My Girl

Laurice Elehwany’s script was bought by Imagine in July 1990 as Born Jaundiced, retitled I Am Woman in August, and had its present title by spring 1991. It was her first screenplay filmed. Howard Zieff sets the story in the invented town of Madison, Pennsylvania, but the shoot ran in and around Orlando, using Sanford, Winter Haven, Plant City, Clermont and Bartow. The funeral home interiors were built on a new Orlando sound stage, and a 1968 motor home became Shelly’s place. The certificate took 2 hearings. Rated PG-13 first, the film lost a producers’ appeal on 6 September 1991, then won the PG at a second hearing on 23 September. The death at the close is off screen, but the casket is open at the funeral, and some parents found that too strong for young viewers. The plot turns on a mood ring: the friend goes back to the woods for the one Vada lost and walks into the bees. Vada’s mother died 2 days after giving birth and the child blames herself. A good fit if you want the funeral parlour treated as an ordinary workplace a child wakes up in, not a gothic set. Not for you if you plan to watch with small children; the open casket was argued over on those grounds in 1991.