All Things Nora Ephron
Ilana Kaplan, author of Nora Ephron at the Movies (Abrams, 2024, $46.50), never met the legendary writer and director of classic romantic comedies “When Harry Met Sally,” “Sleepless in Seattle,” and “You’ve Got Mail.” However, those three standout works were so personal to Kaplan that she credited them in her wedding vows: “I gushed about how much rom-coms, specifically Nora’s trio of groundbreaking genre films, had shaped my core beliefs of finding true romance.”
Although it was those films in particular that impacted Kaplan’s life, her book is a fully comprehensive view of Ephron’s work, including the writer’s oft-quoted essays as well as the screenplays and directorial efforts that went beyond Ephron’s usual wheelhouse—and sometimes ended up “under the radar” or even a “critical miss.”
The subtitle of the volume is A Visual Celebration of the Writer and Director Behind When Harry Met Sally, You’ve Got Mail, Sleepless in Seattle, and More, and half the volume is devoted to film stills as well as publicity and production photos.
The great shots of Ephron on the sets of her films are gems.
And the information offered is extensive. Ephron started as a journalist at a time when positions for women at publications like Newsweek and The New York Post were in the mailroom rather than the reporting beat. Yet she persisted and began collecting bylines. She lived by the dictum “everything is copy,” a writerly strategy that served her well when her then-husband, fellow journalist Carl “Watergate” Bernstein, cheated on her while she was pregnant. She transformed that personal tsuris into the novel Heartburn and went on to write the screenplay for the film version directed by Mike Nichols.
Meryl Streep was cast as Rachel Samstat, the cookbook writer who was Ephron’s stand-in, and Jack Nicholson played the philandering husband Mark Feldman, a stand-in for Bernstein. Ephron had worked with Nichols and Streep before: her first screenplay (cowritten with Alice Arlen) was for Nichols’s activist film, Silkwood, about Karen Silkwood (Streep), who worked for a nuclear plant that exposed its workers to radiation; she became a whistleblower.
Although Silkwood might seem at odds with Ephron’s canonical rom-coms, Kaplan convincingly argues that the through line is Ephron’s commitment to “telling stories about determined, spirited women.” In this way, we might view Sally Albright (Meg Ryan) in Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally as another sort of activist: even in the riotously funny fake orgasm scene that takes place in Katz’s deli, “it was affirming to watch Sally shut down Harry’s arrogance about his sexual capabilities, considering he represents a classic chauvinistic straight guy from the eighties who saw women as sexual conquests.” Kaplan recognizes Ephron’s rom-coms as simultaneously conventional and revolutionary.
Julie and Julia was Ephron’s last film; she wrote and directed it. Paralleling the stories of Julia Child and the Child-obsessed food blogger Julie Powell, Ephron created a “foodies wet dream” onscreen.
Unbeknownst to those on set and most of her intimates, Ephron was quite ill during the production of the film. This time, she did not mine her own illness for copy; instead, she combined her passion for food—and for women who refuse to settle for crumbs—into her final hit.
While Ephron initially aspired to live like Dorothy Parker, a lone woman at a table of men, ultimately, Kaplan explains, “Nora wanted the table crowded with funny ladies.” While her work inspired such funny ladies as Lena Dunham and Mindy Kaling, so did her intentional mentoring. As Dunham put it in her memoir, Ephron’s “generosity with other women, with younger artists was completely unparalleled and she had a way of bringing everyone comfortably into her orbit…” At the end of the volume, Kaplan includes interviews with those who worked with Ephron. Lorraine Calvert, Costume Designer for You’ve Got Mail, echoes Dunham, describing “a really collaborative shoot with a lot of women… I’d never been in a situation like that.”
The encyclopedic nature of this volume means that Kaplan devotes as much time to works that she regards as “scattered” as she does to the classics that represent Ephron’s legacy. Yes, Kaplan’s generous scope here prevents the book from becoming a hagiography and demonstrates Ephron’s willingness to take professional risks. But sometimes, less is more. And oddly, Kaplan doesn’t engage with Ephron’s Jewishness in this otherwise wide-ranging book. In an interview with The Forward, Kaplan does talk about Ephron as a cultural Jew and thinks about Judaism as a “silent character” in her body of works. A discussion of the Jewish flavors baked into her oeuvre would have been an additional treat to complement the wealth of wonderful material on Ephron’s work, life, and legacy contained within this volume.
Helene Meyers is the author of Movie- Made Jews: An American Tradition.
