Learning from Nora Ephron: Everything Is Copy

Jacob Bernstein's HBO documentary-biography Everything Is Copy, about his late mother, Nora Ephron, is clearly driven by his own struggle to come to terms with his relationship to his father (Carl Bernstein) and his father's troubled relationship w/ Nora. JB is pretty much unflinching in his portrayal: Nora E comes off as extremely talented and intelligent, a sharp wit, a good friend to many (most famous) NYers, but also one with a cutting edge and one who died under some mystery: None of her friends (or sisters) knew that she was ill w/ a form of leukemia and her death came as a shock to many. The movie is star-stuffed if the literary world is your key constellation - so many famous editors, authors, agents, directors, producers, journalists, et al. willingly spoke with JB, which sometimes gives the documentary a sense of being a hagiography, but her 3 sisters ground us in reality, and the movie gives us a good sense of her difficult childhood (talented parents more engaged w/ their own work, and later with alcohol, than w/ their daughters) and her 2 troubled marriages. The third marriage, to author Nicholas Pileggi, was apparently the great love of her life, but it seems that he did not want to participate in this project. Nora became the ultimate insider through her wit, skill, chutzpah, and star-crossed marriages, and she had the talent to back it up; I found, however, that the film did not make me want to read or re-read anything she wrote, all of which seems to center on the pronoun "I" - a style breakthrough in the 70s and 80s but a bit stale today. Her greatest skill no doubt was as a screenwriter - each of her major screenplays, whether they're for your kind of movie or not - was fantastic, a breakthrough artistically and commercially, and the documentary includes excellent clips from her movie work: it's as if she needed the screenplay form to get herself out of the picture and to focus on people, drama, ideas, emotions. (She was less successful as a director, as the program recognizes.) I suspect a film student could spend a year learning from Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and You've Got Mail.