Filmmaker Peter Farrelly recalls that when he was a Rhode Island teenager in the mid-1970s, no music affected him as deeply as early Bruce Springsteen. "It was the one good thing we had," he says almost reverently. So even now he winces at what lay ahead.

"Disco was just beginning," says the co-creator of last year's "There's Something About Mary," "but guys were hanging on to that '60s long-hair thing. I remember feeling stuck in the middle. I had hair halfway down my back. All of a sudden everybody was going to discos and there'd be guys with the 90-mile-an-hour look doing these dances. . . . It was a different world suddenly."

Disco is history, Springsteen's got the band back together and Farrelly somehow survived the '70s ("not exactly my favorite decade"). He and his brother, Bobby, have gone on to build what has become a skyrocketing career making comedies like "Dumb and Dumber," "Kingpin," the aforementioned "Mary" and next year's "Me, Myself and Irene," with Jim Carrey.

And now the Farrellys have turned Peter's semi-autobiographical novel, published in 1988, into a movie with the same name, "Outside Providence." Directed by fellow Rhode Islander Michael Corrente ("I think he liked my book better than I did," said Farrelly), it follows a pot-smoking Pawtucket teenager who gets shipped off to prep school. The coming-of-age film, humorous but with dramatic themes and relationships not found in other Farrelly brothers movies, marks the first time the two are producing and not directing. Corrente is co-writer with the Farrellys and co-producer.

In "Outside Providence," Farrelly--a corduroy guy then, no jeans--wanted to capture realistically the Rhode Island of his youth and the transition after President Nixon's resignation, away, he said, from the feeling of hope and change experienced through the '60s toward a growing apathy in the '70s.

The film's fictional story, set in working-class Pawtucket in 1974-75, nevertheless draws from adolescent experiences of the three Rhode Islanders. The bell-bottoms and black-light posters are there, as are Steppenwolf and Steely Dan, but Corrente said he worked closely with production and costume designers to avoid campy stereotypes found in many 1970s movies. "We wanted it to be real, like the haircuts, without everybody having the huge Afros," Farrelly said.

And this isn't a change for the Farrellys, he says. "It's Michael's movie. He edited it. He shot it. He co-wrote it with us."