WHO wants to watch a tween girl on the big screen?
This is actually a serious question, and one that Hollywood has struggled with in recent years.
The tween market, after all, is huge. On the small screen tween girl viewers have catapulted the Olsen twins, Miley Cyrus and other Disney starlets, many now fallen, into major commercial if not critical success. In bookstores preteenage girls (the definition of “tween” fluctuates, though the brackets encompass 9-to-14-year-olds) have propelled series upon series of realistic fiction and middle-grade fantasy onto the best-seller lists.
But those heroines rarely translate into feature-film success. A 2007 adaptation of the beloved Nancy Drew books, starring Emma Roberts, strategically lowered its heroine’s age to about 14 but made only $25 million at the domestic box office. That film barely outearned last summer’s Beverly Cleary adaptation, “Ramona and Beezus,” which starred Selena Gomez. Even Anne Hathaway couldn’t inspire attendance in 2004 for “Ella Enchanted,” based on Gail Carson Levine’s Newbery Honor winner about a 14-year-old girl.
Despite this record, on Friday, Smokewood Entertainment and Relativity Media will release “Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer” in the hope that the same girls who propelled books about 9-year-old Judy to sales of 14 million copies will flock to theaters. It’s a daunting challenge for the third grader of the title.
“Marketers and the media basically invented the category of tween girls,” Ilana Nash, author of “American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture,” said in an interview. “But it seems like Hollywood doesn’t know what to say about them.”
The Judy Moody series, which began in 2000, belongs to a sturdy genre of early chapter books: the everyday capers of a school-age child. This is a form Ms. Cleary perfected in her Ramona books, and it has been updated continuously to feed new generations of readers’ appetites for stories about girls like them.
The protagonists in these books tend to be good-hearted but not goody-goody, smart but not insufferable, eager to please but not always able to do so. They have conflicting emotions that they themselves do not always understand. Most important, they achieve the golden trifecta for tween heroines. Readers can relate to, aspire to be and occasionally feel superior to them — all at the same time.
“Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer” not only has to replicate this elusive tween. It also has to create a compelling narrative arc out of the homespun proceedings that define the books: misjudged classmates, run-ins with the teacher and the like. The screenwriters, Kathy Waugh and Megan McDonald, the books’ author, take Judy out of the classroom and invent one of the overarching goals that characterize each of the books. In this case Judy’s mission is to enjoy her summer despite the absence of her two closest friends and her parents, and the unwanted presence of younger brother, Stink, and her Aunt Opel.
But the greater challenge is translating the lead character, Judy Moody, to film. Preadolescence is awkward. The tween occupies a shifting space between the girl who has carefree adventures and the sexy teenager who angsts. It’s a phase that makes both parents and Hollywood executives uncomfortable: neither Drew Barrymore in “E.T.” nor Drew Barrymore in “Poison Ivy.”
“There have always been terrible social anxieties about the transition from girlhood to adolescence,” said Meenakshi Gigi Durham, an associate professor of media and women’s studies at the University of Iowa. “That’s why Judy Blume’s books were so controversial. They realistically engaged with the complexities of that age.”
Portraying the delicacies of a girl’s first period is hard enough on the page. It’s quite another challenge on the big screen. Whereas the humiliations of preadolescence are fodder for comedy in male characters — the squeaking voice, the pimples, the delayed growth spurt — in girls it’s an age often avoided. Had Hermione Granger not been crucial to an eight-movie “Harry Potter” franchise, she surely wouldn’t have been showcased between schoolgirl and high schooler.
Even battling evil warlocks, when tween girls leave the page for the screen, they largely hew to an awkward caricature of preadolescence. They tend to be sassy beyond their years but at the same time resolutely presexual. They are usually tomboys. And often, as in the case of both the Nancy Drew and Judy Moody movies, they have more visible male friends than female ones. Hollywood tweens are also, oddly, antiheroines. Rather than smart, they are smarty-pants: smug, priggish and set up for a pratfall. The “Nancy Drew” film seemed to want its sleuth to be an old-fashioned kind of girl, but instead turned her into a cartoonish know-it-all, mocked by her school’s It girls.
“Girls this age are going through a period of unrest and acting out,” said Sarah Hentges, author of “Pictures of Girlhood: Modern Female Adolescence on Film,” “but that isn’t usually represented.”
Tween characters who reflect that reality tend to fare better on screen critically albeit not often commercially. Abigail Breslin’s 9-year-old aspiring journalist in “Kit Kittredge” is intelligent and ambitious about something other than socializing. And, as in “Little Miss Sunshine,” Ms. Breslin, with her ungainly physique and overly dimpled smile, didn’t hide her age’s inelegance. Unfortunately audiences didn’t care to watch; “Kit” made only $19 million.
In general, independent movies for adult audiences, with no need to pander to marketing insight, do a much better job portraying preadolescence. Reese Witherspoon made her memorable debut in “The Man in the Moon,” portraying a 14-year-old who managed to be girlish and playful yet capable of sexual longing and complex emotion. And “Akeelah and the Bee” told the story of an 11-year-old girl’s journey to the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
Convincing tween characters used to appear in what were once known as family films. Many people write off Disney’s live-action movies from the 1960s and ’70s as weirdly retro even in their own time, though Hayley Mills, in films like “The Parent Trap” and “Summer Magic,” managed to straddle the line between cute and pretty, and even throw in some substance.
Her characters were neither overly sexualized nor underestimated. Smart, self-possessed and yet capable of expressing genuine emotion, her Nancy Carey in “Summer Magic” was resourceful enough to rescue her family’s ailing fortunes, if childlike enough to do so through a harebrained scheme. And she convincingly comes of age during the course of the film, even allowed a serious romantic interest. These movies recognize that tween girls are still young enough to care deeply about their parents even as they begin to chafe under their family’s expectations.
But such movies weren’t developed or marketed specifically to tween girls. It’s unclear whether tweens today want to watch girls their own age, or the stock film characters that usually represent them, when they go to the movies. Just as 12-year-olds have always read Seventeen magazine, tween girls may prefer watching girls who at least seem older than they are: “High School Musical” rather than middle-school misery.
Though perhaps tween girls and the actresses who portray them shouldn’t be in such a hurry to grow up. Next to the 12-year-old star of “Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer,” Jordana Beatty, the movie’s poster features Aunt Opel, played by Heather Graham, who, caught between sexpot and mom roles, is in a similarly uncomfortable phase. Junior high, for both girls and the actresses who portray them, may be awkward. But it’s certainly not the last, or the most difficult, in-between stage females go through.
This is actually a serious question, and one that Hollywood has struggled with in recent years.
The tween market, after all, is huge. On the small screen tween girl viewers have catapulted the Olsen twins, Miley Cyrus and other Disney starlets, many now fallen, into major commercial if not critical success. In bookstores preteenage girls (the definition of “tween” fluctuates, though the brackets encompass 9-to-14-year-olds) have propelled series upon series of realistic fiction and middle-grade fantasy onto the best-seller lists.
But those heroines rarely translate into feature-film success. A 2007 adaptation of the beloved Nancy Drew books, starring Emma Roberts, strategically lowered its heroine’s age to about 14 but made only $25 million at the domestic box office. That film barely outearned last summer’s Beverly Cleary adaptation, “Ramona and Beezus,” which starred Selena Gomez. Even Anne Hathaway couldn’t inspire attendance in 2004 for “Ella Enchanted,” based on Gail Carson Levine’s Newbery Honor winner about a 14-year-old girl.
Despite this record, on Friday, Smokewood Entertainment and Relativity Media will release “Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer” in the hope that the same girls who propelled books about 9-year-old Judy to sales of 14 million copies will flock to theaters. It’s a daunting challenge for the third grader of the title.
“Marketers and the media basically invented the category of tween girls,” Ilana Nash, author of “American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture,” said in an interview. “But it seems like Hollywood doesn’t know what to say about them.”
The Judy Moody series, which began in 2000, belongs to a sturdy genre of early chapter books: the everyday capers of a school-age child. This is a form Ms. Cleary perfected in her Ramona books, and it has been updated continuously to feed new generations of readers’ appetites for stories about girls like them.
The protagonists in these books tend to be good-hearted but not goody-goody, smart but not insufferable, eager to please but not always able to do so. They have conflicting emotions that they themselves do not always understand. Most important, they achieve the golden trifecta for tween heroines. Readers can relate to, aspire to be and occasionally feel superior to them — all at the same time.
“Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer” not only has to replicate this elusive tween. It also has to create a compelling narrative arc out of the homespun proceedings that define the books: misjudged classmates, run-ins with the teacher and the like. The screenwriters, Kathy Waugh and Megan McDonald, the books’ author, take Judy out of the classroom and invent one of the overarching goals that characterize each of the books. In this case Judy’s mission is to enjoy her summer despite the absence of her two closest friends and her parents, and the unwanted presence of younger brother, Stink, and her Aunt Opel.
But the greater challenge is translating the lead character, Judy Moody, to film. Preadolescence is awkward. The tween occupies a shifting space between the girl who has carefree adventures and the sexy teenager who angsts. It’s a phase that makes both parents and Hollywood executives uncomfortable: neither Drew Barrymore in “E.T.” nor Drew Barrymore in “Poison Ivy.”
“There have always been terrible social anxieties about the transition from girlhood to adolescence,” said Meenakshi Gigi Durham, an associate professor of media and women’s studies at the University of Iowa. “That’s why Judy Blume’s books were so controversial. They realistically engaged with the complexities of that age.”
Even battling evil warlocks, when tween girls leave the page for the screen, they largely hew to an awkward caricature of preadolescence. They tend to be sassy beyond their years but at the same time resolutely presexual. They are usually tomboys. And often, as in the case of both the Nancy Drew and Judy Moody movies, they have more visible male friends than female ones. Hollywood tweens are also, oddly, antiheroines. Rather than smart, they are smarty-pants: smug, priggish and set up for a pratfall. The “Nancy Drew” film seemed to want its sleuth to be an old-fashioned kind of girl, but instead turned her into a cartoonish know-it-all, mocked by her school’s It girls.
“Girls this age are going through a period of unrest and acting out,” said Sarah Hentges, author of “Pictures of Girlhood: Modern Female Adolescence on Film,” “but that isn’t usually represented.”
Tween characters who reflect that reality tend to fare better on screen critically albeit not often commercially. Abigail Breslin’s 9-year-old aspiring journalist in “Kit Kittredge” is intelligent and ambitious about something other than socializing. And, as in “Little Miss Sunshine,” Ms. Breslin, with her ungainly physique and overly dimpled smile, didn’t hide her age’s inelegance. Unfortunately audiences didn’t care to watch; “Kit” made only $19 million.
In general, independent movies for adult audiences, with no need to pander to marketing insight, do a much better job portraying preadolescence. Reese Witherspoon made her memorable debut in “The Man in the Moon,” portraying a 14-year-old who managed to be girlish and playful yet capable of sexual longing and complex emotion. And “Akeelah and the Bee” told the story of an 11-year-old girl’s journey to the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
Convincing tween characters used to appear in what were once known as family films. Many people write off Disney’s live-action movies from the 1960s and ’70s as weirdly retro even in their own time, though Hayley Mills, in films like “The Parent Trap” and “Summer Magic,” managed to straddle the line between cute and pretty, and even throw in some substance.
Her characters were neither overly sexualized nor underestimated. Smart, self-possessed and yet capable of expressing genuine emotion, her Nancy Carey in “Summer Magic” was resourceful enough to rescue her family’s ailing fortunes, if childlike enough to do so through a harebrained scheme. And she convincingly comes of age during the course of the film, even allowed a serious romantic interest. These movies recognize that tween girls are still young enough to care deeply about their parents even as they begin to chafe under their family’s expectations.
But such movies weren’t developed or marketed specifically to tween girls. It’s unclear whether tweens today want to watch girls their own age, or the stock film characters that usually represent them, when they go to the movies. Just as 12-year-olds have always read Seventeen magazine, tween girls may prefer watching girls who at least seem older than they are: “High School Musical” rather than middle-school misery.
Though perhaps tween girls and the actresses who portray them shouldn’t be in such a hurry to grow up. Next to the 12-year-old star of “Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer,” Jordana Beatty, the movie’s poster features Aunt Opel, played by Heather Graham, who, caught between sexpot and mom roles, is in a similarly uncomfortable phase. Junior high, for both girls and the actresses who portray them, may be awkward. But it’s certainly not the last, or the most difficult, in-between stage females go through.