She curled her fingers tight and dropped the fist to her groin: “It meant ‘More balls.’ ”
August 16, 2014
"Robin... was afraid Bobby [De Niro] was going to blow him off the screen."
"I said, ‘I won’t let that happen.’ So it was my job to keep Robin from being funny. We had a shorthand signal for when he got a little flamboyant, improvising," said Penny Marshall, the director of "Awakenings."
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5 comments:
So is there an inverse relationship between being witty and being virile?
That may be. I noticed this in high school. Jocks by their sheer size and physical development got loads of female attention just by being in the room. They were uniformly sullen and truculent, mainly because they did not perceive a need to be otherwise -- the microcosm rewarded their testosterone levels without any other "value added" contributions. The nerdy guys, me included, had to be raconteurs to get attention.
I remember seeing an outtake from "Awakenings" in which Robin Williams, in his white coat, and Robert De Niro are sitting side-by-side at a cafeteria table or the like. And Williams is clowing around, saying, "Oy! I've always wanted to be a Jewish doctor!" And of course De Niro was cracking up.
That explains why it was the last RW movie I enjoyed. Gave up entirely after the one where he was the clown-doctor or doctor-clown.
Interesting to see that Penny Marshall is one of the 10% of cancer survivors who smokes cigarettes.
intersting article, thanks for posting it. Say what you want about these people (Deniro, Williams, Marshall)and their personal lives, but they have entertained us, many of us anyway. I believe there is value in that, and for that I thank them.
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