Nora Ephron is often remembered as honest, hilarious and above the ordinary. The HBO documentary Everything is Copy – Nora Ephron: Scripted & Unscripted, written and directed by her son Jacob Bernstein, is all of this, and more.
Comprising archival interviews of Ephron, interviews with friends, family, and colleagues, scenes from her movies, and celebrity readings of her most iconic essays, the documentary does complete justice to Ephron’s larger-than-life personality. It was premiered on HBO in March and is yet to be aired in India.
Ephron, who died in 2012, knew that to go through life and survive is to be the hero and not the victim. Her mother’s motto, “Everything is copy,”, from which the film takes its title, is the credo by which Ephron chose to live. What it means is that anything that ever happens to you – however monumental or inconsequential, tragic or comical – is essentially a story. Nora Ephron, like her mother, believed that by turning her life into a work on art, she could ensure that she stays in charge of the narrative, of the plotlines, and ultimately the laughs.
Essayist, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, filmmaker and feminist, Ephron was a raw, gritty, unapologetic, and truly comedic voice that inspired countless writers. Her essays are funny and are heavily inspired by her own life. Her movies are heartwarming and sprinkled with original insight. The writer of Silkwood and When Harry Met Sally, and the director of Sleepless in Seattle and Julie and Julia, Ephron’s witty and merciless writing can be considered a genre in itself. A self-confessed expert at human relationships, she observed people and turned them into characters, plot devices, props, or set design – whichever part they convincingly served in her version of the story.
Her son Jacob is a reporter for the New York Times newspaper as well as a writer. His writing is as impersonal as Ephron’s work was autobiographical. Heartburn, her first novel, which was made into a movie staring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson, was a retelling of her very bitter and public divorce from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Carl Bernstein (co-author of All the President’s Men). And that was just the beginning. Remember Julie’s complete devotion to Julia Child in Julie and Julia? The sibling rivalry in Hanging Up? And Meg Ryan ordering a pie in When Harry Met Sally? That was all Nora Ephron too.
When Ephron finally came across a story she could not control, she decided to conceal it. She hid her acute myeloid leukemia diagnosis from even her closest friends, which was unexpected for a woman who lived, thrived and openly laughed under the sun. This became the motivation for her son to tell his own version of the story.
It took Jacob Bernstein two years to bring together everyone (especially his father Carl Bernstein, who was reluctant to relive the publicity that came with Heartburn in 1986). While the documentary celebrates her life and work, and her mind, it does not gloss over the warts that pop up through the many conversations with those who knew her best. She was ruthless in her portrayal of the world around her. “Writers are cannibals,” she said.
Ephron was never afraid to attack or expose her family or friends in her writing, yet she always remained the person you wanted to impress. Director Steven Spielberg says that all he wanted to do was to make her laugh, that would’ve been just like winning an Oscar. Other than Spielberg, the film features Meryl Streep, Meg Ryan, Reese Witherspoon, Lena Dunham, the late Mike Nichols, Rob Reiner, her ex-husband Carl Bernstein, her siblings, and many other people, actors, writers, editors, filmmakers and friends who had been touched by Ephron’s wit and words. It is clear that the loss is still felt acutely by all who knew her.