Latest news with #Forever...
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Forever' creator Mara Brock Akil on updating Judy Blume — and finding ‘real intimacy' — in the age of social media
Since its publication in 1975, Judy Blume's young adult novel Forever... has stirred controversy for its frank exploration of teenage sexuality. By the same token, it's been an important touchstone for young readers navigating the thorny terrain of first love. It was an important book for Mara Brock Akil, a TV veteran who has re-interpreted it for Netflix for a new adolescent audience. "Judy Blume was a first for me as a reader," Akil tells Gold Derby. "I think I became a writer because I was a reader first, and I was immersed in her world." Forever, which explores two teenagers navigating sex and intimacy for the first time, had a particular impact on Akil and her friends because "someone was willing to tell us the truth." Blume's book served as "our modern-day internet" for its young readers, explaining love, dating, and everything that comes with it. So when Blume finally made her work available for adaptation, "my middle-school hand just flew up in the air." More from GoldDerby Adam Scott, Ben Stiller, Britt Lower, Patricia Arquette and every 'Severance' Emmy submission 7 new shows with the most Emmy potential after Upfronts 'I do think that I burned down the cabin': How 'Yellowjackets' star Steven Krueger pulled off Coach Ben's mental and physical decline Yet when Akil saw the list of books Blume was willing to lend out to filmmakers, the producer was dismayed to see Forever wasn't on it. "Judy thought perhaps it was a little past its time," Akil recalls, "that the children today had moved way beyond where the book was." And in a way, Blume is right. "You can find anything and everything on the internet these days," Akil says, "but what's still missing, and maybe missing even more, is deeper connection, real intimacy, honesty." At a time when an abundance of technology has led to "an epidemic of loneliness," Akil thought, "what we need now more than ever is connection and love," and to help "young people navigate that part of the story." Akil's version of Forever places the story in 2018 Los Angeles, centering it on Black teenagers Keisha Clark (Lovie Simone) and Justin Edwards (Michael Cooper Jr.). Akil mined inspiration not just from her own adolescence, but from raising her own teenage son. From that observation came an understanding that for as much as things change, they stay the same. "At the end of the day, most love stories are about miscommunication," Akil explains. "It's just about what are the obstacles in that miscommunication." In the case of today, it's cell phone, the internet, and social media. "One minute it can connect you, and the next minute it can devastate you. Whether it be true or not, you feel like your life is on a global stage, that any mistake you make, your life is over." At the same time, "there's ways in which it can bring you together." The phone provides an important connection for Keisha and Justin, who feel out of place at the almost exclusively white public schools their parents have sent them to. Setting the story in 2018, Akil places it between the murders of Trayvon Martin and George Floyd, which heightened the sense of angst not just for Keisha and Justin, but for their parents as well. The "catastrophic parenting styles" within Keisha and Justin's households stems from a worry about whether "the kid was going to come home or not," Akil explains. That fear, in turn, "is creating unneeded and unnecessary anxiety within their relationship." All of these elements "are the interesting things that help this plot flourish around that very simple premise of miscommunication in a love story, and us rooting for them to finally get on the same page because we see that they're good for each other." That rooting factor hinges upon casting the right leads, and Akil found them in Simone and Cooper Despite her youth, Simone has a fairly robust resume that includes Greenleaf, Power Book III: Raising Kanan, and Manhunt. "She's been working at her craft as an actress for a long time," Akil says of Simone, who just earned a Gotham nomination for her performance in Forever. Pairing her with Cooper, a relative newcomer who has been "waiting to get in the game," turned out to be "magic." To bring out the best in her young stars, Akil turned to Oscar- and Emmy-winning actress Regina King, who has "given us such layered, beautiful, nuanced characters" throughout her acting career, and could do the same as a director. Having someone with experience both in front of and behind the camera was crucial to helping the stars feel comfortable. That was crucial for the sex scenes, which required "a language that felt honest to the story, and not distracting." Akil is the creator of such TV hits as Girlfriend, The Game, and Being Mary Jane. She earned her first Emmy nomination in 2024 for producing the documentary Stamped from the Beginning. Although her work has primarily centered on black characters, Akil finds that ultimately, she's just writing about people. "The majority of us wake up every morning not thinking about our race, our gender, our orientation," she states. "We think about how near and far am I to my dreams?" In the case of Forever, Keisha and Justin are "old enough to start thinking about their future as it relates to college," but at the same time are concerned with "who loves me? Who's thinking about me throughout the day?" Those everyday problems "are some of the most dramatic ideas in most people's lives." Ultimately, Akil believes that "the best way we get to know ourselves, and figure out who we are, is when we can find safe, loving relationships that allow us to carve out more of who we are, and to lead us back to our higher selves." When it comes to Keisha and Justin, "these two young people made a good choice in choosing each other," because it "freed them of themselves to get closer to who they are." All eight episodes of Forever Season 1 are streaming on Netflix. SIGN UP for Gold Derby's free newsletter with latest predictions Best of GoldDerby 'I do think that I burned down the cabin': How 'Yellowjackets' star Steven Krueger pulled off Coach Ben's mental and physical decline 'The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power' star Charles Edwards on his tragic death scene: 'He did single-handedly withstand Sauron' 'It keeps me on my toes': 'St. Denis Medical' star Allison Tolman on walking a fine line between zany and 'incredibly heartfelt' Click here to read the full article.
Los Angeles Times
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
How to have the best Sunday in L.A., according to Mara Brock Akil
Mara Brock Akil has a love story with Los Angeles that runs deep. She was born in Compton, raised in such neighborhoods as Baldwin Hills, Windsor Hills and Ladera Heights, and now resides in Hancock Park. So when she set out on her latest creative project, a TV adaptation of Judy Blume's 1975 novel 'Forever...,' she knew she had to set it the City of Angels. shar'We kept saying we're telling a love story within a love letter to Los Angeles,' said the screenwriter and executive producer best known for the series 'Girlfriends' and 'Being Mary Jane.' Akil's new series, which premiered on Netflix on Thursday, centers on the love story between Justin Edwards and Keisha Clark, Black high school seniors in 2018 Los Angeles. 'We're a very diverse city, but we are still separated within our neighborhoods,' she said. 'I want people to get used to seeing Justins and Keishas in L.A. and make room for them as they try to discover each other.' The showrunner said her 'muse' was her eldest son, Yasin Akil, 21, and her relationship with him. 'My impetus to write this, [which] I think [was] the same as Judy,' Akil said, 'is I want to make space for my children to have a normal rite of passage to understand who they are, how they make that leap from familial love to their first decision around romantic love and friendship love, and before they move into the next realm of their lives.' When Akil isn't on set, her ideal Sunday takes her from her home in Hancock Park to art studios downtown and local bookshops in Ladera Heights. As her work on 'Forever' has taught her, 'You can stay in your bubble or you can sort of venture out. And if you venture out, I think you'll be a better Angeleno.' This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. 7 a.m.: Hot girl walk On my dream Sunday, I'm waking up at 7 a.m. when the city is quiet. There are going to be dog walkers, but there's something so luscious about the stillness of L.A. that early on a Sunday. I do have a walking and writing creative practice, and so sometimes I like to write in New York as a result of it, because I can just go out the door and walk. But Hancock Park allows me to walk to one of my favorite streets in L.A., which is Larchmont. There's something to do where you don't have to overspend, but you can feel a part of something. You can just enjoy walking up and down. You can stop by the magazine stand. You can look in all the stores. You might buy a croissant — there's 1,000 bakeries. You can just go look at the adopted pets. Matcha is my thing. Groundwork has a matcha, Le Pain Quotidien has a matcha and Cookbook has a matcha. And then one of my favorite places, too, is Larchmont Village Wine, Spirits & Cheese. The line is out the door for their sandwiches; I typically get the turkey or the tuna. I get my Sunday fixings [at the Larchmont Farmers Market], so I make a Sunday chicken. I don't cook a lot of things, but what I do well, I do very well. I have a family recipe, and it's a Sunday chicken, and so I get the herbs or the potatoes and the carrots and the things like that. It feels great to walk out of your door after driving in your car all week, to talk to people, bump into friends. 9 a.m.: Neighborly tennis lesson Hancock Park is a really lovely neighborhood. I know my neighbors, and thankfully one of them has a tennis court. I have this amazing trainer named Wkwesi Williams. Wkwesi will meet me over at my neighbor's house, and he'll give us a lesson, and then if we're feeling strong enough, we'll hit afterwards. 11 a.m.: Hit the batting cages Then I'm home, and I can be mom. My 16-year-old son, Nasir, is an aspiring baseball player. Typically, if he's not in a game, which would wipe out my whole Sunday, I just have to get him to the batting cages. My son doesn't drive yet, so he still needs his mom, thank God. He bats at BaseballGenerations with Ron Miller, another amazing coach. It's so funny. It's the flyest — all the young ballers are in there. Sometimes they'll have professional guys hitting in the batting cage. It's like the secret to the secret. 12:30 p.m.: See the art Then, since we're downtown, I would go visit Jessica Taylor Bellamy's studio. Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, who's a good friend of mine, always gave me this great advice: Art should be a daily practice. If you just have 30 minutes and you can pop into a gallery or a museum, just go see the art, see what it does. What I love about Bellamy's work is that she really understands Los Angeles. When I saw her paintings — and she had a palm tree and a pine tree, sometimes she has bright skies, sometimes she has cloudy skies — I was like, 'Who is this? She gets it. She's from here. She knows L.A.' She was also a muse for 'Forever.' When I saw her paintings, I called Michael 'Cambio' Fernandez, who is our cinematographer. We talked about her palette, her understanding of the sunny side and the rainy side and the cloudy side of L.A. That tableau was really important. 2 p.m.: Visit childhood home Because I love driving, [my son and I] take the long way home. I would go by Reparations Club to pick up a book for me. Then we would go to this new comic book store called the Comic Den on Slauson for my son. Then we would go to Simply Wholesome for us. Simply Wholesome is one of our big heartbeat centers of love, joy, wellness and community. We typically get the Sunshine Shake with the egg, and we get some Jamaican patties for my mom, which we will take literally around the corner. My mother lives in my childhood home, and we would go see grandma, so grandma can see how tall Nasir has grown. It always anchors me to walk into a place that you remember yourself. Being in that neighborhood reminds me of how safe and loved and enough I am. I love being in the place where I was a child and also making sure my child stays connected to his grandmother. My own grandmother recently passed in that home, so just honoring that. We always play a little Jhené Aiko or Nipsey Hussle to honor being back over there. 5 p.m.: Sunday fixings I'll get back home around 5 o'clock, so I can cook the Sunday chicken. I have a big life, but I'm always a writer and I'm always in practice. And one of my favorite things is music. Our house is always filled with music, so I cook. I slow down. I engage with that family history as well as my own creativity, and in that active meditation, oftentimes I will catch a lot of great ideas. So I always have my journal nearby, maybe a little Champagne because it's Sunday, and I'm using all of those little fixings I got from the farmers market. And the cool thing is that it takes a minute for the chicken to cook, so I can have a little swim or a little sauna and shower before family dinner. 7 p.m.: Family dinner Right now, it's just the three of us. Sometimes we FaceTime the older one [who is away at college] and be like, 'You're missing Sunday chicken!' But we sit down, and we just talk about the day, talk about whatever. Sometimes it gets very philosophical. To be in our homes and enjoy them is also a treat, and I don't ever want to forget that as I'm out and about around the city. We linger at least an hour before we set a new week ahead of us. 9 p.m.: Have a laugh over drinks But then, I'm also a Gemini, so I like to stay out in them streets. So it might just be calling my girlfriend Alice and being like, 'Let's go have a drink at Damn, I Miss Paris.' Friends of mine, Jason and Adair, just opened that spot up here on West Adams. How long I stay depends on who's there. Maybe just stay for an hour, have a drink, have a laugh. 11 p.m.: Poetry before bed I'm a shower girl, but sometimes I also just like to take a bath. So I would just sort of wind down with a bath, and the other thing is reading poetry. Right now I'm reading Nikki Giovanni, Mary Oliver and my mother. My mother just wrote a book of poetry, which blew my mind because my mom has been my mom. And she's allowed the writer in her to come out. I've been reading those three women in conversation with me as I try to write my life poetically. And by the way, poetry is not a whole chapter. Let me get real deep real quick before I go into this REM sleep.
Los Angeles Times
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
How Judy Blume's books became a hot commodity in Hollywood, 50 years later
When Mara Brock Akil was a little girl, she voraciously read Judy Blume. Looking back, she sees her obsession as the start of her becoming a writer. So when Akil heard that Blume was allowing her work to be translated to the screen, she was ready: 'My little girl hand just shot up, 'I want to do that!'' says Akil. She adds that while this generation's youth can search the internet for information — and, sometimes, misinformation — Blume was her own trusted source. 'The Information Age linked us and let us see things that we weren't able to see or know, and Judy was that for us,' says Akil. 'Judy was writing from a place that was really grounded and gave full humanity to young people and their lives. She took their lives seriously.' Akil has channeled her affection for Blume's work into a new adaptation of the author's 1975 novel 'Forever...,' which premiered Thursday on Netflix. Focused on two teens falling in love, the book contains sex scenes that placed it on banned lists from its inception — and Blume, whose work offers frank discussion of subjects like masturbation and menstruation, remains no stranger to banned book lists, despite selling more than 90 million books worldwide. But as censorship ramps up again, Blume has become something of a hot commodity in Hollywood. In addition to the documentary 'Judy Blume Forever,' a feature film based on her novel 'Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret' was released in 2023, an adaptation of 'Summer Sisters' is in development at Hulu and an animated film based on 'Superfudge' is in the works at Disney+. Akil's 'Forever,' set in 2018 Los Angeles, stars Michael Cooper Jr. and Lovie Simone as the teenage leads — though the roles are gender-swapped from the novel. In 2020, while Akil was developing the adaptation, she tried to think of who the most vulnerable person is in society. 'I posit that the Black boy is the most vulnerable,' she says. 'My muse is my oldest son, and through the portal of him I got to go into the generation and just really start to look at what was going on.' While working on the project, she realized there are few depictions of boys and young men whose story is anchored in love, rather than relegating love to a side plot. 'Mentally, emotionally, physically — they too deserve to fall in love and be desired and have someone fall in love with them,' she says. 'And for Keisha — his honesty was attractive to her. How often do we ever really see that level of vulnerability be the leading guy?' In true Blume style, Akil also incorporated a central issue affecting people today — technology. 'The phone is a big character in the show, because there's a lot of duality to the phone,' she says. Throughout the series, the characters use phones to connect and disconnect via blocked messages, lost voicemails and unfinished texts. In the premiere, the drama revolves around the dreaded disappearing ellipsis — that feeling when you can see someone typing and then it stops. Akil laughs when I bring it up: 'At any age, that ellipsis will kick your butt.' And when you add sex into the mix, everything becomes more charged. 'The phone in the modern times is an extension of pleasure in sexuality, when used in a trusting way, and then it can be weaponized,' says Akil. 'It can be so damaging to this generation's future at a time in which mistakes are inherent in their development.' It's this keen awareness that the mistakes haven't changed but the consequences have that grounds Akil's version of 'Forever.' 'There's a lot of real fear out there and real tough choices that parents are going through,' says Akil. 'And in this era of mistakes, kids can make a mistake and die by exploring drugs or —' She stops herself. 'I get very emotional about the state of young people and their inability to make a mistake,' she says, 'because I think most young people are actually making good choices.' Akil says Blume and her family have seen the episodes more than once and told the showrunner she really enjoyed them. Akil remembers first meeting Blume. 'I was nervous. I wanted to be seen by her,' she says. 'I fangirled out and she allowed it and then was, like, sit your soul down. We had a conversation, and it felt destined and magical. I was grateful that she listened, and it allowed me to come to the table saying, 'I know how to translate this.'' I ask Akil why she thinks Blume's work continues to resonate, lasting for decades in its original form and spawning new projects to attract the next generation of viewers and, hopefully, readers. 'She's relevant because she dared to tell us the truth,' says Akil. 'And the truth is forever.'
Telegraph
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
‘I didn't know how I could make Judy Blume's Forever relevant to today'
Almost every woman who became a teenager in the 1980s and the 1990s remembers the first time they read Judy Blume's 1975 novel Forever... 'I was in middle grade, and we were passing that book around so hard, the pages fell out and had to be paper-clipped together,' says the 54-year-old screenwriter and producer Mara Brock Akil, who was 12 when someone pushed a copy into her hand. It was the early-1980s Midwest and Brock Akil was living with her mother following her parents' divorce. 'Missouri was a pretty conservative place, so the truth about that sort of stuff was harder to find. I went from innocently reading How to Eat Fried Worms to reading about sex with Judy Blume. Boom! All her books – Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret; Blubber – I barrelled through them. She was just hammering us. We all remember her because no one else was writing like her back then.' For the uninitiated, Forever... is the plainly told story of Kath and Michael, two New Jersey high-school seniors who, over several weeks, slowly fumble their way towards having sex for the first time: a satisfactory experience for Michael, considerably less so for Kath, who narrates the book. There have been many YA novels about teenage sex since, but none has the mythic patina and cultural reach of Forever..., a book widely credited with teaching otherwise ignorant and fearful young girls the truth about adulthood. For many, to read it was to feel initiated into a secret club that made them stronger, more curious and less lonely. 'It meant that by the time I sat down to have the chat with my mother about sex, when I was 15, I was ready to go,' says Brock Akil. 'I was like, 'Mum, just give me the birth-control pill!' Forever... enabled me to have that conversation.' On Thursday, Forever... gets its small-screen debut in a dreamy eight-part Netflix series created by Brock Akil, who has relocated the story from 1970s New Jersey to an affluent, sun-addled Los Angeles suburb in 2018. Where the world the novel inhabits is entirely white, the two families at the heart of this version are black, with Kath and Michael reimagined as the outwardly sexually confident Keisha (Lovie Simone) and the more socially sensitive, vastly more privileged Justin (Michael Cooper Jr), who meet at a plush New Year's Eve party and clumsily, giddily, fall in love. The many modern updates include a 'slut-shaming' subplot and a deeper awareness of race, family expectation and class (Keisha is the academically precocious daughter of a single mother; Justin the hemmed-in son of strict and overprotective parents). But the essence remains the same: two young people trying to navigate the confusions and complications of first romance, albeit this time often through the not always helpful technology of mobile phones. Yet Brock Akil – who created the wildly successful and influential Noughties show Girlfriends and is arguably the US's leading chronicler of black American lives on screen – was initially wary about adapting Blume's novel. In the tech-saturated world of today, where a reported one-third of children have seen porn online by the age of 10, very few prepubescents enter their teens with the same innocence as Kath and Michael. 'When Judy wrote Forever..., kids didn't have any understanding. There was nothing to read or watch,' agrees Brock Akil. 'But you only need to go onto Twitter and you are sexually propositioned immediately. Forever... was written against a backdrop of women's liberation – the birth-control pill had become this big new thing and, for the first time, women could explore their hearts and bodies, and know they weren't endangering their future. I knew I could translate the excitement of first love, but I didn't know how I could make it relevant to today.' Her brainwave was to make a virtue of the modern world's more complicated sexual climate, by emphasising both the perils of online communication and the confusions that can stem from the heightened discourse around issues of consent and assault. 'In the book, Kath is the most vulnerable, as a young woman trying to figure out her place in the world. But I'd argue that today it's young black men who are vulnerable. As a mother to boys myself [she has two teenage sons with her producer-director husband, Salim Akil], I find it heartbreaking that before you can talk to them about the birds and the bees, you have to introduce the idea of rape. You have to help them navigate all these complexities around language and behaviour, and that's before they've figured out if the girl even likes them. So, once I'd realised that was how we could tell the story, we were off to the races.' Lately, some of the most dominant tales on screen about young people have been nightmarish, be it the teenage killer at the heart of Adolescence or the sex-and-drugs nihilism of the HBO series Euphoria. Does Brock Akil see Forever... as a way to give back to teenagers a simpler, gooey, young love story? 'Ah, I love that idea! And while I recognise there are some very harrowing challenges in society right now, most people are not having those extreme experiences, right? As a writer, I like to show people's lives as they really are. One of the most radical things you can do today is write a young black male character who is simply a little unsure of what he wants.' Brock Akil has built a career on exploring precisely these everyday nuances. She created Girlfriends in 2000 in response to Sex and the City, because, as she has said many times before, 'on that show, black people had no seat at the table'. Her series – which focused on the chaotic, loving, up-and-down friendships between four black women and has influenced TV shows that explore black lives in relative fullness, such as I May Destroy You – not only broke with the prevailing tradition at the time of depicting black characters only in family sitcoms, it dared to show black women as flawed, messy and all too real. 'The producers didn't want [the actress] Tracee Ellis Ross to keep her natural curly hair for her character, Joan Clayton,' says Brock Akil. 'Can you imagine that? They wanted her to blow-dry it straight. But we won that battle, and over the course of the show's eight series, Tracee's curly hair became a real advert for natural hair.' Girlfriends also became an advert for the glorious reality of black women's sex lives, as something ordinary, untidy, and often imperfect. 'When I created it, the images of black sexuality on TV were extreme,' says Brock Akil. 'We were either represented as sexless lawyers or as marginalised sexually promiscuous women. So with Girlfriends the idea was very much to say, 'We black women are not just here for the pleasure of men'.' 'That idea of the strong black woman,' she says, 'it's a lie that I've been exploring through all of my work, because if you adopt that rigid concept of yourself, it leaves you no room for the full complexity of who we are.' Brock Akil sees a through-line between that show and her version of Forever... 'With Keisha, I wanted to create a black woman who is clever, but who also makes mistakes. She's a girl trying to figure it out – and what better image for young women is there than that?' Forever comes to Netflix on Thursday 8 May
