VIDEO Lifetime airing Judy Blume’s Tiger Eyes movie adaptation directed by her son

For decades, pioneering young adult novelist Judy Blume has been writing books that help teens and adults wrestle with such difficult topics as racism, bullying (back before bullying was a ubiquitous buzzword), sex and religion. Amazingly, none of Blume’s oeuvre of award-winning tales such as Blubber, Superfudge, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and Forever ever made the transition to the young-adult-friendly big screen — that is until 2012 when the film adaptation of her 1981 novel Tiger Eyes, directed by Judy Blume’s son Lawrence Blume, premiered at the 15th Annual Sonoma International Film Festival, and later took home the Jury Award for Best Feature in the Palm Beach International Film Festival.

Tonight the film adaptation of Tiger Eyes is making the transition from the big screen to the small screen as Lifetime is airing the movie as part of it’s Saturday night series of films!

Judy Blume has always been a huge fan of film, and has even volunteered on occasion as a ticket-seller at the Tropic Cinema, a nonprofit arthouse movie theater that her husband, George Cooper, help start in Key West, Florida. So of course Blume, now 75, was thrilled when more than $2 million came through to finance a film project.

The author knew that the movie would be Tiger Eyes, which tells the story of a teenage girl named Davey and her family struggling with the death of her father after he was shot in a convenience store hold up. Blume also knew that the director would be her son, Lawrence Blume, whose previous directing credits included the cult comedy favorite Martin & Orloff as well working with his mom on a made-for-TV adaptation of her book Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great for ABC in 1991.

“My son Larry, you know, has always wanted to make this into a movie, since he was 18; and it’s taken 30 years, I think,” Judy told NPR’s Audie Cornish in June. “Someone came to us with a budget,” she adds. “It wasn’t a large budget, but it was enough to make this film, and that was not the difficult part. The difficult part was finding a distributor who saw something in it and believed in it.”

“This was a real homemade movie,” director Lawrence Blume said of Tiger Eyes in a The New York Times interview in May. “There was something about the two of us being next to each other there, every day, that I think the whole crew kind of rallied around.”

“We were very nice to each other on the set,” Judy Blume added in the same interview. “We’re old enough to decide, ‘We’re going to make this work,’ and we did. And we like each other, anyway.”

So how was the movie-making experience for the seasoned author? “I loved it, I just loved it!” Judy exclaimed, adding that the “bustle of collaboration” was something she missed being a writer. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me,” she added.

Her son Lawrence talked about his excitement about transforming Tiger Eyes from words to moving pictures and bringing Davey to the big screen. “I still really related to her sense of isolation and trying to figure her life out on her own,” he said. “And I also thought it was very cinematic. I could see it, when I read: the canyons, the locations, the whole thing. I could just see it in my mind’s eye, and I thought, ‘I want to make this into a movie.’ ”

^ Tatanka Menas as Wolf and Willa Holland as Davey in Tiger Eyes

Lifetime will be airing Judy Blume’s Tiger Eyes Saturday, January 11 at 8/7c. (If you miss it on Lifetime, you can always hop over to Amazon and stream it any time!) Here’s a preview trailer followed by the network’s description of the film:

Based on the classic novel by coming-of-age author Judy Blume, Tiger Eyes tells the story of a young girl attempting to cope after the tragic death of her father. Davey (played by Willa Holland) has never felt so alone in her life. Her father is dead — shot in a holdup at his store — and now her mother Gwen Wexler (Amy Jo Johnson) is taking 17-year-old Davey and her little brother Jason (Lucien Dale) to New Mexico to stay with relatives while she tries to recover. Climbing in the Los Alamos canyon, Davey meets the mysterious Wolf (played by Tatanka Means) the only person who seems to understand the rage and fear Davey feels. Slowly, with Wolf’s help, Davey realizes that she must get on with her life and finds the strength to carry on and conquer her fears.