Nora Ephron, who wrote ”When Harry Met Sally . . .” after listening to the romantic problems of director Rob Reiner and coproducer Andrew Scheinman, has been writing screenplays (”Silkwood,” ”Heartburn,” the upcoming
”Cookie”) for 10 years after coming off a successful career as a journalist and author.
She knows how the game is played.
After the shock of seeing her script for ”Heartburn,” based on her best-seller about the collapse of her marriage to Watergate investigative reporter Carl Bernstein, altered considerably as it was turned into a movie that starred Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson, Ephron realized that a movie writer ”can`t care” too much about the changes made during shooting. In fact, she welcomes some of the funny changes that Billy Crystal added to
”When Harry Met Sally . . .” out of what she calls ”his bag of goodies.”
”It takes a while before you understand this,” she explains over lunch in a conference room at Columbia Pictures` offices, ”but for a writer it`s important to realize that it`s not your movie. It`s the director`s movie. And that`s the truth.
”Now, if you`re really lucky . . . if you hit the jackpot . . . it`s your movie, too. But it`s basically the director`s movie. That is a lesson that you learn slowly.
”When the collaboration works . . . which, of course, it doesn`t always . . . in fact, most of the time it doesn`t . . . in fact, most of the time scripts get worse rather than get better . . .
”But when it works, it`s a bonanza because it gets better and the characters get richer.”
She pauses to point to an early scene in ”When Harry Met Sally . . .”, the one in which Crystal`s character shows his oafishness by spitting grape seeds onto Meg Ryan`s car window, as an example of one of the comic actor`s impromptu reactions that happened to fit her script very well.
”It was a well-written scene originally,” she says, ”but it`s the grapes that get the laugh and make it hysterically funny. Well, that`s what you want to happen on any play or movie. The actors bring physical things that make their characters work.”
She did, however, make it a point to be on the set on days when she felt that the dialogue was particularly important to a character`s development.
”You want to make sure that nobody is saying something that`s wrong for their character. Sometimes actors steal jokes from later in the movie. Cher did this on `Silkwood` and drove me absolutely crazy.”
But, Ephron says, realistically, ”If you`re into: `You can`t change a word of my dialogue!` I think it`s very hard to be in the movie business.”
She was attracted to the awkward romance of ”When Harry Met Sally . . .” because it was going to be about a subject she understood best-the power of words. She feels that a woman`s erogenous zone is the mind.
”This wasn`t going to be a movie about work because we (she, Reiner and Scheinman) were all people who functioned very well at work. It was just at life that we did not function so well.” (Ephron, who is married to New York magazine writer Nicholas Pileggi, adds that ”I finally lucked out in the husband department, so let`s hear it for me, one in three.”)
She continues that, ”From the beginning we said no car chases, no gunfire. I knew that I could write a movie where people talked, which is what I do, which is what we all do. Words are how their lives change or don`t change. It`s not from some wonderful plane flying into their lives so you get a great shot. You say the wrong thing. Or you say the right thing.”
Her longstanding interest in romance shows in her script.
”I think I`m a hopeless romantic against all the evidence,” Ephron says airily. ”I wrote this in `Heartburn.` This is what optimism is. If you get married a third time like me, it must be completely hopeless.”
