My Mother Was Nuts (24 page)

I started to work up ideas. I got out pictures from my junior high reunion and compared them to those in the yearbook. Some people looked similar. Others were totally different. I entertained the idea of double casting to make the stars stand out even more. I spoke to Tom Hanks and Sean Penn. I had access to practically everyone thanks to the joint birthday parties that Carrie and I had started to host a few years earlier. We had done two or three of them by this time and they quickly became A-list events.

I also had deep contacts with the people who worked behind the camera. I spoke with Oscar-winning cinematographer Gordon Wills, who was shooting
Perfect
. I’d heard he sometimes took over for the director, which was fine by me. I was going to need help. I also talked to production designer Dean Tavoularis, whom I knew through Francis. He’d won an Oscar for
The Godfather II
and received four other nominations. Not too shabby.

Like a coach, I began to put together a team, and as I did a vision began to emerge. I read the script with actors and met with the writers. Debra was there with her dog, who she loved very much. I remember they kissed each other and were very affectionate. I don’t ask.

But three weeks into pre-production I was summoned to a meeting with the producers at the studio. I had no idea why, and it turned into an unfriendly inquisition. I was completely unprepared for such a turn. It was like being in front of the KGB. Did you talk to Dean? Did you talk to Gordon? Did you have a meeting with so-and-so? Did you let Debra kiss her dog? The questions went on and on. I felt like I was being accused of a crime. I had no idea what was happening.

I was officially fired a few days later. I met Howard Koch at his office. He was a large man with a long face and silver hair combed to the side. He got straight to the point. They thought the movie was too big for a first-time director. They would find me another movie, he said. Something family-friendly, like
Annie
.

I didn’t want another movie. “You knew I was a first-time director three weeks ago,” I said. “What changed?”

I went home and retreated to my bedroom. David Geffen and a few other influential friends called on my behalf. My brother sat on the edge of my bed and tried to cheer me up, but as he said, “There’s nothing to cheer about. I can’t even say you’ll get even. You were fired.”

I did get paid, though I didn’t understand why. “I didn’t do anything,” I told my brother’s partner, Jerry Belson.

He told me to stop complaining. “That’s my dream in show business,” he said. “To get hired, fired, and paid for doing nothing.”

In the aftermath Debra Winger dropped out, Kathleen Turner stepped in, and Francis Ford Coppola took over and used Dean Tavoularis as his production designer after I’d been given the third degree for merely talking to him.

“What happened?” Francis asked later.

“I don’t know,” I said.

And I didn’t.

The whole thing just hurt.

At the end of December, I went to see
A Passage to India
with Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston. The state of California had just passed a law prohibiting smoking in movie theaters. Jack and I smoked anyway.

Jack and Anjelica and I decided we wanted to have a New Year’s party. None of us, it turned out, had plans, though actually organizing it was a careful negotiation as we were all a little territorial. Jack wanted it at his house, Anjelica wanted it at hers, and I wanted it at mine.

Finally, Jack got producer Lou Adler to open his Sunset Strip nightclub, On the Rox, and we had a party there.

It quickly became
the
party. Jim Brooks, Deborah Winters, Warren Beatty, Debra Winger, Harry Dean Stanton, Tim Hutton … everyone
came. I was surprised at how many famous people had nothing to do on New Year’s. We stayed up late and then a bunch of us went to Canter’s deli in the morning for breakfast. As I recall, Sean Penn and I were the last to get dropped off there.

My New Year’s resolution was to get out of town. I needed a new backdrop, a change of scenery. I found a willing accomplice in Joe Pesci. I knew Joe through Robert De Niro, whom I’d met years earlier in Hawaii when I was with Rob. Joe had come to Carrie’s and my birthday parties. He was living in the Mayflower Hotel in New York but needed to be in L.A. for a movie. It was perfect. We swapped places—sort of. He ended up staying at my house for three years.

I’m serious. He overlapped with Jim Belushi. My niece Penny Lee also lived there. Others camped out, too. One morning she walked into the kitchen and found Joe and ballet great Mikhail Baryshnikov eating breakfast. Baryshnikov made her eggs. Once, Joe called to tell me the toilet was broken. I said, “Are your fingers broken? Call someone to get it fixed.” I think that’s when he began to think of it as his house. He still does.

He wasn’t alone. At another point, Louise Lasser and Michael O’Donoghue occupied different guest rooms. Michael and Mitch Glaser wrote the Bill Murray movie
Scrooged
there. Friends knew my door was always open.

New York turned out to the refresher I wanted. I did a reading of
Eden Court
, a light comedy about two couples living in a trailer park. Melanie Griffith, John Goodman, and Guy Boyd were already committed to the Off-Broadway production, with Barnet Kellman as the director. Following the reading, they asked me to be in it, too, and I said sure, why not? I hadn’t done a play since I lived in Albuquerque. I thought it would be fun to work in front of an audience and be around people who stayed up late and smoked, like me.

Before rehearsals started, though, Melanie got pregnant and dropped out, and John jumped ship to the Broadway musical
Big River
. Ben Masters replaced John, and Ellen Barkin stepped in for Melanie. As we got ready for previews, the play’s author, Murphy
Guyer, hated one of us each week. The play was at the Promenade Theater on the Upper West Side. I was excited about getting in front of an audience. Having come from three cameras, I knew the audience would tell you whether the material worked and exactly where the problems were. You didn’t need tons of previews; all you had to do was listen the first night.

I liked hanging out in the theater. I was reminded of my days with the Civic Light Opera in Albuquerque. Developing the piece onstage exercised new muscles and let me apply the experience I had in a new way. Since I wasn’t in the opening scene, I would listen from the dressing room and tell Ellen where she was walking through her laughs. “That’s a joke,” I said. “Let the audience laugh. Take the butter dish, put it in the refrigerator, and then go on to the next.” She has credited me for teaching her comedy.

My own entrance was a challenge that I worked on. I came in from nowhere, with no warning, and had to get the audience’s attention without angering them, as I went into a long speech. I played it as if I were out of breath and struggled to get the words out. “You’re not going to believe … what happened …” Gradually, I crossed over to Ellen and, as I did, I brought the theater with me. Later, Ellen told me that she hadn’t ever seen a performer direct an audience like that. She hadn’t spent eight years doing a three-camera sitcom.

The
New York Times
critic Frank Rich singled out Ellen’s performance (“If it were possible to give the kiss of life to a corpse, the actress Ellen Barkin would be the one to do it”) and praised the rest of us, including Barnet’s direction. The problem, he said, was with the script. I knew that was the case. During previews, I had brought in friends to help fix it—Jim Brooks, my brother, everyone in the world. I was like,
Why do you think they call Neil
Doc
Simon? If something doesn’t work, you fix it
. But the writer wouldn’t change a word.

In the meantime, I starred in an off-stage drama of my own. Backstage one afternoon, Ellen noticed that my breasts were larger and my clothes seemed more snug. “Are you pregnant?” she asked. It turned out I was. I hadn’t been thinking about it because I wasn’t with anyone
at the time. I thought it might be Artie’s, but I wasn’t seeing him anymore. It must have been Immaculate Conception, I told myself. I didn’t know what to do.

What I did was talk to everyone who I trusted or who might have been involved. Those who had children said, “You did it already.” Others pointed out that I could afford to raise another child. Money wasn’t the point. I barely had five dollars when Tracy was born. I debated the issues. Did I want Artie in my life forever? Did he want a child? Did I want a child? Would I be able to live with myself if I didn’t have the baby?

Joe Pesci touched me by offering to be the child’s father. As much as I loved Joe, I said no thanks. I sat with my brother and his wife Barbara and made a list of pros and cons. I asked my daughter, who confessed to some experiences of her own that I didn’t know anything about. I was shocked. But it didn’t sway me one way or another.

Ultimately, we all live our own lives and make decisions based on many factors, including whether we can live with them, right or wrong. Who knows what’s right or wrong? There’s no one-size-fits-all answer. It comes down to the individual. I had never had an abortion, and I didn’t want to be that person who did. But … I just didn’t know until I had to know.

The play didn’t run that much longer. After it closed, I decided to terminate the pregnancy. I did it with a heavy heart. My friend Carol took me. My shrink, who I’d also been talking to, came with us. I was the one person who always said I hadn’t had an abortion, and then I was one of those people. It’s the one thing I’ve regretted most. It fit that difficult time of my life. I guess everyone goes through a blue period. This was mine.

Penny providing direction to star Whoopi Goldberg on the set of
Jumpin’ Jack Flash
in 1986
“Jumpin’ Jack Flash” © 1986 Twentieth Century Fox. All rights reserved
.

R
ECOVERY TOOK LONGER
emotionally than physically. Strangely, I found comfort being in New York and decided I should get a place of my own there. I looked on Central Park West, but I didn’t want to pay a fortune to press my nose against a window when I wanted to look out. As I scoured the upper West Side, I crossed paths with Debra Winger on the block where she was filming her new movie
Legal Eagles
. A few days later, I bumped into Whoopi Goldberg, who had just started production on
Jumpin’ Jack Flash
.

It was her birthday, in fact, and she invited me to have dinner with her that night. It felt good to reconnect with these smart women.

In between seeing both of them, I found an apartment on West End Avenue with a large terrace. My brother happened to be in town, and I asked for his opinion. Although not crazy about heights, he gave his blessing and said, “Congratulations. You’re one of the first people I know who’s bicoastal.”

I put a down payment on it immediately and went back to L.A. to get warm clothes. I had high hopes for spending winter in the city and began thinking about how I wanted to furnish my new place.

Then those plans changed unexpectedly. While in L.A., I received
a call from producers Larry Gordon and Joel Silver.
Jumpin’ Jack Flash
was their movie. Somehow they’d heard that I’d had dinner with Whoopi. They had just parted ways with the movie’s creative team, including the director, Howard Zieff. They wanted me to take over.

“We’re already shooting,” Joel said.

“But we can’t shut down for pre-production,” Larry said.

I didn’t understand what pre-production was. It sounded to me like I’d be cutting a class. But why did they want me? That was the real question. I figured it was likely because they knew that I was a reliable human being
and
I got along with Whoopi. I guessed that was a short list.

“Can I read the script?” I asked.

“What do you need to do that for?” Joel said jokingly.

There were forty thousand versions of the script, including the Nancy Meyer and Charles Shyer version originally written for Shelley Long, and also one from David Mamet where everything was fuck or motherfucker. But I liked the basic story about a woman (Terry Dolittle) who was bored at work. She was too smart for her job. Then one day a guy hacks into her computer. He needs her help, and everything changes. Suddenly her life is on the line.

As I told people at the time, I had responded to the script starting at that moment when the guy says, “I’m in trouble. I need you.” Joel had called me out of the blue and asked for help. I said yes, and my life changed.

Whether or not I should do it was another question. And could I do it? That was a more pertinent question. I didn’t think so. I knew three cameras, not one camera. But my brother said, “It’s a strange business. They pay you to learn. Just don’t fall down. And finish.” Jim Brooks said, “It’s not your movie, so it doesn’t matter. Finish it, you’re a hero. If it fails, it’s not your fault.” Finally, Steven Spielberg added, “Do it—and remember to take the lens cap off to camera.”

It was a Thursday when I called Larry and Joel back and said I’d do it. The next day I met with director of photography Matt Leonetti and asked if he had anything against first-time directors or a problem working with a female director. After he said no to both questions, I whimpered, “Will you please help me?” We hugged and then spent the rest of the weekend blocking out shots. He drew the scenes on pieces of paper and showed me where the cameras went. It was like taking a graduate-level filmmaking course in three days. We kept that process going throughout the whole picture.