Entertainment

Totally Anne Frank

It’s Anne Frank for an MTV world — cranky, worried about her looks and crushing on a boy.

In a new adaptation of “The Diary of Anne,” she’s your average teenager and not the tragic Jewish saint that has been portrayed for 60 years on stage and in an Oscar-winning, 1959 Hollywood movie.

Anne “was pretty obsessed with boys, prickly and difficult with her mother, quite manipulative, mad about clothes and very interested in her looks,” says Deborah Moggach, who wrote the new TV production that will air on PBS’ “Masterpiece Classic” this spring.

She’s not the “too serious” Anne of previous adaptations, says Moggach.

“I wanted our Anne to not feel like a creature of history, but a young girl who young people could relate to because she feels like them. We wanted to be as truthful to her as we could be and not sanctify her or make her a martyr,” she says.

Holocaust hardliners might cringe at this updated way of portraying the 13-year-old Dutch girl who chronicled her life during two years of hiding from the Nazis in a cramped annex over her father’s office.

Scenes like the ones where Anne falls in (and out of) love with Peter van Pels, the 15-year-old boy who was also in hiding with her, or when she seethes that sometimes she just wants to “slap her [mother] across the face” are all taken directly from the original diaries, Moggach insists.

The new version was originally created for British TV as a five-part miniseries, broken up into 30-minute episodes, to “tackle it as if it was a video diary,” Moggach says.

It will air on PBS in its entirety April 11, to coincide with Holocaust Remembrance Day (though it was released on DVD here late last month.)

PBS has a marketing plan in the works to appeal to “younger women who are already communicating online,” says “Masterpiece Classics” executive producer Rebecca Eaton. The goal is “getting the word out that [the adaptation] is on and it’s slightly different,” Eaton says.

By highlighting the typical-teenager side of Anne’s personality, Moggach believes she’s actually been more truthful about who Anne was than previous adaptations have been.

“One loves a rounded human being [more] than a cardboard-y goody-goody. That’s what I desperately want, so that we feel for her and love her,” Moggach says.

If this all sounds a little more “Gossip Girl” than “Masterpiece,” at least some Anne Frank scholars don’t object.

The new take is “actually a good thing,” says Maureen McNeil, director of education at the Anne Frank Center USA in downtown Manhattan, who has seen the British miniseries.

“They did a good job in portraying her as a human and not an icon,” says McNeil. “That’s who Anne really was — she was a feisty teenager.

“Her story is like any story that needs to be updated with every generation,” McNeil says.

“Every time you tell a story, it changes a little bit so that the audience can understand,” she says.

“It’s not making it false. It’s speaking to the audience.”