And now it’s such an honor to be able to tell her story, help everyone remember how important she was to them and can be for future generations, too.” “And yet you sort of maybe took her for granted a little bit,” Wolchok continues.
“And everyone sort of counted on her being there as their fairy godmother or their guide through puberty and through their first kiss, first sex, maybe your parents divorce. “She was like always there,” says Wolchok. She played her kids the audiobook of Blume’s Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, narrated by Blume herself, and it began to occur to her how essential Blume was to the childhoods of at least two generations. Pardo first became interested in making a documentary about Blume six years ago, on a long car trip to Nova Scotia.
They first started talking to Blume about a possible documentary in June 2018, but it wasn’t until February 2020 that the author finally sent them a letter saying, “Yes, let’s do it.” (The Are You There, God filmmakers had a similarly long courtship with the author before she agreed to their film.) They like literary subjects, as you may have guessed, and have no fear of provocation: Pardo’s past jobs include working for body-horror master David Cronenberg. Pardo and Wolchok previously collaborated on Very Semi-Serious, an Emmy-winning documentary about New Yorker cartoonists that that Pardo produced and Wolchok produced and directed. (Abby Ryder Fortson, who plays Margaret, told MovieMaker that Blume herself helped her figure out the book’s “must increase our bust” routine.)īut books that try to speak to young people who feel alone in the world remain popular cultural scapegoats, which is why Judy Blume makes a point of promoting them in her bookstore - and Judy Blume Forever takes care to include a diverse range of talking heads who explain how Blume’s novels made them feel less isolated. … The depth of her subversiveness is something that we learned through the making of the film and that we really wanted to highlight.”īlume would seem to have won the cultural fight over her own books: Next week will mark the wide release of Are You There, God? It’s Me Margaret, an adaptation of her 1970 novel about a young girl’s early teenage years, which includes blunt talk about her anxieties around her changing body. “I think we knew she was a trailblazer and radical in her honesty, but I wasn’t familiar with the censorship years, because I was a kid when that happened.
“I don’t think we realized quite how subversive she was at the very beginning of this project,” Pardo told MovieMaker.
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