Inflating a Dog (The Screenplay)

Eric Kraft

Adapted for the screen from the eighth volume of Peter Leroy’s memoirs, in which Peter struggles to win the affections of the toothsome Patti Fiorenza while keeping both his mother’s hopes and his mother’s boat afloat.

Ella Leroy dreams of escaping the dreary routine of her 1950s wife-and-mom life. Without telling her husband, she enlists her son Peter and his locally-notorious girlfriend Patti in a scheme to buy a run-down clamboat and re-invent it as an elegant cruising vessel for summer people in the bayside town of Babbington, Long Island.  But after they’ve bought the boat, Peter discovers that it is slowly sinking.