Penny Marshall, Heartily

“Renaissance Man” director Penny Marshall is a woman who seems to have gone through her own renaissance, at least on a small scale, this summer.

The actress/director, 50, suffered a sudden attack of severe chest pains, widely believed to be a heart attack, on May 28, and was rushed to a hospital in Southhampton, N.Y., on the eve of the opening of “Renaissance Man,” her fifth film.

Marshall, who has also admitted to having a four-pack-a-day cigarette habit, now says that she did not suffer a heart attack and that the rumors of her imminent demise were greatly exaggerated. In fact, she has been especially active lately, exuberantly cheering Barbra Streisand recently at the Pond of Anaheim and now busily promoting “Renaissance Man” in Australia.

“Geez, I wouldn’t be running around if I was still sick!” Marshall said on the phone from Sydney. “I just got overworked and stressed out.

“You know, they (Disney) moved my release schedule (on the film) up six weeks and I wasn’t prepared, so I really had to push it.” In fact, she says, she did not finish the film until the day of the cast-and-crew screening.

“I’m a grandmother, for God’s sake! Whew, it was a push. I had chest pains. So I went into the hospital for a day. You know, I wanted to take a day off anyway.”

By May 29, Marshall was back trying to do publicity for the film, which premiered May 31 and opened nationwide June 3. After the premiere, she said, she checked into a spa for a brief rest, then headed for New York and Los Angeles to do television interviews. Since then, she has simply tried to catch her breath.

“What I learned from this? You wanna know?” she says in her trademark Bronx accent. “Well, it’s this: I will never , ever push a movie six weeks early again. I should have said no.”

Especially when she considers the poor box-office performance and what some involved in the film called Disney’s lackluster promotional push on the movie in a summer packed with movies. The film, which stars Danny DeVito as an unemployed ad executive who begrudgingly takes a job teaching eight troubled Army recruits, has brought in about $23.5 million at the U.S. box office, which doesn’t cover the picture’s cost, although Marshall said that the final tally on the picture was nowhere near the rumored $40 million.

“There was a huge summer crunch of movies. And Disney was in a rush to get movies out this summer,” she says.

Marshall would have preferred to release “Renaissance Man” in September; the back-to-school period would have worked, she said, since it’s basically a film about education.

“When they released this in Michigan,” Marshall said, “kids were still in school. And the teachers in Detroit gave the kids credit if they went to see it.”

So did audiences miss the point of the movie? Would Marshall change anything about it if she could go back and tweak the finished product?

“Well, first, let me say, you’re talking to somebody who’s still trying to fix ‘Laverne & Shirley’!” Marshall, a star of that TV show, said. “But I think the people who saw this movie did get it. The exit polls on this movie were high.” It was also a film, says one source involved in the movie, that was generally considered the fourth or fifth choice on most moviegoers’ lists, given this summer’s lengthy menu of prospects.

But Marshall isn’t blaming Disney for being distracted by “The Lion King.” “No one wants to lose money,” she says. “But with so many releases it makes it hard for Disney to handle all of these films at one time.”

Now, she said, she’s trying to do what she can to sell the movie overseas. The film opened in Australia Thursday and will open in Europe in September.

In the meantime, she’s co-producing “Getting Away With Murder,” a romantic comedy starring Dan Aykroyd and Lily Tomlin, for Savoy Pictures. After that, she’s mulling a number of directorial projects she considered a few years ago when she was at Columbia Pictures.