My Mother Was Nuts (27 page)

It turned out what I thought was an unusually long and heavy period was something else. After a brief exam, the doctor informed me that I’d actually had a miscarriage earlier. I was stunned. I had no
idea that I was pregnant. Nor did I know who the father was. I supposed it could have been one of several guys, though I wasn’t sure. I’d been on location for a while and it’s easier to not worry about names. I know that sounds irresponsible, but I always took the proper precautions—or so I thought.

The doctor cauterized me and told me to rest for the next day or two. I turned down his prescription for a pain medication, explaining I was allergic. Then I had Tim take me back to the set, where I finished directing the scene while lying on the floor. I don’t know if I was tough or stupid, but those who’d worked with me before knew I didn’t stop for nothing.

Jim Brooks was in Washington, D.C., making
Broadcast News
, and he watched my footage and sent notes and suggestions. Sometimes I appreciated his input, and other times it seemed he was questioning my decisions. I was like, “Go do your own movie. You aren’t here to know the circumstances.”

As a result of Jim’s comments, I reshot about ten scenes, though the film’s memorable scene of Tom and Robert Loggia, who played Josh’s boss, dancing on giant piano keys wasn’t one of them. I handled that on one of the two days we shot inside FAO Schwarz, the landmark toy store on New York City’s 5th Avenue. I had seen the piano months earlier, but it featured fewer keys than the one we used in the film, and the sounds that came out when you stepped on them didn’t correspond to actual notes.

I found the piano’s inventor and said I needed a version that was practical enough to play “Heart and Soul” and “Chopsticks.” The first song was in the script; however, I knew enough about playing the piano to think that the second one would be better visually. I also needed the keyboard made longer—long enough for two people to dance on it.

As we waited for him to build it, I had cardboard facsimiles of the keyboard made and sent one to Robert, who was in France, and one to Tom, so they could practice. He rehearsed with intensity, and it made me laugh.

We shot that scene from numerous angles. Greenhut hocked me to use dance doubles. I repeatedly said no. If I could do it—and I did do it—Tom and Robert could, too. What I should have used was a click track, which keeps the actors in the same tempo. It would have made life a lot easier for my poor editor, Barry Malkin. But each take was slightly different. In the end, though, Tom and Robert were happy with the way it came out, and so was I.

After we finished, Tom asked me where to go on vacation with his then-girlfriend, Rita Wilson. I suggested St. Bart’s. They went there and he proposed to her at Maya’s, my friend’s restaurant. They got married a few months later in a big Greek wedding, which I attended, and the rest is one of Hollywood’s happiest marriages.

Big
was an education. The scene when Tom and Elizabeth (Susan) are in the back of the limo after the Christmas party is an example of where I screwed myself because I didn’t know shit. Someone convinced me that we could carry it on the back of a flatbed and shoot into it, which we did. But the way it was configured only let us shoot toward the back of the limo, and all the good stuff and gadgets, like the TV, were in the front part. What was Tom going to play with? He found the windows, the locks, the radio and the phone, but my lack of knowledge had limited my options. I learned from those mistakes.

For as much as I shot, I was always asking, “Do we really need this scene?” If I said no, then I would move on. But I liked making things up. Take the scene when Josh shows Susan his apartment. That was crucial to the story’s progression. He is still innocent and oblivious to what’s on her mind as they get out of the limo and go upstairs. He’s twelve and she’s older. Even when she says flat out she wants to spend the night, he thinks she wants to have a sleepover.

He invites her to jump on his trampoline. It’s fun. She didn’t know how to have fun yet. Again, it was this idea of play that I was constantly thinking about, that shaped me as a kid and influenced the rest of my life. As we did it, I wanted to also go outside and shoot
from across the street and see them through the windows. I needed a transition between Tom coming out of the bathroom and Elizabeth already in bed. If I had stayed in the room, I’d have to deal with the question: When did they change?

I also thought the shot from outside was a way to convey fun and innocence, too. It signified a larger transition.

But Bobby Greenhut didn’t want to go outside. He didn’t want to spend money lighting up the whole street. Why would we have to light up the whole street? I didn’t understand. We battled over that as we worked into the night. Determined to get my shot, I waited till he took a catnap. He wasn’t good late at night. Around 4 a.m., he was asleep. Barry and I stepped over him, took a camera into the building next door, and pointed it at the windows.

I directed Tom and Elizabeth from the walkie-talkie.
To your left. Okay, sit down. Now Elizabeth, jump. Sit. Jump sitting up
. I was pleased with that effort.

Toward the end of production I lost my assistant director, prop man, and a bunch of others. They all went to Woody’s picture because Bob Greenhut did Woody’s movies. I showed up one day and asked where is So-and-so? They were gone. Luckily we didn’t have much left. We were basically at the end where Josh, having decided he wants to go back home, is at the Zoltar machine, making his wish, and Susan finds him. The script had four lines, something like, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Don’t go.” And they both had to cry. It wasn’t right.

Jim got on the phone with Bob and me and we rewrote it. In our version, Josh says there are a million reasons to go back but only one to stay. Hearing that she’s the one reason, they hug and she asks, “So how old are you anyway? Fifteen or sixteen?” When he says thirteen, she groans. I groaned, too. And that was the reaction I wanted—that bittersweet ache in the heart.

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.

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
.

A
FTER 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.