Dana Barron as Janine Yeardley Smith as Cathleen Production Development 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. He was denied unemployment benefits because his nighttime screenwriting was considered potentially lucrative employment, so he filed for bankruptcy, borrowed money and headed for India. 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. Carliner gave Dinner $10,000 to enable him to travel with Miss Lonelyhearts to the Cannes Film Festival, figuring it was "bread cast upon the water". Dinner became attached to direct Catholic Boys. On the plane to Cannes, Dinner met Maurice Singer, chief of the new theatrical film division of Home Box Office. 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." Casting 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. What happens in Los Angeles is that even the good ones come off like Valley 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