Nora Ephron
Nora Ephron arrived at film from journalism and the personal essay, and it is audible in every line she wrote. Her characters talk the way people talk when they are performing for one another: in complete paragraphs, competitively, and usually about something small. She wrote and directed romantic comedies during a period when the form was considered beneath serious attention, and she was better at it than that reputation allowed.
Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail are the two that lasted, and both work by keeping the leads apart. One conducts its romance through a radio phone-in, the other through email, so almost all of the charm has to be carried by talk rather than by chemistry in a shared room, which is precisely the solution a writer with her background would reach for. Julie & Julia introduced a third register, food, which had run underneath her work for years before it finally became the subject.
She was not infallible and the record here says so. Mixed Nuts, Lucky Numbers and Bewitched are the films of someone whose gift for voice did not always survive a high-concept premise. Her book I Feel Bad About My Neck is a reminder that the essay was always the home form. She also turns up as an extra in two Woody Allen films, a wedding guest in Crimes and Misdemeanors and a dinner party guest in Husbands and Wives.
She received a BAFTA Award, and nominations for three Academy Awards, a Tony Award, a Golden Globe and three Writers Guild of America Awards.
Movies (12)
Books (1)
Where to start with Nora Ephron
Her method is clearest in Sleepless in Seattle, which should be first: two leads who barely share a scene, held together entirely by writing. If it works on you, You've Got Mail is the more comfortable and arguably better-constructed version of the same idea.
Julie & Julia is the one to watch third and the most underrated, half of it a great performance about a real cook, half of it a blog adaptation that struggles to keep up. Then read I Feel Bad About My Neck, which is where her voice sits undiluted by anyone else's notes. For the curious, This Is My Life is her directorial debut and the most personal film here, Michael is the strange one, and Mixed Nuts and Lucky Numbers are the misfires, useful mainly for seeing what happens when her dialogue is fitted to a premise that cannot hold it. When Harry Met Sally, her most quoted screenplay, is not among the credits listed here.