MOVIES
aking
It'Bg'
Rocky starts don't
deter Penny Marshall;
crisis turns her on
and Shirley," Penny Marshall
AsLaverne on ABC's "Laverne
danced the schlemiel-schlamazel,
fell down more ramps than Chevy
Chase and fought off hurricanes.
She helped to make the sitcom one of the
top shows on television for seven seasons.
Yet her comedic success never convinced
her that she would ever be able to direct.
The self-deprecating New Yorker believed
she was too indecisive to bark orders at
grips and gaffers, too klutzy to figure out
Steadicams and too shy to instill inspira-
tion in actors.
But witness this act of self-assertion. In
the final weeks of production on her soon-
to-be-released movie, "Big," she is discuss-
ing a song for the sound track with James
Brooks, the executive producer. As cocrea-
tor of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and
director of both "Terms of Endearment"
and "Broadcast News," Brooks is one of
the most powerful men in Hollywood. He
is urging her to use a sophisticated
Gershwin tune. "Woody Allen would do it
in a minute," he pushes. But Marshall
thinks Gershwin would clash with the rock
heard elsewhere in the film, so she stands
her ground. Taking a drag on her Marl-
boro, she chides, "But what a transition
to Billy Idol."
And what a transition for Penny Mar-
shall. After being dumped from her first
directorial project, "Peggy Sue Got Mar-
ried," and being called in at a moment's
notice to barely revive her second, "Jump-
in' Jack Flash," Marshall seems to have hit
it big with "Big" at the age of 45. Twentieth
Century Fox is so high on her sophisticated
comedy about a kid who wakes up an adult
that the studio pushed up its release to
June, when the movie will go head to head
with Eddie Murphy and George Lucas.
In "Big," a 13-year-old boy (Joshua Bas-
kin) goes to bed one night wishing to be
"big" and wakes up the next morning in the
body of Tom Hanks. The problem is that he
still views life as that Little League kid.
While the plot bears some superficial re-
semblance to the rash of age-switch movies
that have come out recently, director Mar-
'I need an enormous amount of encouragement to do anything-even go out to dinner': Marshall
shall has vice versaed "Vice Versa" and its
ilk. Instead of going strictly for laughs, she
makes you feel the terror of the trans-
formed man-child. At the end of his first
day in a man's body, when he's run away
from home and is panicked, Joshua holes
up in a New York City flophouse and cries
himself to sleep as police sirens screech
outside.
Like the grown child in "Big," who sur-
vives by putting his immaturity to work in
a toy company, Marshall has learned to
turn disabilities into assets. A chronic pes-
simist, she prepares for every day as if
disaster were imminent. "The truth is,"
says brother Garry Marshall (a creator of
TV's "Happy Days" and director of films
such as "Nothing in Common"), "without a
crisis she can be a little dull. At 'The Battle
of the Network Stars,' she would lay in the
grass and whine. But when the gun went
off, she was Wonder Woman."
No Liz Taylor: Penny grew up reading Vari-
ety. She performed in her mother's Bronx
dancing school, on local TV and at VA
hospitals. But she never thought she could
act. "I wasn't Elizabeth Taylor beautiful
and I talked Bronx, not English," she says,
laying on her New York accent really
thick. Still, she took the walk-on parts
(Nurse 2, Hippie 1) she could get on various
TV shows, and her career began to develop.
Her first substantial role was as Oscar
Madison's secretary on TV's "The Odd Cou-
ple," which her brother helped develop.
The breakthrough came in 1975 when
MAY 1988
NEWSWEEK ON CAMPUS 45