen,” and lifelong fan of Blume, sent her an email asking to adapt “Are You There God?”
Blume had rebuffed many such requests over the decades, but this was the one she didn’t even know she was waiting for. “I love ‘The Edge of Seventeen,’” Blume says. “No one had ever come to me with a credential that relates to my book. And then Kelly wrote, ‘Oh, and by the way, my mentor is James L. Brooks, and we would like to come and see you.’ That was the start of this wonderful experience. I love Kelly, and I love Jim, and I loved being able to work with them.”
Writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig’s adaptation, starring Abby Ryder Fortson and Rachel McAdams, captures spirit of the Judy Blume classic and reveals how contemporary it remains.
Kelly notes that her letter also mentioned how much Blume’s work had influenced her. “It was in the back of my mind when I made ‘The Edge of Seventeen.’ It’s been in the back of my mind for as long as I can remember, because Judy’s books were the books that made me love reading, and then I started to write as I was reading Judy’s books. I would fill up spiral notebooks with my own stories, and it was because I was reading stories that felt like my life, and until then, I didn’t know my life was worth a story.” The two speak via Zoom: Blume from her home in Key West, Fla., and Fremon Craig from a hotel room in Manhattan.
As the title implies, Margaret has some questions for God. Raised with no religion by her Jewish father, Herb (Benny Safdie), and Christian mother, Barbara (Rachel McAdams, a Gotham Award nominee for the portrayal), Margaret feels confused, searching out various religious experiences to find where she belongs. Having been uprooted from New York to New Jersey and about to enter sixth grade, she also has questions about the changes her body is going through — or that she hopes it will go through soon.
As Fremon Craig wrote the script, Blume went back and reread her book for the first time in decades — and she had notes. In the book, Barbara’s devout Christian parents had disowned her when she married Herb. When they come back into her life, causing discord, the scene is soon followed by the sudden appearance of Herb’s mother Sylvia (Kathy Bates), making a plug for Margaret’s Jewish heritage. Blume realized the two scenes would be far more powerful if converged into one blowout. “It was synchronistic, because I was about to pitch the same thing to you,” Fremon Craig recalls, adding the two often had the same ideas at the same time.
“The thing about Kelly, and Jim too, is that they’re so talented, they didn’t have any ego about me coming in and saying, ‘Well, what about this?’” Blume says. “That was an amazing difference from anything I had ever experienced working with people who made movies. I would write Kelly about all kinds of things. I remember saying, ‘When I was a young married, we cooked with soups.’ Remember that?”
Fremon Craig laughs. “Yes, I was going to bring that up!” She even found the old cookbook with recipes that used cans of soup as ingredients, including it in Barbara’s dubious culinary efforts.
“I used to make them for dinner parties,” Blume says ruefully.
One of the biggest dilemmas Fremon Craig faced was in casting. Without the right Margaret, they had no film. After seeing hundreds of girls, “Abby Ryder Fortson walked through the door, and then it was so clear; there she is.”
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Almost immediately, a larger challenge loomed. “We cast Abby in March of 2020, days before the world shut down, and she had just turned 12, so then it was a race against puberty,” Fremon Craig says of the pandemic-induced delay in filming. “Margaret spends the whole movie praying for boobs, and by the time we got to the costume room, God had answered. So Ann Roth, our costume designer, had to bind her, and then we did a ton of visual effects to flatten her chest.”
The film premiered in theaters in April to near-universal critical acclaim but disappointing box office returns. It found a new life on other platforms — both women note how many people tell them they watched the film on a flight. “Are You There God?” remains one of the best reviewed movies of the year, with a 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
The film stays true to the original material while expanding many of the surrounding roles. Blume says it’s why the film is better than the book, which was solely focused on Margaret’s point of view. “Kelly was able to take what I had written and make them into full-blooded characters on the screen. I love that.” Fremon Craig finds Blume’s praise “wonderfully overwhelming. My hope from the very beginning was to make Judy happy, and for the movie to feel like an extension of the book, so that just means everything to me.”
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