To Hall of Famers, Penny Marshall Was Just Laverne

Penny Marshall claims no talent as a ballplayer when she was growing up in New York, but she knew that when the females take to the field and do well by the game, there’s a movie in it. Especially when the story has been made in documentary form--complete with the perfect title already picked out: “A League of Their Own.”

At first, it was suggested Marshall consider the story of World War II-era All American Girls Professional Baseball League as a movie of the week. Nope. The director “thought it was much more than that” and hired writers (Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel) and pitched the project around town.

Twentieth Century Fox, where she made “Big,” was interested, despite some worry that the concept would be a hard sell to foreign audiences. When Marshall reminded Fox that she wouldn’t be available for a year and a half while she was making “Awakenings” for Columbia, they kept the option on the script and, in true Hollywood fashion, hired another director.

Like the fate of so many other film projects, “A League of Their Own” eventually went into turnaround when there was a change in regime at Fox. No surprise, the screenplay soon became the property of Columbia. “Awakenings” had become a critical and a commercial success. Did this have something to do with Columbia’s interest? Marshall laughs. “Yeah. And I’m not an easy person to make happy.”

Marshall and the film’s producers spent a weekend with “the ladies” (Marshall’s words) when the players were inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. “We had a good bull session and I told them I would try to use them in the movie,” the director said, commenting that her impressions from sitting around drinking and eating with this group of now senior-aged athletes was “inspiring, terrific. They have great stories, great spirit.”

And, she says, they weren’t intimidated by her, like others might be.

“I don’t come off as a big Hollywood director. Anyway, they all knew me as Laverne,” said Marshall. “Maybe some of them were a little skeptical. ‘Are you going to make fun of us,’ that sort of thing. We didn’t, wouldn’t.”