Such a great movie. Francis Ford Coppola's early comedy is nothing like his later, full-bodied epics, but it's certainly very entertaining. Peter Kastner is a 19-year old, essentially thrown out into the world by his bombastic father Rip Torn...all to the horror of his clinging mother Geraldine Page. Kastner gets a lot more than he bargained for from wacky landlady Julie Harris (as Miss Thing),extremely misinformed co-worker Tony Bill and insane actress Barbara Darling (an uncharacteristically sexy Elizabeth Hartman). The movie is hilarious with every single actor totally in tune with Coppola's acerbic take on life circa 1966. Karen Black plays the only sane character so you know this is a very different movie. There are great songs from John Sebastian including DARLING BE HOME SOON.

I found this to be an excellent, fun 60's movie and think it represented the 60's very well. I saw it back then when I was a preteen and the extremely talented and tragic actress Elizabeth Hartman (who looks totally different, in this, than she did in Patch of Blue) plus the song "Darling Be Home Soon" ( a beautiful, and haunting song) by the Lovin Spoonful made it unforgettable! I would love to see it again as I have forgotten a lot of it but those 2 things made a lasting impression! I agree with a previous poster that it was great that Elizabeth Hartman was given a chance to play a part other than plain looking women and this was definitely the total opposite of some other roles she had.

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)