Nora Ephron | CONVERSATIONS AT KCTS 9

I'm Enrique Cerna next on conversations Nora Ephron she's the writer and director of the hit movie Sleepless in Seattle and Julie and Julia she's also authored a new book I remember nothing and other reflections aging journalism family and divorce will talk about it all with Nora Ephron next on conversations local production and broadcast of conversations at KCTS 9 is made possible in part by kcts-9 members and by a major grant from the Floyd and Delores Jones foundation and by viewers like you thank you welcome to conversations and our Efrain good to have you here sure and welcome back to Seattle the city that you're very familiar with I am there are a lot of mugs in the airport in this city that wouldn't be there if it weren't for me what you know when you how much time did you spend in Seattle when you was about door month Sleepless in Seattle we did I spent four months here it was summertime it was heaven because heaven I understood that when you wanted to do some rain scenes because we were sort of in a drought period we were having a drought and of course we had to have it rain in the movie because it took place in Seattle but it wasn't raining so we had to bring in those big machines and then everyone got mad because it was a drought and we were wasting water by pretending it was raining but we did it what can we do yeah a movie maker that's right well hey congratulations with your new book just read today that it is right now number four the New York Times bestseller yes it is yeah I'm very happy about that and by the way if that list were only of books that were actually written by the person that it says whatever it would be number one because George Bush's book is a head of my book and a couple of other books that the person did not write take like Glenn Beck Glenn Beck do you think he wrote that book No I think he just ranted and somebody else something like that yeah well so I think that's kind of where it all came about you know this book which I really enjoyed reading nice and short but it's really good a collection of essays for the most part about many different things from you know you talk about the family you talk about journalism which I'd love to talk to you more about you talk about divorce and the topic that was part of the other book you wrote about your neck that is ancient yes about the things people don't really tell you about getting older when they're busy writing books about how these are going to be your happy golden years and they really do not prepare you for the fact that your elbows are going to be a tragedy is it really that bad I always say if my elbows face forward I would kill myself I'd like you to read a little bit of the book for me I get picked out a couple of spots here and if you don't mind there you go well the book is this is the piece in the book called the books called I remember nothing and this is the piece called I remember nothing and this says and sometimes I'm forced to conclude that I remember nothing for example I went to the Bobby Riggs Billie Jean King tennis match and couldn't really see anything from where I was sitting I went to stand in front of the White House the knight Nixon resigned and here's what I have to tell you about it my wallet was stolen I went to many legendary rock concerts and spent them wondering when they would end and where we would eat afterward and whether the restaurant would still be open and what I would order I went to at least one hundred Knicks games and I remember only the night that Reggie Miller scored eight points in the last nine seconds I went to cover the war in Israel in 1973 but my therapist absolutely forbid me to go to the front I was not at Woodstock but I might as well have been because I wouldn't remember it anyway on some level my life has been wasted on me after all if I can't remember it who can the other thing that you're right for a long time the fact that I was divorced was the most important thing about me and now it's not the most important thing about me now is that I'm getting old which I guess ties into what you just read why is that the most important thing well I think there's a certain point in your life when when it's very hard to ignore the realities of age as much as you'd like to as much as you'd like to think I'm still spry I'm still I'm still able to talk to my children without them leaving the room you know I'm not I I try to keep up I'm I'm not technologically brilliant but but I am on the web and you know you you keep up and you keep up and then suddenly it's not just that you feel bad about your neck it's not just your elbows the truth is there's a different conversation and it's about people getting sick and people dying and you lose friends who can't be replaced it's not like when you're young and you've got sort of an endless bench of friends and if one of them were to move away you'd have another best friend when your best friend dies it's a whole that is younger you have this sense of like invulnerability to well you truly more in mortality that's why kids speed you know and smoke yeah all these things if I can do it now it's never gonna catch up to me at all yeah do you like getting old do I like it of course not no I mean that's one of you know absolutely not there's there's almost nothing there it is true that you are wiser when you're older that is true but it since the wisdom arrives at almost the same moment that your mind is becoming a boy I think it's a very ironic confluence of things and it's kind of a wash you know the one thing that I noted in the book when although you say you remember nothing but actually you remember a lot and what to me it really came through when you talk about your family when you talk about journalism obviously when you talk about your divorces let's talk about the family your mother she meant a lot to you but my mother was a real piece of work she was something she was so powerful she was such a she was a screenwriter with my father and she was so determined that all of her children would be writers without ever being stupid enough to say I want you to grow up to be a writer because that she knew was never going to work so she she basically you know she brought us the greatest books and made turned us into passionate readers and taught us to tell stories in her own completely twisted way okay I mean what she would say to you if you went to my mother and you said oh the worst thing happened to me today she had no interest in it she only wanted to hear about it when you had turned it into a story with a good punch line and so she always said everything is copy everything is material someday this will be a funny story it doesn't seem funny now but trust me someday it will be funny and it's such an interesting way to be a parent it's so counterintuitive I think because your tendency when you're a parent if your kid comes to you with a sad story is to sympathize with them don't you think it's just say about oh honey oh I feel bad that's sad no no just turn it around come back to me when you see that the sky has not fallen that you are still alive tomorrow that in fact you know it's it's this thing I always think that is a basic lesson of comedy which is that if you slip on a banana peel people laugh at you but if you tell them you slipped on a banana peel it's your joke and you're the hero of the joke and it's just the basis of so much of comedy and she just taught us it and and I think I think she knew what she was doing and so then when she became an alcoholic later in her life it was the most disorienting thing to have this mother who had been so powerful I think this happens with a lot of kids where you've got this idea of a parent as a complete icon and then at a certain point they change and you're totally confused about which which one of those two things they are you were very fearful of her coming to your college graduation well I wanted her to come to my graduation but then when she came I was terrified that she was going to you know reveal herself and all of my friends knew that I had this powerful mother who was a screenwriter and a playwright and especially in that period where there were so few almost no one I went to college with had a mother with a real career and kids and she had been home - it wasn't you know it wasn't as if she was out traveling the world well she had kids she was she was really there in her own sort of wackadoodle way and and so you know I I so didn't want my friends to know this whole other thing I wanted them to buy into the myth that I had grown up with in the supermom actually she was the working mother and also at the same time very successful with what she was doing right tell me the story about the woman that she kicked out of oh well would you spent many years trying to figure out that well this is a story that we had grown up on a very famous writer Lillian Roy so the New Yorker came to our house one night and with this is a story we heard as we were growing up and it was like this great story about my mother because Lily and Ross had been at this party and there was a picture of me and my three sisters and she said to my mother are these your children and my mother said yes and she said do you ever see them and my mother went to the person who had brought her to the party and said out right this minute and they left the party so I loved the story it was like my mother was a cowboy in this story she run the bad guys out of town she had run out of town the person who had dared to question this thing we grew up believing which was that you did not you know you were not going to grow up to be a housewife that wasn't what you did when you grow up you could you could have a career and you could have kids and you did you doubt we could see you could do it and of course that's one of the things that made the drinking so problematical because you thought well does that mean you can't do it you know but you eventually found or met with my husband years later Lilian Ross and one of the things I was determined to find out when I met her was whether this story had been true but I didn't want to ask her point-blank because I thought it would betray my mother that I mean I I wanted my mother to have been telling the truth but I didn't want Lilian Ross to know that she had played this huge role in the sort of you know family legend so so we had a conversation where we kind of were fencing back and forth because we were sort of from different schools of journalism and and many minutes of fencing went by until it became clear that we that it became clear to me that she probably didn't like me at all but anyway and then she said you know I was at your house once and I said were you and she said didn't see much of you though and I suddenly knew that the story was true and that I was having the exact a completely different version of exactly the same moment that had happened with my mother of course it was a thrilling moment because I got my mother back in a kind of pure unadulterated way she was a cowboy standing up for the rights of women and and for me and everyone else did that help I guess I'm looking back on the relationship and then also just you know she died at a young age from the alcoholism 37 did that help you in dealing with all that no seven years of therapy helped me in dealing with it you know the other thing that I noted that seemed where your passion really comes through and in the book is when you talk about journalism yes because that seemed to me to be a kind of a love of your life and in many respects I think that's true I think that's true I think that I wanted very early to be a journalist and fell in love with you know not you know the romance it's such a romantic it isn't such a romantic profession anymore I don't I don't think that he has that journalism is in trouble and nobody you know when I was growing up if the hero of a movie like it happened one night Clark Gable is a newspaper reporter and it's sort of the existential hero that that movie makers love to write about because journalists were pure journalists were kind of classless it didn't matter whether you were rich or poor you were just a reporter at a newspaper you couldn't really make any money you believed in the truth all these things that that now people don't really like journalists as much as they did and it's changed but I grew up on that on that fabulous idea of the crusader for truth and these days I mean you started like weaponeer post well first as a right out of college you your main leader all right at Earl's week I was at Newsweek yes I had a lot of girl jobs because they didn't give good jobs to women in fact they gave jobs to women yeah someone there tried to tell you that women could not be journalists over poor writers yes they said we don't have any women writers at Newsweek and it's a very weird thing that they said that to me first of all because can you imagine anyone saying it now but it was totally routine that someone might say it then but the other thing that was quite weird was they did have women writing at Newsweek did two women at Newsweek who had been hired during World War two in this sort of rosie the riveter way where nobody wanted to hire women they just had to because they had run out of men but they were not making that mistake again it was like two was enough so but you got your chance big break in the New York Post and I did a lot of work there went on to do magazine writing I'm curious how did you end up moving into becoming a screenwriter and then directing well there was a moment in the history of in you know in the history of New York life as I look at it where everybody who was in journalism tried to write a screenplay and I was about I was in my late 30s and I tried to write one too and bizarrely enough it was made into a television movie and it was not a good television movie I would have to say it was one of the worst things I've ever scene impact but the script was not terrible and so I got asked to write other scripts and after a while I kind of started to know what I was doing and then I had a movie made which was Silkwood and Mike Nichols directed it Ellis Arlen and I wrote it and we spent months and months with Mike Nichols working on the script and essentially it you know in several months going to a kind of film school that you could never even pay to go to with one of the greatest directors ever so by the time we got through with that I sort of knew how to write a screenplay I wasn't I I still had a lot to learn but it was a very lucky thing for me because I got a sort of different career at a point in my life where I think if you can if you're lucky you can kind of change careers every 10 years or so and it keeps you it keeps you on a steep learning curve it keeps your energy going from our motivation well and it keeps you scared yeah yeah would you tell me the story in fairly briefly I guess uncle Hal the inheritance yes then a particular movie you were writing oh I know I was where I was in the midst of writing absolutely incredibly difficult script when I got a call that my uncle Hal my incredibly rich uncle Hal had died and what we all knew the four of us me and my three sisters was that we were in the will we had been told that repeatedly by my crazy father who would call up in his his characteristically brief phone calls and you he'd say talk to hell you're in the will and then he would hang-up that was my father's idea of a phone call he never gave you a chance to hang up on him and so I was overwhelmed at this because I he had all this real estate in Washington my uncle held it and and he was rich he was my rich uncle and he owned this huge amount of land in Puerto Rico where they were going to build some spectacular series of palaces and so I thought well four of us he's got to have two million dollars which would be 500,000 for me which would be so much money and we had just bought a house my husband and I would just buy a house at the beach and we had run out of money completely and we had this horrible lawn of grass seed that was refusing to turn into grass and but we were surrounded by rich people who had trucks of sod pulling up night and day and I had dreams of sod and I had dreams of trees we had no trees and I thought this is so fantastic I'm never going to have to write anything again I turned the computer off I'm never going to finish this unbelievably difficult screenplay and I'm going to have grass and it's going to be beautiful here and I lay down on the bed and realize we needed a new headboard which I could now afford and at that moment basically experienced the first two stages of inherited wealth which are greed and sloth and of course in the in the annals of becoming an heiress this story did not really work out at all because it turned out my uncle Hal was not my rich uncle he'll at all he was my formerly rich uncle he'll but in the meantime one of the system the four of us had a little falling-out over some it was like within two few days we went through almost every possible stage of inherited wealth except the one you really want to go through which is wealth and and in the end you only got what about $40,000 yes that's right but but I did buy a tree tell me how it helped you writing that's true well then I had to go back and finish the script you see in the script was When Harry Met Sally so as a result I now believe no one should inherit my very rooted me to generalize in that way but I do know that if I had inherited all that money I would never written that movie and it changed my life are you gonna make more movies you can write more books sure but you know mostly what I'm going to do is um cook I'm it's the end of the America I love to cook and it's a big cooking season and I just wish I could get paid for cooking because for my friends yeah because that's what I'd like to do is just have my friends over and and get a salary for it is it the desserts you like to make the most you get anything and everything like I just love cooking and my husband is a champ at dishes he's really great and that's the worst thing about cooking is having to wash up behind yourself so make all that messy yeah that's that's good yeah what about the blogging you're writing actually now for Huffington Post what do you think of that what do I think of Huffington Post when I'm writing writing now for the web and I mean it's a lot different went from being a newspaper reporter or writing a book things like that well it's just a different it's a different skill set and I I love doing it if it's what's called for you know I mean one of the things I'm very lucky is that I can write in a couple of languages and then when when HuffPost came along I realized that that the posting on it which used to be called blogging is a kind of it's different from writing an essay it's more like blowing a bubble big soap bubble and it lasts about as long as a soap bubble and when I look back on some of the things I've written on Huffington Post I have no idea what they're about they were inspired by some some episode some atrocity committed by our then president or for you know Dick Cheney I got a lot of blogs out of Dick Cheney I kind of miss him in a weird way and and I know that something had happened in the news that day that caused me to write this thing that that had a sort of 24-hour life it's it's even you know one of the great lessons you learn at a newspaper is that you wrap the fish it's it really is a way to learn how to write if you don't sit at the time bury thinking oh this is for posterity posterity has to be brilliant if you know that it has to be good enough to be in tomorrow's paper but then no one will remember it the following day it's the most fantastic way to learn to write well you know blogging is even less than that all you're looking for is a few hours yeah and very quickly yeah Nora Ephron the book is just very wonderful and funny it's you know but it's also got some real depth to it there when you talk about your family and journalism and the divorce and all that other stuff and besides that you're you're aging very graceful thank you so much all right thank you very much from time local production and broadcast of conversations at KCTS 9 is made possible in part by kcts-9 members and by a major grant from the Floyd and Delores Jones foundation and by viewers like you thank you

Channel: KCTS9

Views: 41,083

Rating: 4.8190045 out of 5

Keywords: Nora Ephron, Sleepless in Seattle, romantic comedy

Id: SXiNEgO-wxo

Length: 26min 46sec (1606 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 28 2011