My Mother Was Nuts (28 page)

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 was 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 He was quirky and withdrawn.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.

From what I could tell, the man spoke no known language, which made him a perfect complement to my equally brilliant production designer, Anton Furst, who had worked with Stanley Kubrick on
Full Metal Jacket
and won an Oscar for Tim Burton’s
Batman
. His sets were un-fucking-believable. I had called him and asked if he’d like to do a smaller movie. “It’s a little hospital setting,” I said.

Anton spoke with a thick Cockney accent, and when we initially met to discuss the movie he kept talking about plinths and lintels, which I thought were beans. Both were actually different-size pieces of wood. Miroslav and I had no idea what he was talking about. Between
all of our accents, though, I don’t know if any of us ever understood one another.

We did a pre-shoot at Throgs Neck, the sliver of land dividing the Bronx and Manhattan. It was early morning, and we were working with the second unit, which meant we didn’t have a still photographer. The AD kept looking at his watch as the crew built a platform to put the camera on. We were racing against the tide to get a shot of Bobby on a rock in the water while Robin stood on the dock saying, “Come in, Leonard.” But the tide came in so fast some of the crew found themselves treading water. We got the shot. In a later take, it looked like Bobby was walking on water. Luckily someone on the crew had a Brownie and snapped a picture. That became our poster.

Our primary location was the Brooklyn Psychiatric Hospital, a working psychiatric hospital that treated patients with severe or long-term mental illnesses on the first and second floors. We shot on the third floor and used the fourth for dressing rooms. There was no shortage of atmosphere, screams wafting through the air ducts, or potential extras. Bobby likes to shoot in order, so the first part focused on Robin, who held the picture together as Dr. Malcolm Sayer, a research neurologist who steps gingerly into his first clinical position and finds himself wading through hallways filled with patients in wheelchairs who’ve been literally frozen in time for decades and essentially forgotten, except for Bobby’s character, Leonard Lowe, a middle-aged man whose devoted mother still tends to him. For that role, actresses walked in with their Oscars. I was overwhelmed. They were amazing. We tested a few of them, including Theresa Wright, who had spunk, and an older woman, Ruth Nelson.

Ruth was a great lady. She was a New York stage actress in the 1930s who transitioned to movies but was blacklisted in the 1950s when her second husband was among those Senator Joseph McCarthy labeled a Communist. She was victimized by association and didn’t work for
three decades. When I met her, she was eighty-four and had battled a brain tumor and also had arthritis. I stared at her slender arms and gnarled hands. It looked like she had pushed her kid’s arms and legs down for years. I liked her.