Kelly Fremon Craig and the Seven Years Between Two Coming-of-Age Films

Kelly Fremon Craig

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	May 28, 1980 Whittier, California, United States
Occupation	Film director and screenwriter
Awards	New York Film Critics Circle (shared) · Detroit Film Critics Society

Kelly Fremon Craig has directed two feature films, and the second arrived seven years after the first. Both are studio comedies about girls who feel betrayed by their own lives: a seventeen-year-old in The Edge of Seventeen who loses her only friend to her older brother, and an eleven-year-old in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret who talks to God while she waits for her first period. Both drew the kind of reviews most directors wait a career for. The second one also cost more than it earned. That gap, between how much critics love her films and how rarely she gets to make one, is the question her career is asking now.

She grew up in Whittier, California, a city in Los Angeles County, and at thirteen she was watching enough MTV to think of music videos as little short films. At the University of California, Irvine, where she took a degree in English, she wrote sketch comedy and spoken-word poetry rather than screenplays. An internship in the film division of Immortal Entertainment changed that. It was there that she read her first film script, and she started writing her own.

Through her twenties (she was born on May 28, 1980) she wrote films that other people would direct. Her spec scripts included a high-school retelling of Cyrano de Bergerac and a comic remake of a 2004 French drama for Paramount. Another, Ticket to Ride, was bought by Ivan Reitman, who planned to direct it himself. By Reitman’s own count the script went through at least fifteen rewrites before it reached cinemas in 2009 as Post Grad, directed by Vicky Jenson, with Alexis Bledel and Michael Keaton. Critics savaged it and audiences stayed away. Her next script would not leave her hands.

That script was Besties. In 2011 she sent it to James L. Brooks, the writer-producer she has called her comedy idol, and later described him as the crazy long shot she took at the beginning. Brooks bought it through Gracie Films and kept her attached as director. Casting took four more years. Hailee Steinfeld signed on in August 2015, Woody Harrelson came in as a world-weary teacher and Kyra Sedgwick as the mother, and cameras rolled in Vancouver that October. To prepare, Fremon Craig spent time in high schools with teenagers and went back through the journals she had kept.

Retitled The Edge of Seventeen, the film closed the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2016 and opened through STX that November. On a nine-million-dollar budget it grossed close to nineteen million, a modest hit. The reviews ran warmer than the box office. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus credited the sharp script and Steinfeld’s lead performance, Steinfeld was nominated for a Golden Globe, the Directors Guild of America nominated Fremon Craig for best first-time feature, and the New York Film Critics Circle named it the best first film of the year, a prize she shared with Trey Edward Shults for Krisha. What stayed with people was Nadine, a heroine who is wrong about almost everything for most of the film and whom the script declines to make likeable ahead of schedule.

The years that followed looked a lot like the decade before. She was originally attached as sole screenwriter of Warner Bros.‘ animated Scooby-Doo feature, which reached screens in 2020 as Scoob! with six other writers credited. She did uncredited rewrites on Bumblebee, the Transformers spin-off that also starred Steinfeld. A YouTube Premium series spun off from her debut was announced with her as executive producer and later cancelled. A 2018 deal to adapt Adrienne Brodeur’s memoir Wild Game for Chernin Entertainment was announced, and has produced no public production news since.

What broke the pattern was a letter. In August 2018 she drafted an email for her agent to send to Judy Blume, telling the novelist that her books had been a north star while she was making her first film. Blume had seen The Edge of Seventeen. After reading through Blume’s novels, Fremon Craig settled on Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, the 1970 book whose author had turned down every screen offer for 49 years. A meeting with Blume and Brooks at the novelist’s home in Key West followed in September 2019, then more than a year of drafts sent to the author for notes. “There was a lot of typing and then deleting it, because I was really scared to screw it up,” she told Script magazine.

Lionsgate won the rights to release the film after a bidding war among studios. Abby Ryder Fortson played Margaret, Rachel McAdams her mother and Kathy Bates the grandmother, and Fremon Craig kept the story in 1970 instead of updating it. She also did something the novel never does, giving the mother and the grandmother coming-of-age stories of their own. “It’s sort of like you come of age at all sorts of ages,” she said.

Here the contradiction in her career becomes hard to ignore. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret holds a 99 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes and 84 on Metacritic, audiences gave it an A CinemaScore, and McAdams won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association prize for supporting performance. It still opened third, behind The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Evil Dead Rise, and finished at about 21.5 million dollars worldwide against a 30-million budget. Not every critic bought its gentleness, either. In Variety, Amy Nicholson wrote that the film “seems uneasy putting funny, flawed and all-too-realistic Margaret on screen exactly as she is”, a charge aimed at precisely the honesty her admirers praise her for. A director who needs seven years between films, working at studio scale with studio-scale casts, has very little margin for an opening weekend like that one.

Her most recent credit came out of an older draft. Ordinary Angels, a Lionsgate drama starring Hilary Swank as a Louisville hairdresser who campaigns to pay for a sick girl’s liver transplant during the 1994 cold wave, opened in February 2024 with a screenplay credit shared by Fremon Craig and Meg Tilly, although director Jon Gunn wrote the final draft with Jon Erwin. A faith-based family drama sits a long way from the bruising high-school comedy that made her name.

As of October 2026, no new film directed by Kelly Fremon Craig has been announced, and Wild Game remains the last directing project publicly attached to her. If her own habits hold, the next screenplay is already being typed and deleted. The harder question is which studio will pay for a film whose reviews look close to guaranteed and whose opening weekend does not.

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Tags: American cinema, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret., Kelly Fremon Craig, Hailee Steinfeld, James L. Brooks, Judy Blume

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