Penny Marshall: A Penny for your Thoughts

Which is not to say that Marshall isn't gifted. Her strong suit, it seems to me, is the ability to coax honest and consistent performances from her actors. Robin Williams's portrayal of the doctor in Awakenings is especially noteworthy because the writer chose to make him pathologically shy, which had to have been a stretch for the extroverted Williams. (There were rumors of hot tempers and even a punch-out on the set. De Niro reportedly had his nose broken. When I ask Marshall about this, she says that during a fight scene with Robin, Bobby accidentally punched himself in the nose.) Whatever really went down, it didn't hurt any of the performances.

Did Marshall have any trouble dealing with movie stars and their entourages? "I don't work with actors who have entourages," she says. Her relationships with both De Niro and Williams go way back. "Robin worked with my brother on 'Mork and Mindy.' Bobby I've known for years. I once ran into him on the beach in Hawaii. His baby was strapped to his chest. I was afraid he was going to dribble soup on the kid." Still, Marshall was thrilled to be directing De Niro. "I went over to him on the set and started to tell him that, and he said, 'Stop. Don't do that' I said it anyway, but I assured him I wouldn't do it again."

The first cut of Awakenings came in at over four hours. "I showed it to [Columbia chief] Frank Price, and I said, 'I know I went over, time-wise and budget-wise. Can you bear with me?' He was terrific."

The second cut came in at over three hours. "I showed it to Garry. There was no music so we hummed the soundtrack. There were about 15 endings. He kept saying, 'I think it's over here.' " With the help of her editors, Marshall cut it down to 2:18. "I called Frank Price again and said, 'I'd like to get it under 2, can you give me a week?' "

Like the patients in Awakenings, Marshall has mixed feelings about her transformation from baby to grown-up. "Directing is such a hard, horrible job," she says. "I'm not that secure, and when someone questions me, it's rough. My first response is to think, this is the actors' movie, and I'm ruining it. On the other hand, you want the actors (and your friends who see the picture) to be honest. You're desperate for feedback. You need to be told the truth. I used to call Jim Brooks in the middle of the night and say, 'Jim, I don't know...' "

Indeed, many of Marshall's conversations occur in the middle of the night. She suffers from insomnia. "It started when I was a child. I was afraid if I went to sleep, I'd miss something. Later, when I was working, I used to panic when I couldn't fall asleep. But after a while I began to accept it. I'd just get up and put a movie in the VCR. Some of those -movies put me to sleep in five minutes."

In a town where parents regularly compete with kids and some siblings only see each other at funerals, Marshall stays close to her family. I ask her how she and Garry have gotten along so well. "Probably because our parents didn't speak to each other." They didn't divorce, but presumably their incompatibility forced the children to rely on one another. The third Marshall, a sister who is between Garry and Penny, is a television producer. "She was going to work with Garry on Pretty Woman, but the pace of features was too slow for her." I get the feeling Marshall thinks I'm slow when I ask her the inevitable question about nepotism. "I don't understand why you wouldn't help your family," she answers.

Garry and Penny read each other's scripts, view each other's rough cuts, and commiserate. "Garry called me the other day, and said, 'Every day, as a director, you make at least 100 decisions. You know ten of them are wrong. So you come home every night feeling like a failure.' Never mind that 90 were right," Marshall says, "you still have this sense of failure. But you just gotta keep going. I don't know if I'm getting better or not. "You think you got it down. You say, I'm not going to make those mistakes, and then a whole different set of problems comes at you. I try not to be in too much pain."

"What do you do for fun?" I ask.

"I haven't had much fun lately," Penny Marshall says. "Carrie Fisher and I were talking about going to Fiji--but that was before Iraq invaded Kuwait. I went to a camp reunion a few weeks ago. I got all the crap out of the way, and went right back to being a kid. It was great feeling the mushy bottom of the lake again."

___________

Jeffrey Lantos is a frequent contributor to Movieline; he profiled Adrian Lyne in our November issue.

Pages: 1 2 3