Irreconcilable Differences is a 1984 American comedy-drama film starring Ryan O'Neal, Shelley Long, and Drew Barrymore.

At a truck stop in Indiana on the night of January 20th, 1973, film professor Albert Brodsky is hitchhiking across the country, where he gets picked up by Lucy van Patten, a woman who has ambitions of writing books, particularly for children, but her fiancé "Bink", a gruff Navy man, represses her, and she is depressed about being relegated to the life of a military wife.

When Albert sees a young woman named Blake Chandler working at a hot dog stand, he takes her home and casts her in his next film, which becomes a moderate success.

Atlanta becomes an embarrassing box-office bomb, costing Albert any assignments in Hollywood and causing Blake to desert him.

Meanwhile, Lucy's novel becomes a runaway success, allowing her to buy and move into Albert's former mansion, and she begins to morph into a diva.

Irreconcilable Differences was inspired by the divorce between director Peter Bogdanovich and his first wife, producer Polly Platt, after he left her for actress Cybill Shepherd (whose proxy in the film is played by Sharon Stone).

They claimed much of the material was based on their own romantic relationship - when they made it they had been together for a number of years and shared a child.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times did not like the title and did not think the film was very promising at first, "The plot drifts dangerously toward a series of stagy confrontations, but avoids the obvious: This movie has been written with so much wit and imagination that even obligatory scenes have a certain freshness and style."

[7] Janet Maslin of The New York Times praised the talents of the movie's adult leads, but thought Drew Barrymore was too self-consciously cute.