Heaven Help Us

Heaven Help Us (1985)

If God had wanted them to be angels, He would have given them wings!

Sixteen-year-old Michael Dunn arrives at St. Basil's Catholic Boys School in Brooklyn circa 1965. There, he befriends all of the misfits in his class as they collide with the repressive faculty and discover the opposite sex as they come of age.

Date of release
1985-02-08
TMDB
6.4 / 10 (80)
Runtime
1h 44m
Genres
Comedy, Drama, Romance
Director
Michael Dinner

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: New York City

Heaven Help Us is a 1985 American comedy-drama film directed by Michael Dinner. It stars Andrew McCarthy, Mary Stuart Masterson, Kevin Dillon, Malcolm Danare, Patrick Dempsey and Stephen Geoffreys as a group of Brooklyn teenagers, with Jay Patterson, Wallace Shawn, John Heard and Donald Sutherland as the teachers and administrators at the private Catholic school the boys attend in the 1960s.

Production

The story was originally written in 1978 as a masters thesis by Charles Purpura, a student at NYU, who had attended Catholic boys' schools. An NYU teacher showed the script, then titled Catholic Boys, to producer Dan Wigutow, who tried unsuccessfully to interest production companies in it. Purpura dropped out of NYU and was fired from his job at a lithography shop for union organizing.

The script was read by producer Mark Carliner, who wanted to finance further work on it. Wigutow had to contact Purpura in India via telegram. The writer began doing further drafts. Carliner then met Michael Dinner, a former recording artist who had just made a film at the American Film Institute, a version of Nathaniel West's Miss Lonelyhearts which had aired on American Playhouse.

On the plane to Cannes, Dinner met Maurice Singer, chief of HBO Films, the new theatrical film division of HBO. By the time the plane landed in Europe, Singer had agreed to finance Catholic Boys. Tri-Star came on to distribute. Dinner said "When you're a new director you hear from a lot of people that you're a genius but it doesn't mean very much. I was happy to be getting any firm assignment."

Dinner said "I came into this very idealistically, wanting to discover eight brand new faces who could play 16 and 17 year olds. But it didn't work out that way." He spent four months looking for actors around the country, including Boston and Philadelphia, but ended up casting them all out of New York via their agents. "What happens here is that you stumble on kids with some stage experience who also seem natural as New York kids.

Mary Stuart Masterson was cast after Dinner saw a tape she had made at the Sundance Institute, where Masterson had spent two summers in an acting company. Masterson was cast while the film began production, and she would rehearse on weekends with Dinner and Andrew McCarthy.

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