Nora Ephron revolutionized the rom-com and now fans and newcomers to her work can take a deep dive into just how significant her influence was on the genre.
Nora Ephron at the Cinema: A Visual Celebration of the Writer-Director Behind Harry Met Sally, You’ve Got Mail, Sleepless in Seattle, and More by PEOPLE writer and editor Ilana Kaplan, due out this fall from Abrams, details the life and work of the beloved journalist, essayist, screenwriter, author, producer, director and feminist.
With a foreword by Jason Diamond, the book combines detailed criticism with analysis of Ephron’s work as a rom-com champion and Hollywood pioneer. It will also feature exclusive interviews with some of Ephron’s key collaborators, including Andie MacDowell and Jenn Kaytin Robinson, to add color and nuance to her life and legacy.
Read an exclusive excerpt from the book below that explores how Ephron changed Hollywood forever.
‘Nora Ephron at the movies’ by Ilana Kaplan.
Abrams
Think of Nora Ephron as the fairy godmother of modern rom-coms. After years of the genre waiting, she waved a magic wand and wrote scintillating scripts, the equivalent of charming ball gowns for women who wouldn’t put up with any s—. She captivated Hollywood with her charming plots, explosive chemistry and suggestive questions about fate and romance.
Nora deserves significant credit for the rom-com boom of the 1990s and early 2000s, which created regular opportunities for women to write, direct and produce, and created a modern commentary on dating and being single that connected with audiences.
The widespread critical and commercial success of Nora’s genre-defining film When Harry met Sally and the “whore with a heart of gold” vehicle. Pretty Woman (directed by Garry Marshall) ushered in a new era for the rom-com. (The former grossed a whopping $92.8 million at the box office, while the latter became the biggest rom-com hit in history with a total since 1990, according to Indiewire) .
His success helped usher in an era. But a rom-com about a love story about a prostitute wouldn’t take off on its own. The rom-com renaissance was fueled by quirky “girl-next-door” types like Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts, anchors of flawed heroines and their witty lines. And Nora continued to build on her success When Harry met Sally with the year 1993 Sleepless in Seattle and in 1998 You have mail— a trio of canonical projects.
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Nora Ephron on the set of the film ‘You have mail’.
Richard Foreman/Dreamworks/Mad Chance/Paramount/Kobal/Shutterstock
Before Nora, the rom-com had a reliable formula: boy meets girl, boy and girl have a conflict, then boy and girl resolve the conflict and live happily ever after, with cinematic flourishes including bombshell leads, superficial chemistry, and predictable humor.
As trends came and went, the rom-com evolved and underwent a series of changes: The Great Depression was dominated by wacky comedies like His bachelorette Friday (1940) i Lady Eve (1941), elevated by leading Hollywood stars such as Cary Grant and Barbara Stanwyck; from the 1950s to the 1960s, rom-coms “radicalized” the sexual liberation movement and resulted in films such as Battle of the sexes (1960) i Lover Come back (1961), where the enemy-to-lovers trope ran rampant.
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By the 1970s, the rom-com formula had become redundant, except for the introduction Annie Hall (1977) i Manhattan (1979), which talked about insecurity, anxiety and bittersweet romance. In the 1980s, high school romantic comedies like Sixteen candles and The breakfast clubbut the allure of rom-coms largely disappeared at the box office, until Nora ushered in their golden age.
Growing up in love with old Hollywood romance movies like The lady disappears (1938), An affair to remember (1957) i Apartment (1960) influenced Nora’s rom-com framework, but put her own personal spin on the genre. She added Woody Allen’s neuroses, witty dialogue, a sense of nostalgia and real female heroines written through a female gaze.
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A clip from ‘When Harry Met Sally’.
Alamy
And, as Andrew O’Hehir noted in Salon , “Ephron’s best scripts offered the comfort of an old-fashioned love story in what felt like a fizzy, urban contemporary setting.”
She discovered the perfect recipe for building chemistry, often in a gray metropolis like New York or Seattle. In turn, Nora built a clear sense of familiarity in all her characters, which made the genre more universal. She made ordinary relationships—an email exchange or a voice on a radio show—seem like destiny, quenching the audience’s thirst for old-school Hollywood romance with an added layer of vulnerability and intimacy.
Nora may not have invented meet-cute, but she certainly took the reins and made it her own. With meet-cute after meet-cute inside When Harry met Sally‘s vignettes, we’ve all come to believe that love can come from a cross-country trip or a chance encounter in a bookstore.
Reprinted from Nora Ephron at the Cinema: A Visual Celebration of the Writer-Director Behind Harry Met Sally, You’ve Got Mail, Sleepless in Seattle, and More, published by Abrams. Text copyright ©2024 Ilana Kaplan, cover © 2024 Abrams.
Nora Ephron at the cinema will hit shelves on October 29 and is available now, wherever books are sold.
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Source: HIS Education