Nora Ephron on DESK SET + WHEN HARRY MET SALLY + more - Later with Bob Costas 2/26/92

on the february 26 1992 episode of later with bob costas writer nora ephron appears she was promoting her project called this is my life which she not only wrote with co-wrote with her sister but she also is the director of the film so she talks about how that made for no excuses and uh how much she enjoyed enjoyed that um efron came from writing royalty her parents wrote one of my favorite all-time films and they wrote the film version at the broadway version efron was quick to point that out to costas but her parents wrote desk set which was an incredible katherine hepburn spencer tracy movie and talked about librarians versus computers i love it love it love it um she also talked about being a one of the few female writers at esquire magazine and in that role and she said it took years for the management to realize that half the readers were women so uh you know a real mystery why she struck a chord with lots of readers she's great so funny is so smart comes across in this interview without a doubt she also talks about serious work she she wrote silk wood the screenplay for silkwood great great great film not very funny had it had some funny moments look at that you talk about silkwood and the lights start flashing oh my god not doing that folks really not and she talked about probably her best known most endearing work when harry met sally which she co-wrote with rob reiner and really cut to one of the core issues of of life can men and women be friends much less be friends after they do it eventually sometimes hopefully all these lights are flashing girls there is a cat thanks for staying up later nora ephron is with us tonight she is the screenwriter for movies like silkwood and heartburn and when harry met sally heartburn coming off her novel of the same name and her new film this is my life starring julie cavner it's not only wrote but directed it's opened in new york and los angeles already and opens wide in a week or so and we'll get to all that in a minute but you come by this very very naturally because your mom and dad henry and phoebe were writers themselves they wrote the screenplay for carousel they had a broadway classic with the desk set no no they had the movie of the desk set based on the broadway classic they had the movie classic of the desk set based on the broadway classic yes there we go and didn't your mom once say to you about your own life about the family's life look it's all copy my mother had this theory that she said not once but repeatedly when we were growing up she just used to whatever you said to her if you came home and said i've had the most horrible day of my life she would say everything is copy and what she meant of course was that someday this may seem terrible to you now but someday you'll make a story out of it this was long before it crossed my mind that i was going to be a writer but i guess it had crossed her mind and whether or not we did i think that she was trying to do two things one was that i think she was trying not to have to hear the horrible stories that we were coming home to her with which are incredibly painful if you are a parent never mind that you're the kid but the other thing i think she was trying to teach us was the fundamental lesson of humor i don't i mean i think if i could talk to her now and ask her this she would say well of course that's what i was trying to do maybe she was maybe she wasn't but but my feeling is that you know if you slip on a banana peel people laugh at you but if you tell people that you slipped on a banana peel it's your joke you're the hero of the joke you're not the victim of the joke and it's a fantastic lesson in in a teaching you to make jokes out of things which is not the worst thing to do and b to teach you not to always see things as tragedies because they aren't how good a coping mechanism is it not just putting it to use professionally but a coping mechanism day to day where you say to yourself ah no matter what happens as long as i don't die i can turn this to my advantage so i think it's eventually a coping mechanism after about two thousand years of therapy but um if you can get that i mean you ha i don't think it works all by itself but i do think that it's a great coping mechanism it's it's just that you don't i'm not suggesting that you should avoid pain um you know i mean that you should just say oh who cares about it it's nothing but i do think that that the people the people that i'm drawn to are not people who wallow forever in life's little indignities but managed to turn them into something that i'm afraid i have to call an anecdote for want of a better word and your mom and dad did it continually as i get the story little childhood utterances of yours or your sisters they would turn them into into fodder for their work right yes in fact my sister delia whom i wrote this movie with that we're going to get to eventually yeah um it's a half hour show yes there's no urgency my sister delia but it's a fine motion picture this is my life it's already open in new york and los angeles and we'll be opening wide eventually my sister at one point um when she was about six got her head stuck between the stair posts in our house ooh i hate when that happens and the uh fire department had to come and cut her out of it and about ten months later there was a movie called the jackpot which my parents wrote with jimmy stewart and barbara hale and natalie wood played the eight-year-old in it and she got her head stuck between the stairwells so there was this kind of sense in our house that it was sort of not here today and gone tomorrow but here today and there tomorrow and um we were very used to it of course that's a particular separate funny incident there was also angst and all sorts of difficulty that they processed into uh into work which the public saw right too much no not much of ours they they were they wrote comedies and there wasn't a whole lot of angst when i when i went off to college they wrote a play about a southern california family whose daughter goes off to an eastern girls college take her she's mine take her she's mine and it was not full of angst partly because you know when you write your parents letters well i don't know about you but by the time i got to college i had learned my mother's lesson so well that my letters were very cheerful and they didn't know about the angst but i think almost always when you write your parents there's a there's a certain nature of a performance in it um you don't really tell them what you're going through because a lot of it is stuff you don't want them to know now there's a an obvious irony here you wrote the book ultimately made into a movie heartburn most people think the book was much better uh than the motion picture turned out to be the motion picture lost a lot in the translation but based upon your own experience with your former husband carl bernstein and obviously this is a case of taking the most intimate personal experiences heart-wrenching personal experiences and laying them out there was it was it therapeutic for you in any way no i don't think it was therapeutic although i'm probably wrong about it i think that that i had a very good therapist and as a result of that you know when you are a writer and your marriage ends you're probably going to write something about it most people do at some point not everyone but most people do my marriage ended in incredibly melodramatic circumstances and although it was painful beyond belief i knew the day i walked out of it that i had a novel if i could just figure out a way to tell the story without crying and that took a while took a while before i found a voice for it or i found a way to write it so that it was funny it wasn't the tale of a victim which it was it was very funny thank you thank you it was interesting that a lot of your writing came in esquire which essentially is geared toward a male audience what kind of feedback did you get well you know when i was writing for esquire i knew something that they didn't know which was that a huge number of women were reading it and i kept telling them do you understand that there are all these women reading because i had all this mail from them finally they did a reader's survey and discovered that it was something like 50 percent so um it was it was one of those things where the magazine itself didn't even know who its readers were the great thing about writing for esquire for me i mean when i was in college and was dreaming of being a journalist i used to read esquire and think if i die and go to heaven i will be a writer at esquire and you know when you when you write for magazines a thing happens to you if you're writing for you know a women's magazine a big mass market women's magazine you're always thinking will the reader know what i'm talking about if i refer casually to whatever tiramisu sorry obscure thing right but um and if you write for um a sort of staid publication like the new york times you don't want to be too flashy in what you write because you know they don't welcome right at least in in the period when i was doing it they've gotten better but when i finally began writing for esquire it was like i was home there was nothing there was no little bird sitting on my shoulder saying uh uh you can't use that word here i was there was no barrier between me and the readers i loved writing there did your mom actually say to you as she was dying you're a journalist take notes she said you're a reporter nora take notes and we're back now with nora ephron how big a difference does it make when a woman is the screenwriter in terms of how women are portrayed on screen what's hard for a screenwriter who's a woman well there are many things that are hard but one of the hard things is that if you write a movie about a woman it's hard to get it made because i mean i always say this you can get a movie made about a man with a hangnail but if you write a movie about a woman with a whole range of interesting things happening to her a lot of the men who run the studio say i don't know if this is interesting well it's not interesting to them it's not their problem people like to make movies about things that are about themselves and if you write a movie about women and let's say it's a comedy let's throw that in this thing happens which is that you write your script and you send it to your agent and he buzzes and says bring in the director's list and his assistant walks into the office with a piece of paper it's not 100 pieces of paper it's not a it's a piece of paper with names on it and it's not the whole piece of paper it's not just filled with names there's room on the bottom for more names it's a short list that's the gist of it very short list and on that list as you know are not very many women although more than there used to be of the men on the list 70 of them don't do women well they just don't they do terminator or they do action adventure movies of the 30 percent left 80 don't do comedies you're down to this tiny number of people that you can hope to interest in spending a year of their lives on this stack of paper that you've accumulated that is very difficult and why did it work so well with rob reiner the director of when harry met sally which i think is a movie that appeals equally to men and women well it worked you know first of all when harry met sally was robb's idea rob said one day in a meeting let's do a movie about a man and a woman who become friends and don't have sex because it will ruin the relationship and then they have sex and it ruins the relationship that's what we started with so we had a man and a woman to begin with he started with knowing that there was a man and a woman in the movie so that helped a lot and it was his idea that helps a lot i always say to people when i'm talking to young screenwriters that if you want to get a movie made write it about the director's last divorce because that's something that a director really wants to make a movie about one of the reasons why rob and i had a wonderful time making when harry met sally is that i based harry completely on rob this was not his idea this was my idea because as we started talking about being single which was what we mainly did to work on the script and rob and andy shineman who was the producer of the movie began to tell me about their lives as single men which were sort of my wildest nightmares of what life was like for a single man i thought that rob was such a naturally comic character i mean he's so he's so depressed or at least he was he's not depressed anymore but he was so depressed but he was so funny about it there are very few depressed people who are as funny about their depression as rob is was and furthermore he loved his depression he loved it it was his friend and i loved the idea of a character you know like remember joba fisk and the little abner comic who yeah black cloud over his head i mean that that was kind of rob was the most cheerful depressed person i'd ever met who was sally based on the meg ryan sally is more or less me um more or less i'm not as fastidious as sally to put it mildly but i am i mean i'm not neat but i am as big a nightmare when ordering in a restaurant as she was so what's your personal conclusion can a man and a woman be friends have sex and then still be friends i'm not either married or romantically involved sure but it's difficult it's a it's a hard transition to make back to the friendship it's it's very hard i thought you were going to ask me if i thought men and women could be friends which is the real question of the movie and then ask yourself the question and and what and what i think i mean can men and women be friends men think they can't and women think they can that i think is what the movie is really about rob says men and women can't be friends i think they can and i think part of what we were trying to say in that movie is that men and women see things completely differently and that is the problem or the situation or the reality or whatever you want to call it um silkwood with with meryl streep moves in a somewhat different direction for you because this obviously is not a comedy there are individually funny moments within it that you know that are part of the experience but it's not a comedy well you know i had been a journalist for a long time before i wrote silkwood which is one of the reasons why i was even thought of in connection with the project and i had written a lot of things that weren't funny a lot of long reporting pieces so it was not that out of line for me to be interested in something like that it's the sort of thing i might have done a story on if i um had been a journalist at the time of him in the case of this is your life all the laurels or all the blame or at least an enormous portion of either go to you because you wrote it you direct it right well not all because good things yes and i did have many collaborators including my sister whom i wrote it with but um but uh this is one of the things i loved the most about directing was that i could screw it up all by myself it was great it was great and how do you think it came out well i like it but you do tend to well i don't think you always like your own movies i i mean there are you know i can conceive of making a movie that you work on a movie so long that the truth is that when you're done with it and you've seen it about 500 times if you even like three minutes of it it's a miracle but um but i like this movie i one of the reasons i like it is that it's a very personal movie it's um it's based on a novel that was written by meg wolitzer called this is your life a title we were not allowed to use because ralph edwards owns it and so we changed it to this is my life and it's about a woman who becomes a performer and leaves her kids with succession of stand-up comic babysitters while she goes off to become famous and it's really about it's about a lot of things it's about sisters and working mothers but it's it's about fundamentally two things one is that everyone in the family sees things completely differently the same exact things and the second thing it's about is a dirty little secret that a lot of working mothers know which is that pretty much everything that's good news for you is bad news for your kids so you couldn't call it this is your life because ralph edwards has the copyright but doesn't billy joel have the copyright on this is my life apparently not apparently not this is my life with julie cavner samantha mathis gabby hoffman dan aykroyd and carrie fisher gabby hoffman gabby hoffman she's ten do you know her uh-uh oh she's great she was the little girl in field of dreams who fell off the bleachers oh yeah she's great now i do know her phone call well see you later it must be for you [Music] you

Channel: clevelandlivemusic

Views: 150

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Nora Ephron, interview, Later with Bob Costas, This is my Life, Silkwood, When Harry met Sally, The Desk Set, Carl Bernstein

Id: W7xxlz5j8nE

Length: 21min 1sec (1261 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 02 2021