Penny from Heaven

A lost soul, a newly divorced soul, turns up on her big brother's doorstep in Hollywood in the spring of 1967. She doesn't know what she wants to do with her life, doesn't think she's pretty enough to be an actress, doesn't feel she's smart enough to be much else. A decade later, she's a television star of the first magnitude, the Laverne of Laverne & Shirley. A decade after that, she forges a bright new career by directing the hit comedy Big; then she directs the upcoming movie Awakenings, which is based on an erudite book by the neurologist Oliver Sacks.

And does all this success and acclaim turbocharge her ego? Does it convince her that she's hot stuff? Not quite. Penny Marshall has been putting herself down too long to quit cold turkey. She still shrugs her self-deprecating shrug, still whines her self-doubting whine. Nevertheless, she has started sifting through evidence that she may actually be good at her new career. Audiences loved the way Big transcended a gimmicky premise with honesty, humanity and wit. They loved it so much that they made Marshall the first woman director in Hollywood history to break the $100,000,000 mark in gross receipts. That is not to say that she has embraced her new success with a whole heart. She has retained, with a sometimes palpitating heart, what Anton Furst, her production designer on Awakenings, calls the "wonderful insecurity of a truly creative person."

•

The time is early 1990, on the 81st day of an unusually long and intense 83-day shooting schedule. The location is an old psychiatric hospital in Brooklyn. Marshall is bone-weary, like everyone else, but alert. Speaking the local language like the native she is, the former Penny Marscharelli of the Bronx turns to an assistant and asks, "Couldja get me some maw cigarettes? And maybe a Yoo-Hoo. Health nut that I am."

Awakenings is the story of a man named Leonard Lowe, played by Robert De Niro, who has spent 30 years in a catatonic state, and a neurologist, played by Robin Williams, who, in the late Sixties, brings him almost miraculously back to life. The miracle is worked with L-dopa, a drug of immense, unpredictable power. At first, Leonard seems to have emerged from the long sleep with his intelligence and personality intact; soon, the drug that awakened him threatens the very core of his being.

In the scene being shot this morning, Williams tries to interpret some of his patients' drawings. Williams and Marshall have been friends since (continued on page 162)Penny from Heaven(continued from page 144) the late Seventies, when they were both working at Paramount—he as the extraterrestrial Mork of Mork & Mindy, she as the earthy Laverne. During the long, tedious setup for the scene, Williams points to one of several drawings tacked up on an office wall, a geometric design that has been angrily scratched out, and says, in a Freudian accent, "Is that the Manson boy? The one who hates tests? Or is that the Hinckley boy?" Marshall registers the stand-up turn appreciatively but doesn't compete; she stands off on the side lines in a sweat shirt, blue jeans and sneakers, slightly stooped and smoking like a Romanian factory.

That afternoon, she rehearses a delicate scene involving a movie within the movie. Williams and his nurse, played by Julie Kavner, watch a 16-millimeter interview in which De Niro, wrenchingly plain and vulnerable in a wheelchair, recalls his awakening: "It was like a dream at first...." Then, after viewing the film, the doctor ponders the wisdom of what he has done. But the ancient Bell & Howell projector breaks down, and tedium reigns anew. While a couple of electricians perform emergency repairs, Marshall smokes some more, chews some gum, then pops a few vitamin pills with a Yoo-Hoo chaser.

Twenty minutes later, the projector, cast and crew are back in action. Marshall's main concern seems to be letting the scene breathe; she wants to give Williams whatever time he needs to find the essence of the drama while playing it.

She calls "Action!" The take runs extremely long and goes extremely well. "Cut!" she calls gratefully.

"Done!" Williams declares triumphantly. "Only twenty more scenes in two days! A million takes served!"

Later, Williams talks of Marshall's style as a director. "She just lets it happen in some ways. She sets the environment, talks it through with a kind of primal instinct about what works in a scene and what doesn't. I think her instincts are dead-on powerful." And what of her verbal style—the pitiful whimper, the patented whine? Here he leaps back into manic action, doing three or four characters in the same bit, including an impassioned alter ego whose voice explodes in staccato bursts and dyspeptic Marshall, whose voice—limps—along—haltingly.

"She's a brilliant woman, but maybe you don't want to scare people, because some people can be afraid of a brilliant woman. One way it's 'Wait a minute! Watch out! There's a brilliant woman here!' Her way it's 'Well—all—right—let's—see....'

"It's a great smoke screen! Great camouflage! That way she gets things done and you don't even know they've been done! Like, 'So—it's—done—and—it's—a—nice—picture—about—two—friends....'

"'And what about all these deep psychological insights?'

"'They're—there....'

"'And what about the incredibly detailed background of a unique chapter in the annals of modern medicine?'

"'That's—there—too.'"

•

It's hard to tell what any director actually does from watching him or her on the set. In the fragmented process of making feature films, the director's most meaningful contributions are usually made before production starts, in casting and working with writers; then again before shooting each new scene, in private discussions and rehearsals; and after production ends, during editing. In Marshall's case, it's extremely hard to tell, because she resists, at least at first, discussing her craft (Q: "Why are you directing?" A: "Nobody's asked me to act") and because her working method on the set is so collegial: Ask this one, So whaddya think?, ask that one, So whaddya think?, then shoot the scene every which way.

She admits to taking pleasure from the success of Big—"I really do like it that my stuff is entertaining"—but quickly adds, lest that make her sound like a boastful auteur, "What I deal with when I'm directing is just ordinary stuff like, 'Go from here to there and say this and then that while you're doing it.'"

Penny's brother, Garry, who directed the enormously successful Pretty Woman, talks of a similarity in their approach. "Some directors work with fear, others with intellect and analyzation. Begging is our approach. We beg, and it works for us. It's not manipulative or anything, it's just, 'Please, I've got a headache, I want to go home, I'm tired, just say the words, come on, don't make me crazy here.' And they sometimes rally. They rally for her even more than for me, because she plays the perfect urchin. They say, 'We better do it, because Penny looks like she's very unhappy.'"

Yet there are gaps in Garry's set piece on his sister. When Penny directs De Niro, an actor of formidable talent and vast experience, she tells him firmly, before one scene, "You can't do it without your head, you know. You can't do it if you don't focus." That doesn't sound like begging. When Anton Furst, the production designer (who won an Oscar for his stunning work on Batman), speaks of Penny's direction of Awakenings, he describes an artist who "works on a very large palette of the human condition; she models and remodels, takes advantage of any malleable situation." That doesn't sound like much of an urchin. Under cover of the beggar and the urchin, beneath the camouflage of the lovable kvetch, Marshall has been going through her own dramatic awakening to her gifts.

•

She was born in 1943, the younger daughter of Tony Marscharelli, an advertising man and an industrial film maker, and his wife, Marjorie, who ran a tap-dancing school and was an eccentric of epic proportions. The block she grew up on in the Bronx—Grand Concourse and Mosholu Parkway—was a cradle of celebrities to come (including Neil Simon, Paddy Chayefsky, Robert Klein, Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren) but chez Marscharelli—last house on the Concourse on the left—was less of a cradle than a crucible, with her mother as keeper of a high flame.

"She was a funny lady," Penny says. "She was way ahead of her time. She was the only mother who wore slacks, the only mother who worked, and she had this sort of Harpo Marx style of humor. We all got our sense of humor from her." Yet that humor had a sarcastic edge that could cut deeply. "I mean, when it wasn't pointed at you, it was very funny, but, in retrospect, when it was comin' at you, it was hurtful."

Very hurtful?

"Yeah, I'd say that. Very."

Life with Mother was many things, but it was never dull. "She talked so fast it was almost like she was on speed. She did take Anacin most of her life, because all the noise from sixty kids tap dancing all day gave her headaches, but she was just like on speed, and the only way us kids could get to talk was if we sort of talked under her—at—a—slower—pace."

Marjorie Marscharelli had what she called a suicide jar, in which she deposited one pill from every prescription (continued on page 170)Penny from Heaven(continued from page 162) written for her over the years, because she was afraid of being an invalid like her mother, who became blind and lived with them for most of Penny's childhood. The most bitter pill was that she contracted Alzheimer's disease four years before she died in 1985. "The last two years of her life," Penny says, "she was just sort of lying there, she wasn't anything. But the women in the family have very strong hearts. They last a long time. They simply go slightly mad, I believe. My grandmother was ninety-two when she died, and sort of insane."

Penny's older sister, Ronny Hallin, who produces the television series The Hogan Family, remembers Penny as "a little devil kind of a kid, always getting into trouble. She was a real good athlete, a tomboy. She rode a two-wheeler really young, and fast, always very fast, zip zip zip, testing people all the time. If someone told her, 'Don't go in the gutter,' she'd go in the gutter."

Testing people meant testing herself, as she tried to find a tenable position in the family. Ronny was the pretty and sweet one, a delightful child whom everyone loved, while Garry was the sick and hurt one. "I filled the slot of the sickly child to get attention," he says. "I was so sick nobody else had a chance to be sick in my family. So Penny didn't have a position, which is why she kind of took Rebel. She should've taken Bright, but she didn't."

She didn't take it because she didn't believe it. Garry was the big brother with the photographic memory, and Ronny was the big sister who skipped a year and a half in school, so Penny became the rebel who liked to have a good time. When Garry got out of high school, he went to the college of his choice, Northwestern, in Chicago; Ronny earned a degree there, too. When Penny went off to college, she went to the college of her mother's choice, the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque, because it was closer to New York.

Closer? New Mexico?

"Uh-huh," she explains. "My mother thought it was closer than Ohio. Because New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New Mexico—she figured all the News were together. I wanted to go to Ohio State because there was a guy there, but my mother said New Mexico. It didn't matter. I just wanted to get away."

During her first two years, she studied psychology, with minors in business and anthropology. She also married a football player named Michael Henry and got pregnant. "He was on football scholarship, and one of us had to work, so I worked. A man was supposed to finish college, a girl didn't have to. And I wasn't really dedicated, anyway; I felt it was no big sacrifice. I think I was just killing time."

After the birth of her daughter, Tracy, who is now 26 and an actress in her own right, Marshall did secretarial work; she typed 70 words a minute and knew her way around a calculator. Then she taught dancing, because it paid better and didn't require getting up early, which she has never been great at. She also got a chance to do some choreography at the Albuquerque Light Opera and to appear in a production of Oklahoma! But her marriage came apart, and she found herself alone, with a baby and nothing on earth she really wanted to do. By that time, her brother was a successful writer on The Dick Van Dyke Show, so Penny stuffed her worldly goods into a suitcase and headed farther west, to Los Angeles.

•

That marked the beginning of a long Hollywood appendageship; first she was known mainly as Garry's sister, then, after marrying Rob Reiner in 1971, as Rob's wife (and Garry's sister). As Garry tells it, this period began with the career-counseling equivalent of C.P.R.

"When she came out with her suitcase from college, she said, 'I'm not finishing school, so what should I do?' I said, 'I don't know; what is it you want to do?' She didn't know, and I was in my preoccupied, busy mode, so I said, 'Well, we could have dinner and we could talk, but we're already talking in circles here, so go away.' I said, 'Look, I can't do anything until you come and tell me that there's something you like. I give up on something you love. You're not a person who loves something at this point, but you must tell me something you like or I'm not talking to you anymore.'

"So she went away, and then came back two days later. 'One time in Albuquerque, I was in a show, Oklahoma!...'

"And I said, sounding like my mother, 'But you don't sing so good.' Our mother always told her she never sang very well. She said, 'No, that was the thing; I was petrified, but I sang Ado Annie, which is not so much singing as acting. I did Ado Annie, and they laughed, and they applauded, and I felt good.'

"And I said, 'That was it?'

"'That was it. When I felt good. That was it.'

"And I said, 'Actress!'"

•

Easier said than done. She couldn't turn on the charm in interviews, because she didn't feel pretty enough. She couldn't get auditions, because she wasn't perky enough. In what became apainfully funny milestone in her life, she finally did get hired for a shampoo commercial, but as the girl with stringy hair; the girl with beautiful hair was Farrah Fawcett. Worse yet, when they were lighting the set, Fawcett's stand-in was identified by a card hung around her neck that read pretty girl, while the card on Marshall's stand-in read homely girl. (In one of those small but sincere gestures that can change a life, Fawcett had someone cross out homely and put plain; they have been friends ever since.)

These days, Garry gives a lot of lectures. His billing is Garry Marshall: director, producer and Penny's brother. In those days, when he was coming on strong as a writer-producer, he was his sister's best hope for regular work, and he did the brotherly thing, even though it meant opening himself—and, more hurtfully, her—to charges of nepotism. As coproducer of the television series The Odd Couple, Garry cast Penny, in 1971, as Jack Klugman's secretary.

It wasn't much of a part, and she didn't do much with it. For three years in a row, every member of the supporting cast except Penny got a $100-a-week raise. But her other role, as Reiner's wife, was richer for her, and for their friends. She had met Reiner when she was auditioning for the part of Gloria, Archie Bunker's daughter on All in the Family, and he was auditioning for Archie's Meathead son-in-law, Mike Stivic. He got the part, they got each other. They were the first of their circle to marry, and to have a house, which became the group's gathering spot, salon, saloon and home away from home.

What a group it was—a budding television aristocracy of talented, audacious and insecure young people that included writer-producer James L. Brooks, who'd recently started The Mary Tyler Moore Show, writer Jerry Belson and actors Albert Brooks, Paul Sills and Ted Bessell. Jim Brooks remembers Penny and Rob's house, with great nostalgia, as an emotional haven. "It was a house where those of us passing through had great anxiety; that was what we had in common."

Brooks also remembers Marshall as a loving, endlessly caring friend. "This was a time when all her strengths and all her intelligence had no practical utilization in the world. She was sort of a housewife, and it was great for all of us who knew her then, because all her marvelous talents were available for your life. Any problems you had, you got this great force of energy from her. I enjoyed it while I had it, but I saw it slipping away, because she had to go out and be a whole person."

•

Brooks helped her go out by giving her a substantial part in a short-lived series, Friends and Lovers. A year after that came Laverne & Shirley, which was created and produced by her brother and coproduced by her father. From the beginning of its phenomenal run in 1976, Laverne & Shirley, a spin-off from Garry's series Happy Days, was one of those blue-collar sitcoms that only the public loved. (In a capsule review dripping with condescension, Time magazine derided the show's "sheer witlessness" and said Penny had "chosen not to characterize her role but to do an imitation of the inimitable Judy Holliday.")

Most of all, the public loved Penny's Laverne De Fazio, one of the two young women working in a Milwaukee brewery in the late Fifties. Laverne was homely but lovable, gloomy about being a virgin but devilish in ways that Penny had been developing since her girlhood.

Laverne & Shirley brought happy days for her. Suddenly, Garry's sister and Rob's wife was a star in her own right, a heroine of working-class America, and also a bright light on the Hollywood party circuit, when she wasn't too zonked from the merciless shooting schedule.

"She was amazing," says Jack Winter, who directed some of those episodes and who has been friendly with Garry and Penny for decades. "She used to cut film in her head while she was acting. When I directed, I'd go, 'Oh, God, we've got twelve new pages out of twenty-six and they'll never learn it, they'll never learn it!' And Penny was out there, and not only had she learned her lines and was doing somediing new to get a laugh but she was already going, 'OK, we've got C camera on this, so we can cut that and go to the close-up and then cut to the master.' She knew everything that was going on: every line, every joke, every cut."

According to Penny, her virtuosity was only an unconscious survival response. "In television, especially in proscenium three-camera television, you tend to stage yourself. That's how I would memorize my lines. My body would tell me what lines I had. If I was here, I'd be saying this, and going over there would mean I'd be saying that. As long as it made sense to me, I could act it."

But it was more than mere survival. There's a special kind of intelligence that thrives on the complexities of TV-sitcom production. (She is also a whiz at jigsaw puzzles.) "Her thing," says Winter, "was, 'OK, I'm in a corner; how do I paint myself out?'"

When someone once asked Mack Sennett for the governing principle of his comedy, he thought for a moment and said, "One thing leads to another." When Marshall played Laverne (she also directed four episodes), she used to insist, with a rigor that could drive writers mad, on the need for the writing to make sense.

"Sometimes they'd write these big physical scenes and all these jokes, but you couldn't get from here to there, because it was just not logical. There was one scene like that where I had to make a bed with a fat guy in it, asleep. I said, 'Let me just literally try to do it, and then you'll see what'll come out. As long as you approach it logically, you want to take the first blanket off, pull the pillow out, then get that bottom sheet out. Now, that bottom sheet will lead to something, and then you want to lift the legs up. OK, you want the legs of the pajamas to rip, but let me just do it in a logical order instead of jumping around from joke to joke.' You've got to be true to the premise."

•

If life were a sitcom, Marshall's marital problems might have had solutions, too. In the best of times, the relationship was grounded in friendship; in the worst, with his All in the Family stint at an end and her series running out of steam, they became so distant that, after ten years, diey decided to divorce. For Marshall, who had never been a fighter, it was the beginning of what she calls her "door-mat years." "You could walk all over me and it was OK, 'cause that's what I thought of myself." She revisited the party scene, but it wasn't much fun. She rented houses for a while, because she didn't feel she deserved to own one. When she finally did buy, it was only because her accountant had urged her to do so for tax purposes. The sprawling hillside house, which she still lives in, would have been huge for a large family. For a single woman, it seemed an unthinkable, unfillable void.

Yet she filled it—with friends who became house guests, then boarders, and who coalesced into a surrogate, if fluid, family. When friends came to stay at Marshall's house, they came for stretches of time that made The Man Who Came to Dinner seem like a guy who had to eat and run. Jim Belushi stayed for two years. Joe Pesci stayed for three years (moving in at the same time Marshall was using his apartment in New York, during her run in an off-Broadway play). Marshall's daughter had one level of the house as her own domain. Marshall's niece asked if she could have a room for a couple of months; she stayed six years.

Part of the time, Marshall wasn't home; there were relationships, in New York as well as L.A., with actor David Dukes and singer Art Garfunkel, among others, and a trip to Europe—her first—after Laverne & Shirley ended. When she was home, she insisted that her boarders live by a few simple house rules: "Pay for your own phone bills, and I don't want your girlfriends sleeping over, because I end up having to talk to them and I don't want to, because I don't have anything to say."

Marshall herself lived a strange, increasingly isolated life. In part, that grew out of her problems of finding privacy as a celebrity. But mostly, it was an expression of her tastes and needs. "I'm basically just someone who loves to stay in bed," she says. "I'm very happy there. I have clickers and cigarettes, and machines I don't know how to work. One friend always says, 'Are you in The Cave?' He calls it The Cave, because I have blackout curtains."

Her friends have always understood. They know her as a woman who doesn't go out, so they come to her. They also know her as a woman of extraordinary energy and stamina, when she isn't wallowing in lethargy, and a woman of extraordinary competence, when she isn't whining or playing helpless.

That's the essential contradiction of Marshall's life: She's a can-do person who often behaves as if she can't. The pattern may have deepened during her door-mat years, but it grew out of her own family life. "If you play helpless, people respond," her sister says. "My brother does it, too. Garry goes, 'Am I cold? Am I hot?' You have to tell him. 'Do I have my glasses?' Think for a minute! you tell him. He says, 'I have these people to think for me, I can't be bothered thinking about these things.' Penny saw that that worked, too."

•

In 1985, Marshall got a call from a producer friend, Lawrence Gordon, who had a desperate problem. His movie, Jumpin' Jack Flash, had just started shooting, but his star, Whoopi Goldberg, and his director, Howard Zieff, were at each other's throats; Gordon wanted to know if Marshall could take over from Zieff right away.

From Gordon's perspective, the request made sense. The picture was a comedy, or aspired to be; she had directed comedy, both on Laverne & Shirley and in Working Stiffs, a TV pilot with Jim Belushi and Michael Keaton. Most important, perhaps, she and Whoopi Goldberg knew each other socially and seemed to get along. From Marshall's perspective, the prospect of plunging into someone else's movie after ten days of shooting was fearsome. The script was an amateurish, unpleasant mess, while the production was awash in panic and anger.

The shoot was rough, in more ways than one. "It had shoot-'em-up stuff, and such cursing! I'd go, 'No, no, just put one "Asshole" or "Motherfucker" there!' I mean, this girl cursed through the whole thing." But Marshall got through it and emerged with a feature film. Not a good film, or even a particularly coherent one, but a completed film, a releasable film, a generally acceptable film. And that, given the grisly circumstances, constituted a promising debut as a feature director.

•

Big was Marshall's project from the start. One day, while she was still embroiled in Jumpin' Jack Flash, Jim Brooks came into her office at Twentieth Century Fox, put a manila envelope with a script in it on her desk and said, "This is your next movie."

"Huh?" Marshall replied.

"This is the movie you're doing next."

A charming fable of a 12-year-old boy who finds himself in a 35-year-old body, Big is one of those seemingly effortless movies in which a comic style is sustained from beginning to end, and every detail along the way rings true. Just how far from effortless it actually was suggests some of the pitfalls of making movies, and of being a woman in what is still a man's profession.

Unlike the script for Jumpin' Jack Flash, the script for Big was appealing from the start. When Marshall began casting the lead, however, she got turn-downs from such actors as Kevin Costner, Dennis Quaid and Tom Hanks. (Hanks ended up playing the part brilliantly, of course, but he wasn't available the first time around.) And the delays involved in casting took their toll, for three other movies with the same plot premise—starring Dudley Moore, Judge Reinhold and George Burns—were also gearing up to go into production.

In an effort to move her project away from these competitors, Marshall tried to rethink the hero as an older man, or a stronger man, someone who'd never be expected to dance on a piano. Her notions roamed in the direction of Clint Eastwood and Robert De Niro. When De Niro read the script, he said yes.

By now, it's almost impossible to imagine De Niro in the part. "It would've been a whole different movie," Marshall admits, "a street kid versus establishment. It would've been tougher. Not a bad kid, but a street kid who left the Bronx instead of the suburbs." But De Niro withdrew before shooting started—"It had to do with studio-agent problems and deals," Marshall says, "nothing to do with Bobby and me, or else we wouldn't have been working on Awakenings"—and half a year later, in the summer of 1987, Tom Hanks, newly available, claimed the role.

By the time Big was ready to start shooting, however, its three competitors were either on the way or in the can and a discouraged Marshall found herself wondering, Why bother? Her brother had a simple answer: "You're going to do it better. That's your shot. You took the job, you're obligated to try to do it better; there's nothing else to say."

Penny took a lot of time and shot huge amounts of film. For the actors, who understood what she was doing, her working method was an invitation to shine, even if it drove them crazy now and then. But some key members of the crew neither understood how she worked nor wanted to. "One time on the set," Garry says, "she literally cried on my shoulder. 'They don't like me, they're pickin' on me all the time.' She knew why. She knew it was because she was a woman, and I said, 'You're right, and there's nothing to do about it. Let's just find out who they are and have them killed.'"

"I couldn't believe it," says Jim Brooks, who, with Robert Greenhut, was the movie's coproducer. "I couldn't believe what was happening, because even on Big, even in 1986, Marshall really had to live with shit because she was a woman.

"I'll give you an example. There's a cut in the picture I just love, when Tom Hanks and Elizabeth Perkins are bouncing on the trampoline and you cut outside and see them from across the street. It's a beautiful cut that rewards you for your intimate knowledge of the film; the moment the shot goes outside, you have a sense of being in on some secret. Yet Marshall had to resist a crew who said it was stupid, we've finished shooting the scene, now why do you have to go out there across the street? But she was compelled to go across the street and get that shot. She wasn't going to let them go until that happened."

This illustrates another point, that the same woman who can admit to not knowing what works best—at least not until she reviews her options in the editing room—has wonderful instincts, and the tenacity to follow them. Like every good movie, Big was the product of an intricate collaboration: actors and technicians, writers and producers and director. But, like every good movie, it was shaped by the sensibility of its director.

One sees that sensibility at work in comic moments, such as the lovely bit where Hanks, at a cocktail party, tries to figure out what to do with an ear of baby corn; in showstoppers, such as the one with the giant piano, which starts tentatively, then develops gradually, organically, into a jubilant dance; and, most of all, in a succession of calm, sweetly human scenes such as the one where Hanks and Perkins undress to make love, and he caresses her breasts with such tenderness and wonderment that we really believe he's seeing a grown woman's breast for the first time. That's an example of Marshall's insistence on being true to the premise, and one reason why Big, of all those movies with the same plot, was the only hit.

•

Directing is not something Marshall loves to do. She may never love it, given the staggering detail, the stupefying tedium, the crushing fatigue and the prodigious investment of time that each feature film involves. She'd much rather be home in bed, with the TV on and the curtains drawn.

After Big, however, she found it hard to keep daylight out of her life; every studio courted her, every producer sought her magic touch. "Since Big was a high-concept movie, I got every high-concept script going: A horse is your next-door neighbor, a dog turns into I don't know what. Then the script for Awakenings came across my desk. I had no idea who sent it. It didn't come with a cover letter. But when I'm not working, I read everything myself, so I read this and it was just a fascinating story."

No one can call Awakenings high concept; there's little likelihood that three or four other pictures will turn up with the same plot premise of a postencephalitis patient coming out of catatonia. Indeed, Awakenings would seem to be a wildly improbable stretch for the woman who directed Big, were it not for the woman's love of logic and her habit of hewing faithfully to a subject's premise. "I've been so impressed by Penny's seriousness as a researcher," says Oliver Sacks, the author of the original book. "She's extremely bright, with huge energy and enthusiasm. I think that woman works harder than anyone I've ever seen."

•

There are animal trainers, and there are cats, but there is no such thing as a trained cat. Marshall may not have realized this before Awakenings; neither of her previous films has any noticeable feline content. Here she is, though, on the next-to-last day of the Awakenings shooting schedule, waiting anxiously on the set in Brooklyn while a handler tries to persuade his insouciant tabby to stay put in a garbage-strewn kitchen sink. (In the scene, a character's elderly sister is found dead in her apartment.) "It's important to keep the cat in position," Marshall urges in a doom-struck voice. "In the last take, its head was cut off so it looked like a big fur ball."

This is the problem of directing in a nutshell, or a fur ball. Awakenings is a story of singular depth and mysterious beauty. But before Marshall can get to the beauty part, before she can put the filming behind her and begin shaping the human drama in the editing room, she must solve the immediate problem of the goddamned cat.

"Tell me when we're ready," she calls to no one in particular, as she stands outside the narrow confines of the kitchen set. She's keeping her distance because she's allergic to cats. Already, in fact, she is scratching her scalp with a vengeance.

"Still placing the cat," the unseen handler responds grimly.

Still placing the cat on this, the 82nd of 83 shooting days during which 750,000 feet of film have been shot. Still placing the cat on this, the morning after an intense night of shooting; most of the crew is nearly comatose, too. Eventually, the cat is placed, and the scene is shot again, with a Steadicam rig that the camera operator wears like a robotic suit. But just before the operator sashays past the sink, the cat high-tails it onto the floor and out of sight. The crew prepares for a third take.

Maybe the scene was written as a secret test of character. If so, Marshall passes with flying colors, both as director and as unit mother. "Did you get enough sleep?" she asks a grip, putting her arm around his shoulder. (He didn't.) "Want your chair, hon?" she asks her cinematographer. (He doesn't.)

And what of the cat?

The director checks her little TV monitor, but the picture is too blurry to make out. "Is the cat just hanging over the sink?" she asks edgily. "'Cause it just looks like a big lump on the monitor. Like a big rat."

No response. The cinematographer goes to investigate. A moment later he comes back, looking forlorn. "The cat," he announces to Penny, "is wrecking the kitchen."

"Oh, dear," she replies, whining her whine. "Oh, dear...." Suddenly, her face brightens; she has had a revelation. "But, listen, it's OK! The cat can wreck the kitchen!"

She's right, of course. The animal is free to do whatever it wants, and so is she. Soon the lights are relighted, the cues are recued and the director gets the shot that she's been itching for.

"She plays the perfect urchin. They say, 'We better do it, because Penny looks very unhappy.'"

"'Penny didn't have a position, which is why she kind of took Rebel. She should've taken Bright.'"