Coppola had optioned Benedictus’s novel for a thousand dollars and set about transplanting the story to New York City because he had always wanted to portray the life of a teenager living in New York, where he had grown up. Coppola had actually written his screen adaptation in his spare time in Paris while he was collaborating with Gore Vidal on the script for Is Paris Burning?—in order to “stay sane,” as he quipped. When Seven Arts got wind of the fact that Coppola had composed the script while he was in their employ, they claimed, quite rightly, that they owned the rights to any material Coppola had written while on their payroll as a screenwriter. He shrewdly pointed out to the front office that he owned the rights to the novel from which the screenplay was derived and they owned the script: “Therefore, I own one half and you the other. So let’s do it together.”2
You’re a Big Boy Now (1967)
At this time Seven Arts was merging with Warner Brothers, and Phil Feldman, business manager at Seven Arts for the past four years, had decided that the time was right for him to break with Seven Arts and become an independent producer. Feldman had faith in Coppola, and Coppola convinced him to produce You’re a Big Boy Now. They began the preproduction phase for the film before they had obtained financial backing for the project. “We were shelling out our own money,” Coppola recalls, “using credit cards and what have you.”3
Feldman finally negotiated a deal with Seven Arts that would resolve the dispute over the ownership of the screenplay: Ray Stark, Coppola’s former boss at Seven Arts, would pay Coppola no fee for the script (which technically belonged to Seven Arts), but he would pay Coppola $8,000 for directing the movie on a twenty-nine-day shooting schedule. Stark, in return, got the newly formed Warner Brothers-Seven Arts to make the picture. “Why did I make Big Boy for just $8,000?” Coppola comments. “I would have done it for nothing.”4
Coppola explains his strategy with Warners-Seven this way: “I don’t ask anybody if I can make a movie.” He simply informs a studio that he is ready to go into production, “and if they’re wise, they’ll get in on it.” In the motion picture business very few executives can resist getting in on a project that is already a going concern. So he and Feldman advised Warners-Seven that they were going ahead with the picture and that it was almost too late to get in on the ground floor. The moguls simply said, “Well, we might as well make this movie.”
But Warners-Seven only offered Coppola a measly $250,000 budget because the plot centered on a nineteen-year-old and there were few bankable teenaged stars. As a result, Coppola decided to cast relative unknowns in the key roles and to get better-known actors for the supporting cast. He accordingly cast as the young hero and heroine Peter Kastner, the promising Canadian actor, and Karen Black, a graduate of the Actors’ Studio with one Broadway play, The Playroom, to her credit. In addition, he cast as the young femme fatale Elizabeth Hartman, who garnered an Academy Award nomination for playing a blind girl in A Patch of Blue (1965), her first film.
Hartman had appeared in a couple of other pictures, usually as a mousey, inhibited girl. In giving her an unsympathetic role Coppola was exemplifying his willingness to cast an actor against type. The late Elizabeth Hartman told me during a brief conversation that when Coppola phoned and asked her to play the sexy Barbara Darling she nearly cried. “Do you know what I look like?” she asked. He did, and he stuck to his choice.
Coppola took the bull by the horns and bypassed the agents of the experienced actors he wanted for supporting roles and contacted the actors directly. He phoned Julie Harris and Rip Torn and his wife Geraldine Page himself and coaxed them into reading the script. Geraldine Page spoke for the others when she said, “I get scripts daily, but this one really made me laugh.” She thought Coppola was a marvelous young talent and trusted him implicitly.5 (She eventually got an Oscar nomination for playing the hero’s dotty mother.) When all of these distinguished actors agreed to be in the movie, Warners-Seven raised Coppola’s budget to eight hundred thousand dollars, still a meager budget by studio standards.
Some Hollywood insiders thought the studio was imprudent in bankrolling Coppola’s film. One publicist described Coppola’s conferences with the studio officials this way: “All these stuffy executives were sitting around a conference table, offering the moon” to this kid “with a beard and blue jeans.”6 In actual fact, Warners-Seven was wise to finance Coppola’s picture, since allowing the twenty-seven-year-old aspiring director to make a low-budget film for a mainstream studio would enable him to demonstrate what he could do. In addition, a young talent, anxious to prove himself, would not command a large salary but would very likely finish the film on time and on budget.
Coppola had always been fascinated by the young people, called pages, who get books for patrons at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue by sailing down the eighty miles of library stacks on roller skates, and so he gave that job to his hero rather than making him a shoe clerk as in the novel. But library officials were not pleased that Coppola had inserted into the script the suggestion that the library had a secret vault stocked with exotic pornographic books and objets d’art. They also feared that Coppola and his film crew would interrupt the library’s daily routine. After the library board denied him permission to film on the premises, Coppola pointed out to Mayor John Lindsay that Lindsay had a policy of encouraging film crews to work on location around New York City as a goodwill gesture to the film community. Lindsay acquiesced and issued a permit for Coppola to shoot in the library, overruling the library board’s veto.
In Coppola’s screenplay Bernard Chanticleer (Peter Kastner) works in the stacks at the New York Public Library, where his father, Humphrey Chanticleer (Rip Torn), is curator of rare books. Bernard’s raffish friend Raef (Tony Bill), who also is employed at the library, often attempts to make the naive Bernard a bit more worldly in his outlook on life. Humphrey Chanticleer, over the protests of his wife Margery (Geraldine Page), decides that Bernard should move out of their Long Island home and into an apartment of his own in New York City. Bernard apologizes to “Mummy” and “Daddy” for his failure to live up to their expectations in the past, thereby indicating that he is still in essence their little boy—he is not a big boy yet.
The apartment house Mummy and Daddy choose for him is presided over by the sexually repressed Miss Nora Thing (Julie Harris), who readily agrees to Margery’s request that she report to Bernard’s parents any partying Bernard indulges in with the opposite sex. Another tenant is a burly cop called Francis (after the young director), who likewise keeps a suspicious eye on Bernard, whom he views as a young punk. As things develop, Bernard becomes interested in Amy Prentiss (Karen Black), a co-worker at the library. But he soon transfers his attachment to Barbara Darling (Elizabeth Hartman), one of the library’s patrons. Given the fact that Barbara is a go-go dancer at a Greenwich Village discotheque and an actress in offbeat, off-Broadway plays, it is hard to imagine her as a regular library patron—but no matter. In any case, the promiscuous Barbara eventually sheds Bernard for the more attractive Raef.
To his dismay Bernard learns that his father, who maintains a respectable facade, is really a lecher who has made a pass at Amy and has even endeavored to work his wiles on Miss Thing when he corners her in the secret library vault he has filled with erotic art. Disenchanted with his father, Bernard defies Humphrey by stealing a prized Gutenberg Bible from his father’s rare book collection. After a chase led by Humphrey through lower Manhattan, Bernard is captured and jailed—and bailed out by Amy.
Benedictus’s novel concludes with Bernard having lost both Barbara and Amy, but Coppola’s screenplay reunites Bernard with Amy. Benedictus points out that his book concludes with Bernard living a solitary life, whereas Coppola supplied a happy ending: “Instead of being scarred for life by this sadistic Barbara Darling, the young hero will get a nice girl in the end…. Still I think there have been fewer concessions to public taste than in most American films.” As a matter of fact, Coppola’s script does have a
serious dimension underlying the plot, despite the happy ending. Like the novel, the script presents a young fellow on the brink of manhood who matures by finally summoning the gumption to defy his overbearing parents and outgrow their influence.
Coppola prepared a rehearsal version of the screenplay and had the actors rehearse in a Manhattan warehouse without benefit of scenery or costumes as a way to familiarize them with their roles. This procedure was a carryover from his days rehearsing plays at Hofstra. After ten days of rehearsing with the cast, Coppola explains, “We played the entire script all the way through before a live audience.” In this manner the actors were able to evolve their roles to performance level, “and I was able to get a sense of what my picture was going to look like before we started shooting.”7 (In the years ahead Coppola would continue to hold rehearsals prior to the start of principal photography.) Coppola then gave the actors a final shooting script just before filming commenced.
It is true that Coppola had already gained some experience in directing by making a low-budget film for Roger Corman. Nevertheless, he was still diffident at the prospect of shooting the present film on location in New York City with some gifted and well-known character actors, with a real union film crew, and on a limited schedule. He was scared when he walked on the set he had never seen before on the first day of shooting, and when cinematographer Andrew Laszlo inquired what the first camera setup would be, Coppola froze. He looked at the nine actors and the crew of forty and abruptly decided to dismiss them for half an hour, while he blocked out the scene. He could not function with forty-nine people watching to see if he knew what he was doing.
When he was shooting on location in the streets of New York, Coppola utilized Eastman’s high speed color film, which enabled him and Laszlo to film with natural light, even at night. One location sequence recalls an incident from Coppola’s youth: after he had run away from military school, he wandered around Manhattan trying to summon the courage to go home and face his parents. Similarly, in the film, Bernard roams around Broadway and Times Square just after he moves into his own apartment. The scene is photographed with documentary-like realism as Laszlo’s handheld camera follows Bernard while he is window-shopping around the 42nd Street porno shops and penny arcades.
This sequence reaches its climax when Bernard drifts into a peep show parlor. While looking at a raunchy filmstrip, Bernard gets his tie caught in the rickety viewing machine. Amy, who happens to spot him from the street and follows him into the store, snips his tie off with fingernail scissors she is conveniently carrying. The wholesome Amy, of course, represents a marked contrast to the lewd creature in the filmstrip that Bernard had been watching. In fact, the awkwardness Bernard displays in the porno emporium he visits implies that raw sex is not really attractive to him—he is looking for love. This scene accordingly prefigures how Bernard will ultimately prefer love with Amy over a mere sexual relationship with Barbara.
At any rate, once outside the porno parlor, Bernard and Amy chat with each other on the telephones in adjoining phone booths on the street, an act that serves as a metaphor for their attempt to connect with each other. Indeed, they discover that, among other things, they both attended P.S. 109 in New York City (the same school Coppola attended).
A stand-out location sequence in Big Boy begins in Humphrey’s office, where nearly all of the principals in the cast (even Barbara) meet for a showdown. It is at this point that Bernard impulsively steals the Gutenberg Bible and is pursued down Fifth Avenue by a posse led by his father. En route, they wind up in Macy’s department store. Coppola explains that he wanted to see what would happen when this “madness” hit Macy’s at 11:00 AM, with no one outside the film’s cast and crew having the remotest idea of what was transpiring. Three cameras were concealed in delivery carts and shopping bags. Coppola and Laszlo, as usual, filmed the scene with the natural light available, in this case a mixture of the fluorescent lights overhead and sunlight coming in through the windows. Kastner and his pursuers were running up and down the aisles, “and they started a riot,” Coppola remembers—“some kids started ripping Peter’s clothes off” (footage which did not make the final cut). “My only regret is we didn’t have thirty cameras to get everything down on film.”8
The chase ends when Barbara finally corners Bernard in a room where the department store mannequins are kept and clobbers him with the leg of a dummy. This shot is apparently a homage to one of Stanley Kubrick’s early films, Killer’s Kiss (1955), in which the hero slugs it out with the villain in a warehouse stored with department store mannequins.
Chown observes that Coppola photographed the movie in a rather showy fashion, with frenetic handheld camerawork during the chase in Macy’s and ostentatious dolly shots in the library as Bernard skates through the stacks. The freewheeling cinematography, he continues, is marked by the wild camera movement and gaudy colors reminiscent of TV commercials and, hence, draws attention to itself. Coppola, commenting on his style of cinematography in the picture, told me, “You’re a Big Boy Now is a flashy movie to some extent. I have since been more subtle than that. But flashy films do attract attention, and that was what I wanted to do when I was making my first film for a studio.” In fact, he has often thought of the movie as the first underground film ever made for a major Hollywood studio by a tyro moviemaker.
At times the flashy photography pays off, as when Bernard takes Amy on a date to a psychedelic disco in the Village where Barbara is appearing. Coppola’s canny camera captures the garish atmosphere, all dazzling lights and glittering decor. To top it off, gory scenes from Coppola’s own Dementia 13 are being projected on one of the walls just to add to the bizarre setting.
Barbara, a typical 1960s swinger dressed in a miniskirt and plastic boots, is gyrating to the music in a cage suspended from the ceiling. Bernard looks up at her adoringly, as if she were an inaccessible goddess on a pedestal. By the same token, Barbara looks down at Bernard like a goddess eyeing with disdain one of the mortals who worships her.
This scene incorporates some excellent visual imagery, some of which has just been described. In addition, there is the shot, shortly afterward, when Bernard kisses Amy while they are walking in Times Square. As they embrace Bernard fantasizes that a gigantic neon sign above them is spelling out “Barbara, you’re on my mind” in bright lights. Thus Coppola indicates visually that Bernard is preoccupied with Barbara, even while he is kissing Amy! Another fine visual symbol occurs when Bernard and Raef are flying a kite in Central Park, with Raef all the while advising Bernard to give up his dream of winning the unattainable Barbara. The kite gets caught in a tree, and Bernard cannot reach it when he tries to retrieve it—a metaphor for how a young man’s romantic dreams all too often elude his grasp.
Indeed, when Barbara finally invites Bernard to her apartment for a sexual escapade, the experience is an unqualified disaster. Barbara, who was seduced by a middle-aged therapist when she was a youngster, is a castrating female who despises men. Little wonder that Bernard fails to perform at the climax of the scene. When he expresses his shame to her, Barbara, the bitch-goddess, smirks with her usual condescension, “There is nothing wrong with you that a firing squad couldn’t fix.” As already suggested by Bernard’s embarrassed tour of the porno shops earlier, he is not satisfied by sex without love—which is all that Barbara can offer him, and he cannot respond to it. He subconsciously yearns for the kind of genuine love that Amy represents. So much for Barbara as Bernard’s dream girl.
At the film’s denouement Bernard is jailed for stealing the Gutenberg Bible. While he is behind bars he admits to a guard that he has been imprisoned by his domineering parents, who have caused him to be “filled with self-doubt, frustration, and perpetual guilt. I’ve been in my parents’ custody all my life. From now on I’m going to be in my own custody.” Significantly, it is Amy who bails Bernard out. She not only liberates him from prison but ultimately helps to free him from his parents’ control.
The picture ends with
the couple merrily romping through a pretzel factory (Bernard had earlier opined that what this country needs is a good five-cent pretzel). They are accompanied by the 1960s rock group the Lovin’ Spoonful singing, “Go on and take a bow, cause you’re a big boy now,” while a conveyor belt sends a cascade of nickel pretzels toward the camera.
You’re a Big Boy Now reflects Coppola’s theme, already enunciated in Dementia 13, that the family is a source of strife and emotional problems. He states, “I’m fascinated with the whole idea of family.” In his work, “it is a constant.”9 Indeed Big Boy is the first of his movies to explore a father-son relationship, a theme that would surface prominently in films like The Godfather.
Big Boy was taken seriously by the film community. It was chosen as the only official U.S. entry at the Cannes International Film Festival and gained Geraldine Page an Academy Award nomination. Still the picture merited a mixed bag of reviews, both at Cannes and in the American press. Some critics noticed positively that the movie is crisply paced and has a refreshing story that turns somersaults and zigzags off in unexpected directions. They conceded that it is hard not to warm to the director’s brash, invigorating style. As one reviewer put it, when the camera is capturing city life off the cuff, the picture has energy and charm. By contrast, the movie was criticized for its anarchic, “custard-pie plot” (a reference to the slapstick chase through Macy’s department store, with its resonance of the Keystone Cops’ silent comedies).
As for the acting, on the one hand, the supporting cast headed by Julie Harris, Geraldine Page, and Rip Torn, were complimented for giving their roles a dizzy spin. On the other hand, the naysayers pointed out that their performances at times came close to caricature, as when Margery Chanticleer or Miss Thing screeched at Bernard for chasing girls. It is true that the characterizations of some of the minor figures are somewhat superficial and even border on the grotesque, as certain critics maintained, but Bernard himself is drawn in some depth. At times he seems to be traveling a road without signposts in his journey toward maturity. He seems a feckless outsider, the sort of innocent whose luggage an airline is bound to lose. Kastner gave the most memorable performance in the picture as the harried young man.
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