Baby Boom (1987)

Diane Keaton is JC Wiatt, the quintessential Ms. magazine career girl – married to her job, working twelve hours a day, making six figures a year, with no time for human emotions.

Even her lovemaking with roommate-boyfriend Steven Buchner (Harold Ramis) is timed to never take up more than four minutes of her valuable time.

Then the bottom falls out. The brainy executive inherits a baby from a distant relative she hasn’t seen since 1954 and she finds herself up to her stock market reports in baby food and diapers, trying to find what she calls “quality time” to pop a Valium and wash it down with a baby bottle.

Her boss says “You can’t have it all” but the rest of this delectable comedy says you can, as the frustrated JC hangs up the corporate ladder and moves to a 200-year old farm in Vermont where she’s as out of place as Goldie Hawn in Private Benjamin (1980).

The first half of Baby Boom is about the struggles of a lady yuppie to scratch her way to the executive washroom. The second half is about the struggles of a displaced city mouse scheming to get back to town.

Broke, despondent, and hysterical, all she’s got is a cupboard full of applesauce from a hard winter.

The way she turns her predicament into a commercial bonanza by marketing designer baby products out of her own mail-order kitchen makes this one of the wittiest, most intelligent, and most endearing comedies in years.

Diane Keaton gives the richest, funniest performance of her life in a tour de force of neurotic, frazzled timing that proves why she’s a real star.

Kate Jackson starred in a short-lived TV version for NBC in 1988/1989.

JC Wiatt
Diane Keaton
Steven Buchner
Harold Ramis
Dr Jeff Cooper
Sam Shepard
Fritz Curtis
Sam Wanamaker
Ken Arrenberg
James Spader
Hughes Larrabee
Pat Hingle
Verne Boone
Britt Leach
Charlotte Elkman
Mary Gross
Robin
Kim Sebastian
Eve
Victoria Jackson
Elizabeth Wiatt
Kristina Kennedy
Michelle Kennedy
Narrator
Linda Ellerbee

Director
Charles Shyer