"Riding in Cars With Boys," a Film currently in General Release, starring 
Drew Barrymore, is based on an autobiographical book by Beverly Donofrio who 
grew up the daughter of an Italian American Police Chief in a working-class 
neighborhood in Wallingford, Conn., in the 1960s, as a good girl surviving 
bad situations by believing "that which doesn't kill you makes you want to 
die,"  
  
"Riding in Cars" tells the story of Donofrio's teenage pregnancy, hasty 
marriage and years of struggling to keep things together financially and 
emotionally. (Barrymore plays her in the film.) When her husband, Ray Hasek, 
becomes a drug addict, Beverly leaves him and then raises her son, Jason, 
alone. She's hardly more than a child herself, and the story alternates 
between comedy and pathos.

Italian American Penny Marshall (La Verne of "LaVerne and Shirley"), and 
sister of prolific TV & Film Producer, Garry Marshall is the Director. 
Lorraine Bracco (Dr. Melfi) portrays Beverly's Mom. 
===================================================
DONOFRIO'S UNIQUE LIFE IS, AT LAST, A FILM

Los Angeles Times
By Ellen Baskin

October 19 2001

When Beverly Donofrio was growing up in a working-class neighborhood in 
Wallingford, Conn., in the 1960s, she would never have imagined that her life 
story would one day be "a major motion picture from Columbia Pictures 
starring Drew Barrymore." But that's what it says on the latest edition of 
her 1990 memoir, and as further proof, there's a glossy photo of Barrymore 
emblazoned on the cover.

"They picked it up when it was still a manuscript," recalls Donofrio of 
decade-long film industry interest in her book. The long and winding 
development road began at 20th Century Fox, which first optioned the 
material. At that time, Donofrio was living in New York, and she was flown to 
Los Angeles to meet writer-director-producer James L. Brooks ("Terms of 
Endearment," "As Good as It Gets"), who was attached to the project.

"We had this incredible meeting," she says on the phone from her home in San 
Miguel de Allende, Mexico. "It was a marathon talk, a conversation that 
continues to this day." For his part, Brooks says of Donofrio: "You don't 
meet many people in the course of your life who have lived an original life."

"Riding in Cars" tells the story of Donofrio's teenage pregnancy, hasty 
marriage and years of struggling to keep things together financially and 
emotionally. (Barrymore plays her in the film.) When her husband, Ray, 
becomes a drug addict, Beverly leaves him and then raises her son, Jason, 
alone. She's hardly more than a child herself, and the story alternates 
between comedy and pathos. By her own admission, Donofrio was never a 
candidate for mother-of-the-year accolades. And, according to reports, the 
drama depicted in the film was matched by much off-screen contention between 
Brooks and director Penny Marshall. But Donofrio says her experience on the 
film, which opens today, was positive.

"I had a blessed position," she asserts, belying more-often-heard tales of 
woe from writers who say their books were lacerated by Hollywood. "From the 
start, they've been so respectful and inclusive of me." And she's happy with 
the finished product. "It tells the heart of the truth that I told in my 
book," she declares. She is sorry, though, that no mention is made of her 
determination to go to college. "I would have liked to have seen that in the 
film, because to me that's the payoff to the story." Donofrio attended 
Wesleyan University and then received a master's in creative writing from 
Columbia.

When he left Fox and set up his production company, Gracie Films, at Sony, 
Brooks continued to shepherd "Riding in Cars," picking up the book's option 
after it expired and remaining as the film's producer. Brooks brought in 
screenwriter Morgan Upton Ward, who met at length with Donofrio. "When Morgan 
began to produce drafts, whenever they thought they were at a critical 
juncture, they'd give it to me and ask for input," Donofrio notes. "Jim liked 
to say, 'It's like going back to the mother's breast."'

Donofrio, 51, also spent a lot of time with Barrymore. "And Penny had me come 
to her house and watch the casting tapes," she adds. "We'd watch her home 
movies too and have lots of discussions because she had been a young mother 
herself."

In the film version of "Riding in Cars," Beverly and a now grown-up Jason go 
to see Ray, who has been absent from their lives for years, to have him sign 
a release for the publication of Beverly's book. This present-day framing 
device is not in the book, but it is based on a real-life occurrence. "I had 
to get the release signed for the movie," Donofrio remembers. "So I went off 
to find my ex-husband. But I didn't go with my son."

Brooks picks up the story: "Bev wrote me an e-mail about a day in her life 
when she saw her ex-husband about the film rights. And that became our story. 
When you adapt a book, you try to literally adapt it at first, and then a 
process takes over about what's possible and what's not. In this case, Bev's 
life continued to inform us."

"Riding in Cars" is about Beverly Donofrio, but it also tells the story of 
her only child. "I always come out as the hero," Jason Donofrio notes with 
amusement when asked how it feels to have his childhood on such public 
display. "So it's pretty cool."

But watching his life played out in the film provided a surprising discovery 
for Jason, now 33. "I never saw my father as a real person before the movie," 
he says of the man he met only once, when he was 11. "It really brought home 
to me that he was somebody who went through something really hard too, and it 
made him much more real to me." Ray died several years ago.

One strictly fictional element of the film involves a romance for Jason. "I 
was a little annoyed about that at first," he admits. "But I came to accept 
it. I had talked to Morgan before he started writing the script, so this was 
really an encapsulation of all of my relationships." In an unintentional 
"life imitates art" moment, Jason was married in August. He's currently 
working on his own memoir.

Now Beverly Donofrio is engaged to a man she met in Mexico and plans to marry 
him next year. "I think that Jason's getting married allowed me to finally 
fall in love," she observes. "Single parents of single children form 
something of a couple, especially if you're opposite sexed. It wasn't 
conscious, but it was almost like I was married to Jason for all those years."

And speaking of marriage, Beverly and Jason appear in "Riding in Cars"--as 
guests at Donofrio's unhappy wedding. "We're seated right behind Drew in the 
scene," Donofrio points out, "so whenever the camera is on her, we're in the 
shot."

Despite the provocative title shared by the book and film, "Riding in Cars 
With Boys" does not dwell much at all on sexual matters, although the book 
does include Donofrio's participation in the "free love" era of the late 
1960s and 1970s. "Riding in cars with boys is what got me in trouble," she 
says. "Because I got pregnant so young and so accidentally, sex was nothing 
about emotion or heart or love. It was peer pressure in the beginning, and 
then it was social pressure."

After all this time, Donofrio, who is in the early stages of writing a 
historical novel, is ready to finally put the brakes on "Riding in Cars."

"This whole movie process has been so long," she says. "And in a way [the 
part of her life covered in the book] had to still be alive, because I was 
constantly being tapped to go back there and remember and tell them more 
things. Now, everything that can possibly be done with this book is over. I'm 
just going to let it go and start the rest of my life." ========================================================
Movie Review 

"RIDING IN CARS WITH BOY'S"  GETS STUCK IN OVERDRIVE

Los Angeles Times
By Kenneth Turan
Times Film Critic

October 19 2001

"Riding in Cars With Boys" is a failed film that gives glimpses of the 
success that might have been. Buried under the miscalculations, the 
shamelessness, the off-putting and inappropriate broadness are sporadically 
visible souvenirs of a good project gone bad, hints of the unusual, 
bittersweet story that got away.

With Drew Barrymore starring as a good girl surviving bad situations by 
believing "that which doesn't kill you makes you want to die," "Riding in 
Cars With Boys" is based on a widely appreciated memoir by Beverly Donofrio. 
Screenwriter Morgan Upton Ward's adaptation interested several directors, 
with the assignment going to Penny Marshall. The results are not the best.

Certainly films like "Awakenings" and "A League of Their Own" have 
established Marshall as a crowd-pleaser, and at least one of her pictures, 
"Big," has been memorable. But her bent is for sticky sentiment and shameless 
comedy, for over-emphasizing emotions whenever possible. Subtlety and 
restraint are not in the vocabulary of someone who prefers to overdose 
audiences on cute kid shots, and the obviousness of her sensibility is not 
what's called for here. After a brief prologue of Beverly at age 11, "Riding 
in Cars" shifts back and forth between the adult Beverly of the 1980s, the 
mother of a grown son (Adam Garcia), and the teenage girl of two decades 
earlier. The youngster is a 15-year-old police chief's daughter growing up in 
Wallingford, Conn., in 1965 with the philosophy that "fun is what you bring 
with you."

Invariably boy crazy, Beverly goes to a big party with a crush on a handsome 
but stuck-up football player. She instead connects with an 18-year-old 
dropout named Ray Hasek (an excellent Steve Zahn), a goofy kid who's the 
first to tell you he's trouble from the wrong side of the tracks.

Much to the horror of straitlaced parents (played by James Woods and Lorraine 
Bracco) and the chagrin of best friend Fay Forrester (Brittany Murphy), 
Beverly ends up pregnant at 15 and forced into an unpromising marriage. Yes, 
Ray truly loves her, but as a feckless, substance-abusing simpleton, he's a 
poor match for a bright, ambitious young woman who dreams of a college 
education and a writing career. And then there is that child.

Beverly is a complicated, challenging character who ages 20 years in the 
course of the film and refuses to be fazed by life's low blows, so it's no 
surprise that Barrymore was eager to play her. But she has trouble looking 
convincingly 15 (what 26-year-old actress wouldn't?) and she hasn't had the 
help she should have with the more complex aspects of Beverly's tricky 
personality.

To start with, Beverly is made to look more severe and unattractive than 
necessary, so much so that it begins to feel like the film enjoys humiliating 
her. In fact, people who go to "Riding in Cars" based on the smiling, 
cheerful image of the star on the poster can consider themselves victims of 
misleading advertising.

And while it's understood that a striving teenage mother married to a drunken 
fool with the ambition of a slug is going to be miserable a lot of the time, 
Barrymore has not found an acceptable way to play that emotion. Her Beverly 
is too difficult, too much of a glum, seething-with-resentments, 
self-centered whiner to either engage our sympathy or do justice to the more 
dimensional character the real woman must have been.

It's rare to see as likable and capable a performer as Barrymore seem so much 
out of her element in a role. She may have gotten too much direction, or too 
little, but the result has left her uncertain and at sea in a way that makes 
us feel more empathy for her as an actress than we do for the plight of her 
character.

The difficulties Barrymore has parallel and likely stem from the problems the 
film has overall with its more painful moments. At home with the comedy, even 
if it is too broad, the director brings next to nothing to the serious 
scenes; they simply sit there on the screen, empty and forlorn. Only two 
actors manage to climb out of the wreckage: Zahn, who beautifully arouses our 
sympathy with his fine work as the overmatched Ray, and Murphy, invariably 
funny as soul mate Fay. Otherwise, "Riding In Cars With Boys" is a shipwreck 
that really didn't need to happen.

MPAA rating: PG-13, for thematic elements, drug and sexual content. 
Times guidelines: much talk about drugs and sex.

'Riding in Cars With Boys'

Drew Barrymore: Beverly Donofrio
Steve Zahn: Ray Hasek
Brittany Murphy: Fay Forrester
Adam Garcia: Jason
Lorraine Bracco: Mrs. Donofrio
James Woods: Mr. Donofrio

A Gracie Films production, released by Columbia Pictures. Director Penny 
Marshall. Producers James L. Brooks, Julie Ansell, Richard Sakai, Sara 
Colleton, Laurence Mark. Executive producers Morgan Upton Ward, Bridget 
Johnson. Screenplay Morgan Upton Ward, based on the book by Beverly Donofrio. 
Cinematographer Miroslav Ondricek. Editors Richard Marks, Lawrence Jordan. 
Costumes Cynthia Flynt. Music Hans Zimmer, Heitor Pereira. Production design 
Bill Groom. Art director Teresa Carriker-Thayer. Set decorator George 
DeTitta. Running time: 2 hours, 2 minutes.