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Nora Ephron: Feminist with a Funny Bone
- University of California Press
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34 Nora Ephron has several careers, which she has shuffled like a master dealer always with one more card up her sleeve. Long before her first screen credit, she was well known as one of the leading voices of New Journalism, a tough reporter, first-person essayist, and feminist with a funny bone—sometimes one or the other, other times all three at once. Three collections of her newspaper and magazine pieces became best-selling books in the 1970s. Her first marriage was to writer Dan Greenburg; her second was newsworthy: Carl Bernstein, one of the two Washington Post reporters who pushed the Watergate story until Nixon resigned. (The disintegration of their marriage was channeled into Ephron’s first novel, Heartburn, later filmed by Mike Nichols from a script by Ephron.) High on the Who’s Who of East Coast literary lights, she even appeared as a party guest in two Woody Allen films. When she turned to scriptwriting in the early 1980s, Ephron was, in a sense, coming home to Hollywood. Her personal backstory included a childhood growing up in Los Angeles, as the oldest of four daughters of Henry and Phoebe Ephron, who together wrote plays like Take Her She’s Mine and a number of sparkling motion pictures, including There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954), the screen version of Carousel (1956), and the Hepburn-Tracy comedy Desk Set (1957), capping their scriptwriting careers with an Oscar nomination for adapting Captain Newman, M.D. in 1964. We Thought We Could Do Anything: The Life of Screenwriters Phoebe and Henry Ephron (1977) is Henry Ephron’s elegant memoir of the family’s life out west, with a moving introduction by Nora and many glimpses of her precocity as a child. Her parents were displaced New Yorkers, and she did not much like California (or Hollywood).After education at Wellesley she ended up in New York working for newspapers, which INTERVIEW BY PATRICK MCGILLIGAN NORA EPHRON FEMINIST WITH A FUNNY BONE McGilligan_Ch03 8/7/09 11:37 AM Page 34 NORA EPHRON 35 she highly recommends for budding scenarists looking for better training than film school. After dipping her toes in television in the late 1970s, she was asked by director Mike Nichols to write a true-life script about the suspicious carcrash death of antinuclear crusader and union activist Karen Silkwood.The gritty, disturbing Silkwood, which starred Meryl Streep (who later played the Ephron character in the film Heartburn), brought Ephron her first Oscar nomination in 1983. Silkwood performed only modestly at the box office compared to the hilarious romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally, which was a runaway crowd-pleaser in 1989, swiftly achieving iconic status among writers as well as fans, for its smart script probing the limits of platonic friendship between a man (Harry, played by Billy Crystal) and a woman (Sally, played by Meg Ryan) who are sexually attracted to each other. (Everyone knows the scene in crowded Katz’s Deli, where Harry is insisting he can’t be fooled by a woman’s pretend orgasm. Sally, loudly and vividly, fakes one to win the argument, topped by—it was Billy Crystal’s suggestion, which Ephron added to the script—a woman customer shouting out, “I’ll have what she’s having!”) Ephron collected a second Oscar nomination for this film. She crashed the boy’s club of directing in 1992 with This Is My Life, based on a Meg Wolitzer novel about a single mother finding a second chance in stand-up comedy. Then she was called in on an informal remake of Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember (1957), and her witty final script (again, Oscar nominated) and growingly assured direction transformed Sleepless in Seattle into the perfect date movie of 1993. During the 1980s, Alice Arlen was her regular collaborator; on more recent projects younger sister Delia has served in that capacity. Things came full circle in 1998 when Ephron reunited Sleepless in Seattle stars Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail, the Ephron sisters’ Internet-themed update of Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop around the Corner (1940); one of their parents’ earliest jobs in Hollywood had been on the last Lubitsch film (That Lady in Ermine, 1948) before the master of sophisticated comedy died. Along the way there has been a kooky-teenager-with-mobster-dad drama (Cookie, 1989); the underrated My Blue Heaven (1990) and Mixed Nuts (1994), both starring Steve Martin; Michael (1996...