Tom Hanks is a big believer in breathing, I told a friend with PTSD seven years ago. Here are the quotes I shared with her.
Read More...“It seems to me that the first thing we have to do is to separate out the things that are pleasant from the things that are unpleasant.” Hmm …
Read More...Coming full circle with my long-ago desire to be like Cher in one particular scene in “Moonstruck.”
Read More...Published June 17, 2018
Lady Bird was released in December, but I didn’t get around to watching it until awards season, just before the Oscars. I meant to write something about it sooner, but life got in the way. I loved it enough to buy it, and I re-watched it this weekend.
Published May 3, 2018
My desire to see “The Post” owed mostly to my long career in newspapers, but motivations are often complex, and that was true about my interest in this movie. A believer in the role that newspapers have as watchdog, I felt an extra pull to view Tom Hanks as Ben Bradlee and Meryl Streep as Katharine Graham. Those characters, the editor and the publisher of The Washington Post at the time of the controversial public disclosure of the Pentagon Papers, have been well known to me for decades.
Published February 2, 2018
The mass shooting Wednesday in Parkland, Florida, and the public reactions from students who survived it caused me to think a lot about high school. During my four years, nothing remotely close to it ever happened. Until Columbine in April 1999, something like that occurring on a high school campus was largely unimaginable to me.
Published February 12, 2018
Earlier this month, I reconnected with a good friend from college. Conversation soon turned to movies, and she recommended “Housekeeping” (1987). Directed by Bill Forsyth, it is based on Marilynne Robinson’s 1981 novel. If you watch it in a mood similar to mine when I saw it a couple of weeks ago, you might be taken aback by the use of the word “comedy” in the opening of Vincent Canby’s November 1987 review for The New York Times. Taken in full, the description “haunting comedy” feels closer to the mark.
Published October 23, 2017
I thought we were gonna get television. The truth is, television is gonna get us.
Over the weekend, I watched the 1994 film “Quiz Show” again. Like a lot of movies, books, short stories, TV shows, documentaries and news stories I’ve revisited in the past year or so, it unexpectedly spoke to the ugly realities of this point in time.
Photo by s_bukley/Shutterstock.com
Published May 19, 2016
There is something, I am certain, for everyone in “Everything is Copy,” a 2015 documentary about writer and filmmaker Nora Ephron. Perhaps the most compelling reasons to watch it center on writing — specifically writing about oneself and one’s life, and whether everything is fair game. Not only that, but whether it’s essential to tell the stories that others might wish you would never write. The personal stories other writers might be afraid to tell.
Written and directed by Jacob Bernstein, the firstborn of Ephron’s two sons, “Everything is Copy” debuted on HBO in March. My most recent viewing was yesterday, on my late mother’s birthday, a date I picked for reasons that probably make sense only to me.
Today is Nora Ephron’s birthday. If you know her from her writing and directing such films as “Sleepless in Seattle,” “When Harry Met Sally…” or “You’ve Got Mail,” there are moments in “Everything is Copy” that you will surely enjoy. If you know that she was a reporter for the New York Post in the 1960s and then began writing a column on women’s issues for Esquire, the film has nuggets you will appreciate. Her marriage to, and divorce from, Carl Bernstein, known best for teaming with Bob Woodward in covering the Watergate break-in and aftermath for The Washington Post, was fodder for her 1983 novel “Heartburn” — and has a major role in her son’s documentary.
The title he chose for the 89-minute film about his mother speaks to a phrase she learned from her mother, and which invested much of her life’s work and her ability to deal with the most painful moments of her personal life. It is very much, like the documentary, a statement about what to leave in, and what to leave out, as a writer.
As Ephron says in the first of several sections of her own narration during the film, she and her three younger sisters had those three words ingrained in them at an early age.
“We all grew up with this thing that my mother said to us over and over and over and over again, which was, ‘Everything is copy.’ You know, you’d come home with some thing that you thought was the tragedy of your life — someone hadn’t asked you to dance, or the hem had fallen out of your dress, or whatever you thought was the worst thing that could ever happen to a human being — and my mother would say, ‘Everything is copy.’ ” Write it down, she would tell her children. It’s all material.
As an adult, Ephron wrote: “I now believe that what my mother meant is this: When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you, but when you tell people that you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh, so you become the hero, rather than the victim, of the joke. I think that’s what she meant.
“On the other hand, she may merely have meant, ‘Everything is copy.’ ”
Survivor tools
Ephron was born in New York City, but when she was young the family moved to Beverly Hills, California, and her playwright parents both pursued screenwriting as a career. The documentary describes their alcoholism and, eventually, the death of Ephron’s mother as a result.
“My mother died of cirrhosis,” Ephron wrote, “but the immediate cause of her death was an overdose of sleeping pills administered by my father. At the time, this didn’t seem to me to fall under the rubric of ‘everything is copy,’ although it did to my sister Amy, who put it into a novel. Who can blame her?”
Part of Jacob Bernstein’s motivation in making “Everything is Copy” was to talk with people who had been close to Nora Ephron, his mother, and to try to better understand what shaped her life and her resiliency, and to take a closer look at whether everything was indeed copy for her. As it turned on, it was not so true for his grandmother, Ephron’s mother, who was so fond of saying it to her daughters.
“My grandmother said everything was copy, but in the end, she only wrote superficially about the things that happened to her,” Jacob Bernstein says in voice-over narration during the film. “Is that part of why she wound up being less successful than my mom? In AA, they say you are as sick as your secrets. Did my grandmother’s failure to admit slipping on the banana peel hasten her demise? Did my mom’s need for control stem from her mom’s loss of it?”
Ephron’s sister Amy offers her perspective on the legacy left by their two alcoholic parents: “I think one of the things we got from them, in a sort of backhanded way, is that we got kind of survivor tools. Watching them not have the equipment to reinvent themselves fueled the kind of reinvention that certainly Nora had — not even a coping mechanism. It’s something way beyond that. It was like, ‘You’re not gonna knock me down.’ ”
Nora Ephron reinvented herself throughout her adult life, through three marriages, through the transition from reporting to column and essay writing to screenwriting and, eventually, directing. She was a mother with a toddler, and pregnant with her second son, when she discovered that her husband, Carl Bernstein, had been cheating on her. Some of her greatest successes came after that heartbreak, but getting to that point was difficult.
She had moved from New York to Washington, D.C. because of the relationship, but she returned to her comfort zone to pick up the pieces of her life after telling the world, through gossip columnist Liz Smith, that the marriage was over.
She wrote it funny
Director Mike Nichols, interviewed by Jacob Bernstein for the documentary before his fatal heart attack in November 2014, tells the story of how Nora Ephron moved into the home of Bob Gottlieb, her editor at Alfred Knopf, after leaving Washington — and the marriage to Carl Bernstein: “Very, very few, if any, people that I can think of have ever survived being publicly cuckolded — Nora being the exception that it’s like those photographs of cats that somebody took, in which they’ve decided to change direction in mid-jump. Because what she did is, in mid-jump, she moved to the Gottliebs’ house and cried for six months — and wrote it funny, and in writing it funny, she won. And betrayed women all over the world knew it and cheered.”
Three years after the 1983 publication of the novel “Heartburn,” which bore a striking resemblance to the story of Ephron’s relationship with Carl Bernstein, Nichols directed the movie adaptation. It was not as popular as the book, which was funnier than the movie and had been popular with women. This excerpt, read by Ephron in footage later used in “Everything is Copy,” might help explain that popularity.
I had gotten on the shuttle to New York a few hours after discovering the affair, which I learned about from a really disgusting inscription to my husband in a book of children’s songs she had given him. Children’s songs. ‘Now you can sing these songs to Sam’ was part of the disgusting inscription, and I can’t begin to tell you how it sent me up the wall, the idea of my 2-year-old child, my baby, involved in some dopey inscriptive way in this affair between my husband, a fairly short person, and Thelma Rice, a fairly tall person, with a neck as long as an arm, and a nose as long as a thumb, and you should see her legs, never mind her feet, which are sort of splayed.”
Marie Brenner, a journalist who was friends with Ephron and who had dated Carl Bernstein before he started seeing Ephron, says in the documentary that Ephron’s writing helped her get past tough moments in her life.
“She had detachment, so that she was able to be her own helicopter pilot, flying up when she was in front of her typewriter and getting it down without feeling the need to vomit her problems all over someone.”
Says Bryan Lourd, her agent at Creative Artists Agency: “She had the ability to go back to the typewriter and write herself out of trouble, and she was very adept and facile at shape-shifting.”
But after Ephron was diagnosed in 2006 with the blood disorder myelodysplasia, which led to the form of leukemia that caused her death, she largely kept it a secret. Brenner, while being interviewed by Jacob Bernstein for “Everything is Copy,” reflects on that turn of events: “How interesting it was, Jacob, that at the end of her life, where everything — your mother’s mantra, your grandmother’s mantra: ‘Nora, this is all material; Nora, this is material’ — at the most powerful moment of her life, when she was facing her death, it was not material. It was not a story.”
A story she couldn’t control
Which brings us back to the main point of the documentary, its raison d’être. As Jacob Bernstein puts it: “For decades, my mother put her private life front and center — writing about her physical inadequacies, the indignities of aging, and the breakup of her marriage to my father. But at the end of her life, she chose to stay silent about the blood disorder that killed her. Why, after being so open about everything else, did she choose not to address the most significant crisis of her life?”
“I think this was a story that she couldn’t control,” says Richard Cohen, a Washington Post columnist who became a close friend of Ephron’s. “The other stuff, she could control. She told it her way.”
Through the process of making “Everything is Copy,” Jacob Bernstein draws some conclusions that align comfortably with Cohen’s assessment.
“I think at the end of my mom’s life, she believed that everything is not copy, that the things you want to keep are not copy, that the people you love are not copy.” He goes on, saying that he thinks her opinion changed to being “what is copy is the stuff you’ve lost, the stuff you’re willing to give away, the things that have been taken from you. She saw ‘everything is copy’ as a means of controlling the story. Once she became ill, the way to control the story was to make it not exist.”
Meryl Streep, who played Karen Silkwood in “Silkwood,” written by Ephron and directed by Nichols, played the character loosely based on Ephron in “Heartburn.” Like many who knew Ephron — Rob Reiner, Bob Balaban, Gay Talese, and even Nichols — Streep did not know Ephron was dying. Almost no one did, including those she worked with on her last projects. Nichols’ interview includes him saying that he was too stupid to realize, as others did, that his last meal with Ephron was a goodbye lunch.
The privacy with which Ephron managed to spend her final days stunned many who knew her, including Streep: “And she’s the one who said, ‘There is no privacy. Forget privacy — it’s gone.’ And this is the most fascinating thing in the whole world to me, because she achieved a private act in a world where the most superficial parts of the most intimate acts are everywhere and sold. They’re sold.”
A means out of victimhood
In an interview on NPR’s “Fresh Air” about “Everything is Copy,” Jacob Bernstein reveals a pragmatic reason for Ephron’s privacy near the end of her life. He says that for his mother, the philosophy that became the title of the documentary “was really a means out of victimhood. It really was the belief in being the heroine of your life and not the victim, and how do you not become the victim if people are walking up to you and saying, ‘How are you? Are you OK?’ She didn’t want that. So, it was a secret that allowed her to move throughout the world in control.”
For much of her writing life, and in the personal life that helped provide the material for it, Ephron was notorious for being ruthless.
“It was part of her whole Dorothy Parker thing,” producer Amy Pascal says, “to cut people to the quick.”
That was not lost on Ephron’s son, whose interview with NPR includes this perspective: “I think that comedy exists in this thin line between bravery and ruthlessness, and part of what I was after with the film was the belief that it’s both, and that it’s possible for the kind of cannibalism that writing is to be both a tremendous source of self-actualization and something that’s a little unseemly and unfair to other people.”
Meg Ryan and others interviewed for “Everything is Copy” says that late in her life, Ephron became softer, more accepting of others’ weaknesses and even her own. But she seemed to remain a woman who considered herself an expert on relationships, and a person who wasn’t shy about giving advice to people, whether about their love life or other matters.
Donald J. Lee Jr., an assistant director and producer who worked with Ephron on “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail,” sheds some light on the void she left behind after being such an influential person in the lives of those she cared about. Talking with Jacob Bernstein, pushing the words through a throat full of emotion, Lee says, “I was riding up in the elevator after your mother died with Mike Nichols, and he just looked at me, and we said, ‘Who … who’s gonna tell us what to do?’ ”
¶
Had she lived to see today, she would have been 75 years old. That’s the age my mother was when she died in 2006, the year Nora Ephron was diagnosed with the blood disorder that ended her life on June 26, 2012.
There are remembrances of her online today, and I’m sure there will be again on the anniversary of her death. People will continue to talk about what they learned from her through her movies, and they will remember their favorite scenes and lines from them. People will write about “Everything is Copy.” They will tweet about her, as people are doing today.
On her birthday, 16 #NoraEphron quotes that taught us how to love >> https://t.co/0wEUXukIZy
— Free Library of Philadelphia (@FreeLibrary) May 19, 2016
"Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything." —Nora Ephron #bornonthisday pic.twitter.com/negEv0uP3x
— PEN America (@PENamerica) May 19, 2016
Quotable – Nora Ephron https://t.co/nIJ9G33dPj born 19 May 1941, died 26 June 2012 pic.twitter.com/PIyGnSe3RO
— Amanda Patterson (@amandaonwriting) May 19, 2016
Happy birthday Nora Ephron! #TCMParty pic.twitter.com/lpnqB4NXac
— Elise (@TeamRickandIlsa) May 19, 2016
I’m certain that there are people who knew her who will say, as Lee and Nichols did on the day she died, “Who’s gonna tell us what to do?” Don’t think I didn’t say and think the same at times after my mother died. I thought about that Wednesday on her birthday. I’m thinking about the same feeling of loss that people are being reminded of today on Ephron’s birthday, a feeling that’s accompanied by the joy in remembering what made her special.
Like I do regarding my mom, people who still feel that void can return to their memories. Regarding Nora Ephron, they can open one of her books, or watch one of her movies, and discover that somewhere inside each, she is there, in her way as a writer, director or both, doing that just. Telling us what to do. Or, maybe, who we are. The part of her that was confident in her read on men and women helped her tell stories that resonated with so many.
“Everything is Copy” is out there too, and I suspect more people will discover it and watch it because of the discussion about her on social media today, and again in late June. Maybe they will learn how to be their own helicopter pilot, flying their way out of their troubles by finding a way to tell their story — and by being the hero or heroine of it.
Published January 28, 2016
The Challenger launch 30 years ago marked NASA’s 25th Space Shuttle mission, the 20th after five test flights. Much like the nearly doomed Apollo 13 mission some 16 years earlier, mission STS-51-L came along far enough into the program’s timeline that some people no longer felt compelled to watch its liftoff on television. What captured the imagination of many who followed the buildup to launch was the presence on the crew of Christa McAuliffe, selected from more than 11,000 applicants to become the first teacher in space. The mission was the 10th for Challenger, the second shuttle put into service by NASA.
By now, you no doubt know what happened 73 seconds after Challenger’s liftoff.
Today’s anniversary brings back memories, many of them shared by the millions who followed the news after the shuttle broke apart on that Tuesday morning high above the Kennedy Space Center on the eastern coast of Florida. There are phrases we will always connect with the disaster.
- The words of NASA public affairs officer Steve Nesbitt, who sat at a desk at Mission Control in Houston and relayed status updates heard by everyone watching the live broadcast: “Obviously a major malfunction.”
- President Ronald Reagan’s speech that that night that ended with a reference to how the Challenger astronauts “waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’ “
On that sunny winter’s morning, there were, as USA Today recalled five years ago, the “two separate streams of smoke veering first apart and then together, then twisting around in a wild dance.” There was the look on the face of McAuliffe’s father, who was in the spectator gallery near the launch site, trying to process what had happened moments after the shuttle broke into pieces. Later, there were memorial services, and schools and scholarships named in honor of astronauts lost as the mission was barely underway.
There are other things I will never forget. The morning of the launch, I read a newspaper story that previewed the expected launch, noting that it had been scrubbed or delayed several times in the previous week. A student at Concord High School in New Hampshire, where McAuliffe taught, let on that it was getting rather tiresome hearing so much about her day after day. Almost every year on the anniversary, I wonder how he felt after the disaster, and in the days and weeks after it.
In the late ’80s, a self-promotional CNN bumper showed the dramatic moment of the fireball and the shuttle coming apart, dubbing in the sound of a loud explosion that wasn’t part of its live coverage on Jan. 28, 1986. I remember being stunned and outraged CNN felt that the moment needed hyping so it could hype itself coming in and out of commercial breaks. It’s still nauseating and disappointing to me to recall it.
One memory I doubt anyone else has from 30 years ago involves the somewhat unlikely pairing in my mind of the Space Shuttle disaster and the movie “Runaway Train.” Its nationwide release was Jan. 17, 1986, five days before the planned Challenger launch, and less than two weeks before the eventual launch. I saw it in its first few days of release and found it gripping, and I left the theater certain I would want to see it again, largely because of the performance by Jon Voight and how the train seemed like a character itself (like the music at times). Director Andrei Konchalovsky painted a haunting picture of two escaped prisoners and a crew member confronting their own mortality on the runaway locomotive. Roger Ebert, who shared my enthusiasm about the film, wrote this in his review:
The ending of the movie is astonishing in its emotional impact. I will not describe it. All I will say is that Konchalovsky has found the perfect visual image to express the ideas in his film. Instead of a speech, we get a picture, and the picture says everything that needs to be said. Afterward, just as the screen goes dark, there are a couple of lines from Shakespeare that may resonate more deeply the more you think about the Voight character.
For days following the Challenger disaster, my emotions were not unexpected or unusual. It was a horrible way for seven people to die, and my shock and sadness were probably no different than what most others experienced. Also, I’d grown up enthralled by NASA and every part of the U.S. space program, and I knew this was a blow to the program and the public’s confidence in it.
But something else was nagging at me, some unresolved tension I couldn’t identify. It was a thick, unsettling fog as I tried to move through it and through my daily routine. The more my intellect searched for a handle on the feeling, the more any logical explanation eluded me.
Then one weekday afternoon I took a nap and woke up with a start, roused by the sound of a single, booming explosion. I’d had a dreamless sleep, so I asked my mom if she’d heard the loud noise. She said no, asking me if I’d had a bad dream. I said no, then found myself opening the newspaper for the page with the movie listings, suddenly feeling pulled toward a second viewing of “Runaway Train.” I saw that I had just enough time to drive across town and make it to the 7ish showing. For much of it, I was somewhat distracted, still shrouded in whatever undefined uneasiness had taken hold since the shuttle had exploded.
I watched, for a second time, the person in charge at the railway’s central control room monitoring the situation with the runaway train by radio communications and with a $4.5 million state-of-the-art computerized system he’d designed and installed. As others begin to panic, he takes a sip of coffee and says, “Come on, the system’s foolproof.” But, one by one, the usual safeguards become disabled or nonexistent through a series of unexpected developments.
As the train, and the three people on board, speed toward the film’s climax, the staff at central control, after making a series of decisions designed to limit casualties, is left to do nothing but wait for what seems inevitable. As a supervisor tinkers with what resembles a chain of interconnected, oversized paperclips, the young man who designed the high-tech system is shaken by his inability to take control of the train.
“I still don’t understand,” he says. “How did this happen? Why couldn’t we stop it, with all this junk? I mean, with all this high technology?”
As he speaks, a report about a successful NASA launch of two communications satellites is on a television near his workstation. After showing highlights from the launch, the report cuts to a smooth landing by the Space Shuttle at the end of the mission.
That’s when I knew what had been gnawing at me since the Challenger disaster. That’s when the unresolved tension gave way to an understanding that the clip showing the Space Shuttle — at such a reflective moment in the film, a moment of realization about the things we make that we think are foolproof — had made an impression on me the first time I saw the movie. But it did so in a way I didn’t consciously remember the day the shuttle exploded after liftoff. Yet, my subconscious tugged at me from then until I went back for that second viewing. I concluded that my subconscious mind woke me from that nap with what I’d thought was the sound of an explosion, and somehow stirred me to seemingly randomly pick that night to see “Runaway Train” again.
All of the usual emotions following a tragedy were still with me to some degree, but the unsettling feeling I’d had, the one I couldn’t put my finger on, was gone. Instead of having an eerie vibe about the way it led me to see the movie a second time, I felt calm. There was resolution, yes, but also a level of comfort that my subconscious mind was looking out for me. It’s not the only time it’s done that, but it remains one of the most memorable. For a long time, I tried to glean some deeper meaning from it, but mostly I accepted that it was a reminder of the power and complexities of our subconscious minds.
So many lives were changed by the Challenger disaster 30 years ago, when we were again jolted out of whatever complacency had settled in after a series of successful missions. Watching “Runaway Train” again recently, I found myself considering that only a fool thinks that anything made by us is foolproof, and how the systems we build tend to be susceptible to human error, user error and the number of ways in which we arrogantly tempt fate. The conclusions drawn after the failure of the shuttle’s O-rings, which were never tested in extremely cold weather, are widely available for examination.
Thirty years later, my mind still links Challenger and “Runaway Train,” and it probably always will.
Photo by Everett Historical/ Shutterstock.com