Big Boy

I wrote the novel upon which this film was based, I worked on the various scripts with Francis, and I was present throughout the filming in New York. An amazing experience. Coppola had been working for a year with MGM writing scripts for them (he had got this job as a result of winning a nationwide literary competition) and had scripted Is Paris Burning? and Patton Lust For Glory, both of which Gore Vidal was supposed to be writing but Coppola travelled to Paris to help get scripts out of him. He had also written the screenplay of This Property Is Condemned, based on a Tennessee Williams short story, and (apart from the magnificent helicopter shot which starts the film) thought very little of it.

For full details of the filming of this first real Coppola movie see my memoirs Dropping Names which is available from my website www.davidbenedictus.com Oh and by the way clips of Dementia 13 which Coppola filmed in a couple of weeks in Ireland (he mentioned to me some nudie films which he may or may not have directed but Dementia 13 is probably his first acknowledged work) are used several times throughout You're A Big Boy Now (I imagine he didn't have to pay copyright on them!) and they look powerful to me.

A sad memory is that Elizabeth Hartman who plays the sexy man-hater with great precision and style was to have a serious nervous breakdown after the end of her marriage and threw herself out of a window to her death. She was some actress and you may have seen her in The group and A Patch Of Blue (opposite Sydney Poitier)

About 15 minutes into this quirky film I was ready to proclaim it a must see and to bill it as the best movie no one has seen or even heard about. After all it was Coppola's masters thesis for film school. It has Elizabeth Hartman successfully playing against type as a sexy (somewhat psycho) Greenwich Village ingénue. It has Peter Kastner, Rip Torn, Geraldine Page and Julie Harris playing characters more bizarre than anything in "Harold and Maude" (it reminds you a lot of that film and may have inspired it). It has Karen Black doing a toned down version of the Rayette Dipesto character she would play in "Five Easy Pieces". It has a lively sound track by the Lovin' Spoonful. It even has Coppola cutting in extensive gruesome footage from his first film "Dementia 13".

Unfortunately by the halfway point of "You're a Big Boy Now" it totally runs out of steam and you begin to understand that its obscurity is well-deserved. Coppola's script is the problem because the cast are generally excellent and you can tell they had a lot of fun making the film. Even minor cast members like Dolph Sweet do a good job and there are great little sequences like Kastner's after dark explorations of the New York City streets. But unlike "Herald and Maude", Coppola says nothing with this film; consequently it ends up as a classic case of the whole being considerably less than the sum of its parts.

I am not in love with Coppola as a director, but even those who are will acknowledge the incredible distance between his good stuff and the vast majority of his films. This is not his good stuff but is worth checking out if you like Hartman, Harris, and Page.

A coming of age film centering on a young man's longings and fantasies for his dream girl whom he sees in the New York Public Library's main branch. This comedy-drama is so spotty it is often infuriating but still worth seeing. The lead, Peter Kastner, is forgettable, but his father played by Rip Torn, head of incunabula (see the movie and find out what it is!) at the library, is hilarious; the fight scene with Julie Harris is marvelous. The opening scenes show the behind the scenes goings on at the great library and even where all the books are stored, which the public can't see. Karen Black did a fine and affecting job as Kastner's girlfriend. On the negative side is the lovely Elizabeth Hartman coming off her big success in "A Patch of Blue" with Sidney Poitier. She is supposed to be the cool and detached object of longing - but is as vapid and empty as any character could be, and in part this has to be the fault of the direction of Coppola. This is a significant problem with the film. Hartman was very tragically an apparent suicide in 1987. The movie does have enough in it warrant a viewing.

When you see this movie in theater in '66 at age 18, you are probably going to be a YABBN cultist for life. I saw it originally because I was a Lovin' Spoonful fan (who wasn't in '66?) but was blown away by the whole thing and have seen it probably 6 or 7 times over the years. Thinking about it today in particular at the passing of the great Rip Torn, who is awesome in this along with his brilliant wife Geraldine Page. Probably will seem dated to most younger people now, but it is both a time capsule and an immortal vision of coming-of-age.

The most famous movie to look at the younger generation's disillusionment with the American way of life is "The Graduate", but Francis Ford Coppola's "You're a Big Boy Now" also offers some insight. The young protagonist is a character very much like Ben Braddock: born into an affluent family that plans for him to be a big success. But this young man actively seeks out a new life, and he befriends a go-go dancer...but that's not all.

A lot of the humor is cutaway humor. In the end the movie isn't a masterpiece but has some funny stuff. It's sort of a cross between the zany comedies that dominated the '60s and a Woody Allen movie. One of the most interesting things is the soundtrack. The Lovin' Spoonful did the music, and it includes some songs - among them "Amy's Theme" - that I had heard but never knew whence they came.

I recommend the movie. It's a perceptive look at the youth culture, and also at mid-'60s New York. We even get shots of movie theaters running noted movies of the era! It's really a movie that you gotta love. I bet that when "The Godfather" debuted, people were shocked that it was directed by the same man who directed "You're a Big Boy Now".

And remember, wooden legs and aggressive chickens.