The When Harry Met Sally screenwriter, who has died aged 71, invented the sentimental, screwball romcom – and turned heartbreak into laughter
"Ohh … Ohhhh … Ohhhh … Yes!"
"I'll have what she's having!"
The great scene in When Harry Met Sally when Meg Ryan demonstrates to a gobsmacked Billy Crystal that women can fake orgasm any time is the classic, almost quintessential Nora Ephron moment [see footnote]. It features smart, wiseacre conversation over lunch – and the lunch scene is a signature Ephron trope. It's about sex, and yet sex is ironised, miraculously made light of, made to seem funny; yet at the same time it's weirdly intimate. There's a sly nod to a gal-pal world of female secrets withheld from the hopeless guys who think they're in charge of everything. And there's the killer payoff line, the work of a blackbelt comedy writer.
Perhaps above all, the scene has a hint of fantasy and wish-fulfilment. Imagine that!
"Ohh … Ohhhh … Ohhhh … Yes!"
"I'll have what she's having!"
The great scene in When Harry Met Sally when Meg Ryan demonstrates to a gobsmacked Billy Crystal that women can fake orgasm any time is the classic, almost quintessential Nora Ephron moment [see footnote]. It features smart, wiseacre conversation over lunch – and the lunch scene is a signature Ephron trope. It's about sex, and yet sex is ironised, miraculously made light of, made to seem funny; yet at the same time it's weirdly intimate. There's a sly nod to a gal-pal world of female secrets withheld from the hopeless guys who think they're in charge of everything. And there's the killer payoff line, the work of a blackbelt comedy writer.
Perhaps above all, the scene has a hint of fantasy and wish-fulfilment. Imagine that!
- 6/28/2012
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Smart, honest, funny and hard-working, screenwriter Nora Ephron was the woman every woman wished was her best friend
Dry skin. Email. Panels on "Women in Film". These are just some of the things the great and, unbelievably, now late Nora Ephron included in her list of "Things I won't miss" in her last collection of essays, the mortality-tinged I Remember Nothing. Unfortunately for the rest of us, it's a list that serves as a reminder of how much Ephron herself will be missed.
For a start, it sounds a little like a whistlestop tour of topics that have featured in Ephron's five decades-long career as a journalist, screenwriter and essayist. Few people wrote about body insecurities as shrewdly and hilariously as Ephron, from the smallness of her breasts in her 1972 essay A Few Words About Breasts, included in the collection Crazy Salad ("My girlfriends, the ones with the nice big breasts,...
Dry skin. Email. Panels on "Women in Film". These are just some of the things the great and, unbelievably, now late Nora Ephron included in her list of "Things I won't miss" in her last collection of essays, the mortality-tinged I Remember Nothing. Unfortunately for the rest of us, it's a list that serves as a reminder of how much Ephron herself will be missed.
For a start, it sounds a little like a whistlestop tour of topics that have featured in Ephron's five decades-long career as a journalist, screenwriter and essayist. Few people wrote about body insecurities as shrewdly and hilariously as Ephron, from the smallness of her breasts in her 1972 essay A Few Words About Breasts, included in the collection Crazy Salad ("My girlfriends, the ones with the nice big breasts,...
- 6/28/2012
- by Hadley Freeman
- The Guardian - Film News
Billy Crystal and Meryl Streep among luminaries praising work of film-maker best known for When Harry Met Sally
Hollywood stars have been paying tribute to the wisdom and wit of their friend and colleague the film-maker Nora Ephron, the screenwriter behind When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, who has died at the age of 71.
Billy Crystal, who starred with Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally, told the Huffington Post: "She was a brilliant writer and humorist. Being her Harry to Meg's Sally will always have a special place in my heart. I was very lucky to get to say her words." Ephron died on Tuesday after suffering complications from the blood disorder myelodysplasia, with which she was diagnosed six years ago.
Having begun a journalistic career as a reporter at the New York Post in the 1960s, she moved into scriptwriting after working on a screenplay for All the President's Men,...
Hollywood stars have been paying tribute to the wisdom and wit of their friend and colleague the film-maker Nora Ephron, the screenwriter behind When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, who has died at the age of 71.
Billy Crystal, who starred with Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally, told the Huffington Post: "She was a brilliant writer and humorist. Being her Harry to Meg's Sally will always have a special place in my heart. I was very lucky to get to say her words." Ephron died on Tuesday after suffering complications from the blood disorder myelodysplasia, with which she was diagnosed six years ago.
Having begun a journalistic career as a reporter at the New York Post in the 1960s, she moved into scriptwriting after working on a screenplay for All the President's Men,...
- 6/28/2012
- by Andrew Pulver
- The Guardian - Film News
It's been touching to see the outpouring of love for Nora Ephron since the journalist, novelist, screenwriter and director passed away last night. Ephron's films have never really been particularly trendy; you're not going to find many hip young filmmakers naming her as an influence. But it's clear from the last twelve hours or so that most cinephiles hold at least a few of her films close to their hearts. Ephron wasn't just the writer, and sometimes director, behind a string of classics, she was also one of the most important women in the film industry across the last twenty years, and one of the most insightful writers of female characters that Hollywood has ever had.
Her big-screen work is only a drop in the ocean of a long and hugely impressive career; she was a prolific and brilliant prose writer, and anyone with even a slight interest in Ephron...
Her big-screen work is only a drop in the ocean of a long and hugely impressive career; she was a prolific and brilliant prose writer, and anyone with even a slight interest in Ephron...
- 6/27/2012
- by Oliver Lyttelton
- The Playlist
Twickenham Film Studios' sad end, gunfight at a vacant lot near the Ok Corral and Joely Richardson's family semaphore habit
✒ Round where we live we're very sad indeed about the likely closure of Twickenham Film Studios. Many great British and foreign films have been made there, including the Beatles movies, Alfie, The Italian Job, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Fish Called Wanda, Blade Runner and more recently My Week with Marilyn and War Horse. The studio, which occasionally brought a faint dusting of star glamour to our suburb, has been on the site for 99 years. Now there's a petition to save it, signed by among others Steven Spielberg, Colin Firth and John Landis.
There is some puzzlement about why it has gone into administration. Someone who works there told me this week that it had been badly managed for years. Now comes the horrible news that Taylor...
✒ Round where we live we're very sad indeed about the likely closure of Twickenham Film Studios. Many great British and foreign films have been made there, including the Beatles movies, Alfie, The Italian Job, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Fish Called Wanda, Blade Runner and more recently My Week with Marilyn and War Horse. The studio, which occasionally brought a faint dusting of star glamour to our suburb, has been on the site for 99 years. Now there's a petition to save it, signed by among others Steven Spielberg, Colin Firth and John Landis.
There is some puzzlement about why it has gone into administration. Someone who works there told me this week that it had been badly managed for years. Now comes the horrible news that Taylor...
- 3/3/2012
- by Simon Hoggart
- The Guardian - Film News
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