In a League of Her Own

To fans of nostalgia TV, Penny Marshall will always be Laverne DeFazio in “Laverne and Shirley,” which ran on ABC from 1976 to 1983. But she went on to become one of Hollywood’s major directors with “Big” in 1988, the first film directed by a woman to gross more than $100 million. Her latest film, “Riding in Cars With Boys,” starring Drew Barrymore, Steve Zahn and Brittany Murphy, opens Friday.

COMPUTER: It’s a little black thing. I don’t know what kind it is. It’s sitting here on the bed. Wait, I’ll look.

It says “Dell.”

Question: So it’s a laptop?

Answer: I guess so. Believe me, I am mechanically challenged. The big computer is in the other room in the office. It has a printer. When script notes or something comes in on e-mail, I let them know in the office and they print it out for me.

Q: What do you use the laptop for?

A: When I can’t sleep, I play games--I play 12-year-olds at Slingo, which is like Bingo. It’s very simple, and it drones on and on, so eventually I get tired and can go back to sleep. It’s on AOL and it’s free, but if you don’t play for five or six months, all your points get wiped out. Right now I have 146,274,550 points.

I go to Boxerjam.com to play Out of Order, Strike a Match and Hollywood Showdown, which is a trivia game. I play solitaire at Iwin.com, and then there is Jackpot.com and Worldwinner.com. Before the movie started, I just zoned out on these games when I couldn’t sleep.

Q: Do the people you play online know who you are?

A: No. I have made friends on Boxerjam, but they don’t know who I am. I get e-mail from this one woman who just had a baby. She’s very nice.

Q: You do a lot of e-mailing?

A: All with friends, no business. Carrie Fisher is on there and my doctor sends me jokes. Actually, a lot of people send me jokes. I used to download some of them that were funny and take them to Drew at work.

For a while, there were a lot of Bush jokes, but those have stopped now. Now people send sayings. [She pauses to find some in her e-mail.] Like: “Is it time for your medication or mine?” and “I refuse to star in your psychodrama.” I guess you had to be there.

Q: Do you use your computer for writing?

A: I don’t write. I call. When I get the script notes, I pick up the phone and say, “This makes no sense,” and then they write back something else.

Q: You don’t write scripts at all?

A: I can improvise and get a laugh, but I need someone to take down the line because I won’t remember it. I don’t commit to paper so well. My mother found a letter I wrote when I was 11, and that was the end of writing for me. It was about some guy.

HAND-HELD: I have a Palm Pilot around here someplace, but I don’t know how to use it. I’m still in the Filofax, with the zipper thing. They made an address book for me off the computer, but the print was so small I couldn’t read it.

BOOKMARKS: My games. And I go to EBay. Last Christmas, I didn’t have time to shop--we were working and I would come home for four minutes and then sleep. On the weekends, I went on there and bought six PlayStation 2 machines that I had to get for my grandson, my assistant and I don’t know who else. I got one for Steve Zahn so I could say to him, “Go take this to your trailer and leave me alone.” He was very happy.

Q: PlayStation 2s were expensive on EBay last year.

A: You’re telling me. A fortune. But I had to get them and I paid. I don’t understand everything about it. My poor assistant, Nicole, had to go on there and leave positive feedback and all that.

I also buy sports memorabilia online, but you have to be careful not to get ripped off. I will only buy from Barry Halper [a well-known collector]. And I like folk art. If a friend of mine sees something on EBay they think I will like, they let me know.

GADGETS: I have a DAT machine that I use to record actors sometimes. When I was making “Awakenings,” I needed some lines from Bobby DeNiro for some temp stuff we needed for editing. The lines were said off camera so he didn’t have to match picture. I went to a party he was having and recorded the lines right there--I made them turn off the margarita machine, and we did it.

When he came in later to loop it on a sound stage, he was a bit tense. The reading from the party was better, so that’s the one that ended up in the film.

I’ve done that with Danny DeVito too. We are so used to it, we know the whole routine in his office. We shut down the refrigerator, the air conditioning and record. I’ll probably get shot by the unions for saying this, but I don’t care.

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As told to David Colker