Starring: Elizabeth Hartman, Peter Kastner, Geraldine Page, Rip Torn, Karen Black, Tony Bill, Julie Harris

Come swoon with The Deuce on a riotously rollicking romp around 1966-ish NYC for a fun-filled amour-fou Valentine to the City of Dreams and Dreamers – where the follies and foibles of frisky youth are free to be… until that fateful day when (metaphorically speaking): YOU’RE A BIG BOY NOW!!

Rollerskating circulation-stackboy at NYPL ‘s Main Branch – bespectacled  übernerd “Bernard Chanticleer” – leaves his overbearing/overprotective/over-the-bridge parents’ Great Neck nest to breathe deep of the (then more breathable) air of Fun City…  and fumble his way along to “finding himself” while (and more desperately) hoping to find love amongst the fumbling… tubby-ish bumbling boy meets brazen Bad Girl… bumbling boy meets boring-ish Good Girl… bumbling boy bumbles both! Fumbling and tubby-ishly bumbling his way amongst Discotheque dancers! Experimental theater in the Village! Times Square peep-galleries! Boardinghouse-bound chickens! An albino hypnotherapist! With real-life husband and wife Rip Torn and Geraldine Page as the titular twerp’s taciturn parents –  and set to a swinging stick-in-your-head soundtrack courtesy of Jonathan Sebastian & The Lovin’ Spoonful (netting them a bona fide Billboard hit with “Darling Be Home Soon”)… Having a melange of sensibilities ranging from the screwbally comedies of the past to the then-hipness of French New Wave, Coppola’s “calling card” film is both a referential frenetic reverie to the cliched growing-pain-hurdles on the way to “manhood” wrought gloriously ridiculous, and a fever-dream love-letter to the kaleidoscopic crazy-quilt cacophony of NYC!!

After a time under the tutelage of Roger Corman, for whom he wrote and directed DEMENTIA 13 and did other odds-and-ends duties – and before graduating from UCLA – the then 27-year-old Coppola was given “carte-blanche” for BIG BOY – his first solo feature AND his MFA thesis… the filming of which brought the Queens-bred kid back East where BIG BOY was a Big Deal here in The City… garnering constant updates in local NYC newspapers of its production progress and location shooting before having its big upper-brow premiere (’60s-swingingly heralded in ads as “Happens Today”) at 59th & 3rd Ave’s Baronet Theatre before bouncing over to Times Square’s Selwyn… So… is it a date?? XOXO from The Deuce!