'My mother never took to her bed, but she never talked about it.

A girl who loses her father, who's the love of her life before she gets to know him as an adult, there's got to be a lot of that in there for me,' she said. 'My father died suddenly - he wasn't murdered, but he was 54, my mother was 54, and I was 21. That marriage didn't last,' she recalled, noting that her young son struggled with a faraway move and with separation from his father.īlume, who grew up in New Jersey, where the killing in 'Tiger Eyes' takes place, drew on other experiences. 'I had a very brief second marriage to a physicist, and we lived in Los Alamos for two years. Judy Blume had lived in New Mexico before, as had her son, and the memories were vivid, although not all positive. The New Mexico landscape is a part of it,' she said. It's a place - place is as much a part of that story as any character. His mother signed on: 'It's probably my most cinematic book. 'There were only two of Judy's books that I had the passion to do for the screen,' he said, 'and those were 'Tiger Eyes' and 'Summer Sisters.' For the amount of money they had in the budget, there was no way we could do 'Summer Sisters.' I gave them 'Tiger Eyes' to read and pitched my concept of how it would be adapted - and it just happened.' 'Tiger Eyes' became a feature film after Lawrence Blume was approached by a British producer. We had $60,000 from some educational company.' It was 'Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great.' We wrote that screenplay together in a week. 'I decided after that we were both too young to work together. 'He was 25 and I was 50,' the author said. One adaptation that she completed was a short film with her son, filmmaker Lawrence Blume. Yet she did work with two screenwriters who tried in vain to adapt 'Deenie' (about a teenager with scoliosis) for Disney.

Pursued by TV mogul Aaron Spelling - 'He wanted to buy 'Margaret' and 'Then Again, Maybe I Won't,' and he wanted to pay me a lot of money to put both books on TV' - she turned him down. 'I had nothing to do with it,' said Blume, who recalled the advice of a former agent: 'Just sell them the rights and stay out of it, or it will kill you.'įor the most part, she heeded that counsel. Her controversial 1975 novel about teenage sexuality, 'Forever,' was adapted for television in 1978 by Bay Area director John Korty.

'And I'm a movie person,' she added, noting that her husband of 34 years, George Cooper, founded the nonprofit Tropic Cinema in Key West, where the couple spends the winter. It never fit together,' Blume, 74, explained, sipping water near a window overlooking Central Park in her New York apartment. 'There were years when they were after me, but it never seemed right.

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