Getting The Best Acting Is A Difficult Task, Period

Movie director Garry Marshall tells about life behind the big screen in his new memoir, “Wake Me When It’s Funny” (Adams; $22.95).

And one story, passed on by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Leah Garchik, involves “Frankie and Johnny,” the 1991 movie with Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino:

One morning Marshall watched Pfeiffer try to order breakfast. But “when she discovered they were all out of bagels, she started to cry.”

Marshall wanted to help out, but Pfeiffer told him not to bother. She wasn’t really sad, she said, she was merely on her period.

So, Marshall wrote, “I made it a positive thing because she had several crying scenes in the movie. After lunch, we sat down with the production schedule and, with Michelle’s approval, plotted the crying scenes around her menstrual cycle.”

Loose talk

Actress Sandra Bullock on the negative aspects of fame: “Now ‘Hard Copy’ is after me in airports, when I’m looking really horrible.”

He’ll spend the evening watching Che in ‘Evita’

Fidel Castro turns 68 today.

The touch of her lips brought new life to that old vessel

At her special memorial service for the late J. Howard Marshall, her 90-year-old ex-husband, 27-year-old widow Anna Nicole Smith said why she should have access to the man’s reported $550 million estate. “He called me his precious package,” Smith said. “Even when he couldn’t talk, when he was on his deathbed, I was there… I gave up much of my career to sit by his bedside, day after day, and nurse him. I’m the one who brought him back to life when he was first hospitalized.”

What she needs now is some order in her court

Kimba Wood was one of Bill Clinton’s aborted choices for attorney general. Now the New York federal judge is involved in a romantic scandal. She’s been named “the other woman” in a divorce fight between New York socialites Nancy and Frank Richardson. This is what Richardson wrote of Wood in his diary: “When I first took her head and kissed her lips …how she stiffened and gave slowly but inexorably.”

Doubtful? Trying walking your spouse just once a day

So why have so many current celebrities become dog owners? Trend analyst Faith Popcorn says it’s because, “It’s lonely at the top.” With the pet, she says, “There’s a body heat to it, a closeness. They don’t know how famous you are. They truly love you.”

But if you’re need something, anything at all…

“It’s filthy and disgusting,” says actress Nathasha Richardson, “and I’m ashamed of it.” Her topic: the clutter in her purse.

Then again, it may just be your snide attitude, pal

Dennis Miller, who stars opposite Sandra Bullock in “The Net,” accepts what his “role in the movies now is.” As he told Entertainment Weekly, “I’m the guy who never gets (sex). I talk to the women, I nod, I assuage their pain. And then they go to bed with the other guy.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Photos

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Compiled by staff writer Dan Webster