My Mother Was Nuts

  I kept the cameras rolling after she offered to drive him home and they turned and walked away. Later, we wild-lined in that same scene when she muses, “Ten years. Who knows? Maybe you should hold on to my number.” I was always thinking ahead. Maybe there was hope. Then she drives him home, they wave, and you hear scrape, scrape, scrape, and there’s David Moscow in the suit and the shoes. No special effects. It was all done in cuts.

  Someone at the studio wanted Susan/Elizabeth to go back with him. I said no. Who says she’s from the same neighborhood? Is his mother going to allow her to sleep in the house? Sorry. But in the end you heard how happy Josh’s mother was that he’d returned. Somebody had to be happy at the end.

  I watched the editor’s assemblage in Los Angeles with a few trusted people, including my brother, Jim Brooks, and Randy Newman, plus the editor, Barry Malkin, and Howard Shore, who I had hired to write the score. Barry had used jazz tunes for temp music, but it changed the feel of the picture from what I had imagined, and I was a little sour when the lights came back on. I turned to Howard and said, “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

  Howard saw past my reaction and insisted he knew what to do, and he turned out to be right. In the meantime, Randy introduced me to Battle Davis, a talented music editor who redid the temp music, and it worked, allowing me to see the movie the way I had imagined. Battle had a dry sense of humor like Randy’s and became one of my dear friends.

  Soon I showed another cut to my sister. She gave me comments and a few more scenes came out. After several more cuts, we started showing the movie to audiences. Their reactions were good and confirmed most of my thoughts. Unfortunately, I wasn’t satisfied with the footage at the end when Josh goes back to look at his old neighborhood. Seeing Tom in a rain coat staring wistfully at children playing made me think of a pedophile. It didn’t work for me. Nor did Howard’s music in that part.

  I was responsible for the problem, and I tried to fix it by putting in Artie’s very pretty rendition of Percy Sledge’s classic “When a Man Loves a Woman.” Artie had a sweet voice, and I thought that and the lyrics made up for whatever was missing. But the next screening we had of the movie turned into a disaster when the film caught on fire. The screen filled with the orange flair of celluloid frying. I heard the three editors there—Barry, Richie (Marks), and George Bowers—exclaim, “Fuck,” and then run to the booth. It kills everyone to see that happen.

  They got it back up and the movie finished. Everyone loved it. But Jim and I had a fight over the music. He thought I had used Artie’s song because I had dated him, and I argued that it was there solely because it fit the story. We got a little heated and personal before arriving at the real issue, which was whether there should be a song with lyrics or no lyrics. Eventually, I cut in music from David Pomeranz’s pretty song “It’s In Every One of Us.” It swelled at the right time.

  I had many similar conversations with Howard about the music he composed. For some reason, it was tough to get it right in each scene. But those are only some of the thousands of little details that you have to get right if a movie is going to work.

  Between the long hours and the endless decisions that had to be made, I had no other life. It’s either return calls or eat and take a bath. I was too tired for both. That’s why I always say directing is a dog’s life.

  In June, the studio threw a carnival-themed premiere party on the Fox lot and that was followed by a wide opening. The reviews were overwhelmingly positive, but I didn’t bother to read them. What was the point? Some people liked me or it was all about Tom or this or that. By then, it was out of my hands and all I wanted to do was get the fuck away.

  I planned a trip to Moscow with Allyn Stewart, a friend from Warner Brothers, and on the way I stopped in New York, where Greenhut persuaded me to sneak into a theater on Broadway with him. I stayed a couple minutes. I got too nervous. “I need to get out of the country where no one knows who the fuck I am,” I said as we caught a cab.

  A week later, I was in Red Square at midnight and spotted a kid wearing a Big T-shirt. It turned out the executive in charge of foreign distribution for the studio was there with his family. Otherwise, I spent a blissful two weeks seeing the sights without anyone staring back at me. We were at the American Embassy meeting with Russian filmmakers on the day when a U.S. warship mistakenly shot down Iran Air Flight 655, thinking it was a fighter jet, and there were momentary fears of a response that could involve the Russians. It made for some tense hours. But I supposed we were at the safest place in Moscow.

  From there, we went to Leningrad. After a few days there, I cut short the rest of our trip, including a couple days in Georgia. I was tired of speaking through an interpreter and wanted to get back to people who spoke English. I had learned Russian cab drivers will stop immediately if they see you waving a pack of Marlboros, and so I got us to the airport pretty quick.

  They served caviar on the plane ride back to London. For some reason, there were a lot of American students in first class who asked for my autograph. I traded them a signature for their caviar and had a filling flight. Once in London, I saw my hysterically funny friend Nona Summers and hung out with Jack Nicholson, who was there getting fitted to play the Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman. Jack was very appreciative when I shared the fifty-thousand-proof vodka I had brought back from Russia.

  By the time I returned to L.A., Big was doing steady business. It wasn’t number one, but it had legs. Tom and his wife, Rita Wilson, and I took the film to festivals in Deauville and Venice. The box office kept climbing. Eventually the total hit $100 million. My brother and others told me that it made me the first woman to direct a movie that reached and surpassed that magic milestone.

  I was very happy for its success, but the box office was only one of the reasons and not even the most important. This may sound sappy, but I liked that the movie made people feel good. My mother had believed it was important to know what it was like to entertain people, and she was right. It felt great.

  CHAPTER 38

  A Medical Mystery Tour

  Penny on the set of 1989’s Awakenings with Robin Williams and a patient

  “Awakenings” © 1990 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Columbia Pictures.

  AFTER BECOMING A $100 million director, I was given a little office at Fox, and it was there that someone gave me a documentary on the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, a professional league of women ballplayers that started in 1943 as a diversion while men were in the service and lasted until 1954. I had never heard of the league before, and I was a sports fan. The studio suggested it could be a made-for-TV movie, but after watching the documentary I thought it was worthy of a feature film and set about getting a script.

  My first instinct was to find a woman to write it, but none of the female writers I approached wanted to do it. Monica Johnson might have been good if she had known anything about sports. She was living in my house, having replaced Michael O’Donoghue and Louise Lasser. When she moved in, she brought her ex-boyfriend Greg’s ashes. Greg, my assistant’s brother, had overdosed on drugs. Technically, I guess she and Greg were still living together at my house. She would set his box on the table at dinner.

  I had a group of friends who came over at night pretty regularly. They called themselves “Girls on Wheels” and included Lorne’s now ex-wife Susan Forristal, Becky Johnson, Nona Summers, Lyndall Hobbs, and Carol Caldwell. They drove me around since I hadn’t gotten behind the wheel of a car in years. They were a worldly group, but the ashes were too much even for them. I told Monica that she couldn’t bring the box to the table anymore.

  “But it’s Greg,” she said, her soft voice sounding wounded.

  “No!” I said firmly. “Greg can’t come to dinner no more.”

  All that’s a roundabout way of saying I finally asked Lowell Ganz to write the so-called “girls baseball” movie. Lowell and his writing partner, Babaloo Mandel, whose real name wa
s Mark, were red hot. They had written Night Shift, Splash, Spies Like Us, and had recently turned in the script for Steve Martin’s hit, Parenthood. They liked the idea and saw the same potential in the documentary. Even though they wrote guys better than girls, I had confidence in them.

  But they took longer than I anticipated. As they wrote, I turned my attention instead to Awakenings, a script based on a 1973 memoir by Dr. Oliver Sacks, then a young British neurologist working in the Bronx, who had used the drug L-dopa to wake up patients who had been catatonic for decades. I don’t remember how it got in front of me. It was a dead project at the studio, gathering dust. Producers Walter Parkes and Lawrence Lasker were attached, and the screenplay was from A-list writer Steve Zaillian. Everyone in the world had looked at it and passed—I think because the studio had fixated on turning it into a love story.

  But I saw it as a medical mystery. I thought of my mother in her final years when she knew nothing and didn’t respond to anything I said. I wondered if she could still hear me. I also liked that this story was about doctors treating sick people as human beings deserving of care and compassion even though they were ill.

  I immediately thought of De Niro for the role of Dr. Sacks. I owed Bobby for giving me validity on Big. I went to him and explained that I wanted him to play the doctor. He was quirky and withdrawn. I saw the fit. But Bobby said, “No, I want the glitz.” I understood. So then I had to find someone who would give me the energy the picture would need. As great as Bobby is, he’s a solitary figure and self-contained, except with Marty. They are always in a Winnebago, making phone calls.

  In the meantime, it was New Year’s. After celebrating at the Hotel Bel-Air with Jim and Ed Weinberger, Ted Bessell, and their wives and others, I checked into the Pritikin Longevity Center in Santa Monica. This was my second or third year going there for two weeks in January to get healthy and clean and stop smoking. It was cheaper than the Canyon Ranch in Arizona, where I had gone a few times with Carrie, who would sneak in food and defeat the point of being there.

  The food at Pritikin was much worse than at Canyon Ranch. It was all roughage, and dry. I ate jicama like crazy. I happen to like jicama so that was okay. But everything there gave you terrible gas. I was thinking about that because I had a meeting with Robert Redford about Awakenings. He had a place in Malibu and we arranged to meet there and walk and talk on the beach. But I was concerned about being around Robert Redford when I had a chronic flatulence issue.

  I asked my friend Carol Caldwell to come over and take a practice walk with me on the beach. “All I do here is fart,” I explained. “I sound like a duck. I want to know if I’m toward the water and he’s up, can he hear?” It turned out he couldn’t, nor did he work out for the movie.

  Before my two weeks at Pritikin were up, Barry Diller called. Now, I wasn’t taking phone calls while I was at the Center because I light up a cigarette as soon as the phone rings. It’s an automatic thing with me. But I said, “Hi Barry, talk fast because I’m on the phone and I’m trying not to smoke.”

  “A friend of mine named Ronald Perelman is the head of Revlon and very wealthy—”

  “Talk faster,” I interrupted.

  “He wants you to shoot a Revlon commercial campaign,” he said.

  “Okay, send me the stuff,” I said. “Fax it or send it. I can’t talk because I’m trying not to smoke.”

  A couple weeks after leaving Pritikin, I went to New York and met with Ronald, who I liked very much and who would become one of my dearest friends. But then it was business. I wasn’t smoking and was still eating jicama. He and his marketing people explained they wanted to do a campaign with famous people answering the question: What makes a woman unforgettable? I returned to L.A., and they had a casting person and some marketing people who had certain names in mind, which was fine. But I also went through my phone book and shot Carrie, Sandra Bernhard, Harry Dean Stanton, Little Richard, and the Pointer Sisters, among others.

  I went to meet Gregory Peck at his house. He had a three-legged dog, and we were told not to mention that the dog only had three legs. At his house, my assistant Jon-Michael and I saw a sign on the gate that said Beware of Dog. We had to drive around the block a couple times before we stopped laughing. Once we were inside, Gregory was wonderful. He told stories about old Hollywood and working with John Huston and the cowboy movies he did. The casting girl arrived late and during the first break in conversation immediately said, “Mr. Peck, what happened to your dog?”

  I guess she didn’t get the memo. Gregory skipped over it so I never found out what had happened to the dog, either. He was nice. I also used former Los Angeles Lakers coach Pat Riley and San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana. I tossed Joe a football to hold, to make him more comfortable. Here, play with something while you talk. Lauren Bacall was a pro. Grace Jones kept us waiting until I finally yelled, “If you want to do this, you must come out now. The crew is leaving!” Tony Curtis needed help.

  “What makes a woman unforgettable?” I asked from behind the camera.

  “Her smile,” he said.

  “Say it like you like her smile,” I said.

  We did another take:

  Me: “What makes a woman unforgettable?”

  Tony: “Like her smile.”

  So not everyone made it into the final cut of the commercials. Also, we didn’t need as many people as we shot. They premiered on the Academy Awards. The New York Times noted the irony: “Penny Marshall, whose direction of the film Big was ignored by the Motion Picture Academy despite the movie’s nomination for best picture, directed Revlon’s spots.” I watched the awards show at Jerry and Joanne Belson’s house, but covered my eyes during the commercials. They weren’t bad. I was just modest around my family and friends.

  In the meantime, Barry Diller did not share my enthusiasm for Awakenings. Having Bobby De Niro and a script by Steve Zaillian didn’t change his opinion. Without Barry’s backing, the project was still dead at Fox. But I still wanted to make this movie. I met with Barry about taking it to another studio, even if there was another actor in it. The business term for that is “change of elements,” but I didn’t know that. I simply said, “Can I take it somewhere else? And if I do, are you going to change your mind?”

  Barry gave me his blessing to shop it elsewhere. I called Dawn Steel, one of the most impressive people in the business. Only the second woman to head a film studio, Dawn was president of Columbia Pictures. She had brownish-red hair, a warm smile, and eyes that took in everything. She was at Columbia during a tumultuous time, and even then she managed to gain a reputation for supporting filmmakers, boosting confidence, and championing women.

  I met with Dawn in a conference room full of studio executives. She and I were the only women in the room. I pitched the script and my vision, which included Bobby. I was halfway through my pitch when Dawn excused herself to go to the bathroom and told me to follow her.

  “Don’t trust any of these guys,” she said when we were alone. “They will fuck you over.”

  “Do you want to do it?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Are you going to be here still while I make it?” I asked, knowing studio heads changed every two and a half minutes. “Will you be here when I finish it?”

  “I hope so,” she said.

  She wasn’t. But she green-lit the film. Then I went after Robin Williams, who I had briefly spoken to about playing Dr. Sacks. I had watched Dead Poets Society and known him since my brother created Mork & Mindy. Ronny and I had actually brought Robin to my brother’s attention. I called Peter Weir, who had directed Dead Poets, and asked how Robin was to work with.

  “He’ll do anything you want,” he said.

  Robin had costarred with Steve Martin in a production of Waiting for Godot that Mike Nichols did at Lincoln Center, and through various sources I’d heard his soon-to-be wife, Marcia Garces, had been giving notes. Okay, I thought, as long as he wasn’t the problem, I could deal with her.


  I told Bobby to watch Dead Poets. I said, forget the trailer. It’s the one scene where Robin broke character. Just watch the movie. He did, and he agreed that Robin was the right guy for the role. When I spoke again with Robin, he had one concern—that Bobby would blow him off the screen. I said, “Look, it’s my job to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  I arranged for them to meet. I took Bobby to Robin and Marcia’s hotel. I knew Marcia was going to try to sit in on the meeting and worked out a plan with Bobby to keep her out. “I’ll just say you’re shy,” I said, and that worked. The three of us had a productive, positive talk about the movie, their characters, and personal stuff, and I walked out with my two leads in place.

  Then I met the real Oliver Sacks. We got together at the Botanical Gardens, his daily lunch spot. It was near Beth Abraham Hospital where he worked, in the Bronx. The food was terrible, but he was the fascinating, quirky character (he rode a motorcycle, misplaced his keys) I had come to know from reading the script and his book, as well as from talking about him with my therapist, who happened to have gone to school with him. He promised to be available on the set as often as I needed.

  Production was about to begin on Awakenings when Fox green-lit A League of Their Own. Lowell and Babaloo had handed in their script and Joe Roth, who was running Fox that day (a minute earlier it had been Scott Rudin and Larry Gordon), wanted to do it. I wanted to do it, too, but I was about to leave for New York. We hired David Anspaugh to direct. We thought he would get to the heart of it, as he’d done on Hoosiers. I didn’t think he’d get the comedy, but to me the heart was more important.

  I moved to New York and began work in Brooklyn during one of the darkest, coldest winters ever. My friend Miloš Foreman introduced me to Miroslav Ondříček, the brilliant Czech who had worked on Amadeus and Ragtime, as well as The World According to Garp and Silkwood.

  I adored Miroslav from the start. I could look in his eyes and know exactly what he thought, and if he didn’t like a shot he walked in front of the camera. But his thick accent was impenetrable. I couldn’t understand a single word he said. Miloš said he couldn’t either—and he was Czech.