by Nora Ephron
Rob and Andy and I noodled for hours over the questions raised by friendship, and sex, and life in general; and as we did, I realized—long before I had any idea of what was actually going to happen in the movie itself—that I had found a wonderful character in Rob Reiner. Rob is a very strange person. He is extremely funny, but he is also extremely depressed—or at least he was at the time; he talked constantly about how depressed he was. “You know how women have a base of makeup,” he said to me. “I have a base of depression. Sometimes I sink below it. Sometimes I rise above it.” This line went right into the first draft of the movie, but somewhere along the line Rob cut it. A mistake, I think, but never mind. Here’s another from Rob on his depression: “I think I’m not ready for a relationship. When you’re as depressed as I am … If the depression was lifted, I would be able to be with someone on my level. But it’s like playing tennis on a windy day with someone who’s worse than you are. They can do all right against you, they can win a couple of games, but there’s too much wind. You know what I mean?” I have no idea what Rob was talking about, but as I wrote those words in my notebook I knew that I would use the lines somehow. And I did, and they were cut, and it was a mistake, and never mind.
The point is that Rob was depressed; but he wasn’t at all depressed about being depressed; in fact, he loved his depression. And so does Harry. Harry honestly believes that he is a better person than Sally because he has what Sally generously calls a dark side. “Suppose nothing happens to you,” he says in the first sequence of the movie. “Suppose you live there [New York] your whole life and nothing happens. You never meet anyone, you never become anything, and finally you die one of those New York deaths where nobody notices for two weeks until the smell drifts out into the hallway.” Harry is genuinely proud to have thought of that possibility and to lay it at the feet of this shallow young woman he is stuck in a car with for eighteen hours. He is thrilled to be the prince of darkness, the master of the worst-case scenario, the man who is happy to tell you, as you find yourself in the beginning of a love affair, that what follows lust, inevitably, is post-lust: “You take someone to the airport, it’s clearly the beginning of a relationship. That’s why I’ve never taken anyone to the airport at the beginning of a relationship…. Because eventually things move on and you don’t take someone to the airport, and I never wanted anyone to say to me, ‘How come you never take me to the airport anymore?’ ”
So I began with a Harry, based on Rob. And because Harry was bleak and depressed, it followed absolutely that Sally would be cheerful and chirpy and relentlessly, pointlessly, unrealistically, idiotically optimistic. Which is, it turns out, very much like me. I’m not precisely chirpy, but I am the sort of person who is fine, I’m just fine, everything’s fine. “I am over him,” Sally says, when she isn’t over him at all; I have uttered that line far too many times in my life, and far too many times I’ve made the mistake of believing it was true. Sally loves control—and I’m sorry to say that I do too. And inevitably, Sally’s need to control her environment is connected to food. I say inevitably because food has always been something I write about—in part because it’s the only thing I’m an expert on. But it wasn’t my idea to use the way I order food as a character trait for Sally; well along in the process—third or fourth draft or so—Rob and Andy and I were ordering lunch for the fifth day in a row, and for the fifth day in a row my lunch order—for an avocado and bacon sandwich—consisted of an endless series of parenthetical remarks. I wanted the mayonnaise on the side. I wanted the bread toasted and slightly burnt. I wanted the bacon crisp. “I just like it the way I like it,” I said, defensively, when the pattern was pointed out to me—and the line went into the script.
But all that came much later. In the beginning, I was more or less alone—with a male character based somewhat on Rob, and a female character based somewhat on me. And a subject. Which was not, by the way, whether men and women could be friends. The movie instead was a way for me to write about being single—about the difficult, frustrating, awful, funny search for happiness in an American city where the primary emotion is unrequited love. This is from my notes, February 5, 1985, Rob speaking: “This is a talk piece. There are no chase scenes. No food fights. This is walks, apartments, phones, restaurants, movies.” Also from my notes, Rob again: “We’re talking about a movie about two people who get each other from the breakup of the first big relationship in their lives to the beginning of the second. Transitional on some level. Who are friends, who don’t have sex, who nurse each other and comfort each other and talk to each other and then finally do it and it’s a mistake and recover from it and move into second relationships.” Here’s a scene from the first draft; it bit the dust early, too self-conscious, but I toss it in partly because I can’t stand to waste anything, and partly because it perfectly sums up the movie I was trying to write:
SALLY: I think we should write a movie about our relationship.
HARRY: What’s the plot?
SALLY: There are only two plots. The first is, an appealing character strives against great odds to achieve a worthwhile goal, and the second is, the bluebird of happiness is right in your own backyard. We’re the first.
HARRY: An appealing character—
SALLY: Two appealing characters strive against great odds to achieve a worthwhile goal. Two people become friends at the end of the first major relationship of their lives and get each other to the next major relationship of their lives.
HARRY: I don’t know anything about writing movies.
SALLY: Neither do I.
HARRY: But on the face of it—I don’t want to be negative about it—
SALLY: Sure you do. You love being negative, it’s who you are, embrace it—
HARRY: —but it seems to me that movies are supposed to be visual. We don’t do anything visual. We just sit in restaurants and talk, or we sit on the phone and talk, or we sit in your apartment or my apartment and talk.
SALLY: In French movies they just talk.
HARRY: Do you speak French?
SALLY: Not really.
HARRY: What happens to the friends when each of them gets to the next major relationship of their lives?
SALLY: They’re still going to be friends. They’re going to be friends forever.
HARRY: I don’t know, Sally. You know what happens. You meet somebody new and you take them to meet your friend, and you want them to like each other as much as you do, but they never do, they always see the friend as a threat to your relationship, and you try to stay just as good friends with your friend but eventually you don’t really need each other as much because you’ve got a new friend, you’ve got someone you can talk to and fuck—
SALLY: Forget I mentioned it, okay?
They smile at each other.
HARRY: I love you. You know that.
SALLY: I love you too.
HARRY: When I say, “I love you,” you know what I mean—
SALLY: I know what you mean. I know.
When Harry Met Sally started shooting in August 1988, almost four years after my first meeting with Rob and Andy. In the meantime I wrote a first draft about two people who get each other from the breakup of the first big relationship in their lives to the beginning of the second. Rob went off and made Stand By Me. We met again and decided that Harry and Sally belonged together. I wrote a second draft. Rob went off and made The Princess Bride. And then we all went to work together on the next (at least) five drafts of the movie. What had been called Just Friends and then Play Melancholy Baby went on to be called Boy Meets Girl; Words of Love; It Had to Be You; and Harry, This Is Sally. To name just a few of the titles. Mostly we called it “Untitled Rob Reiner Project.” Rob suggested that we try inserting some older couples talking about how they met. How They Met was another title we considered for at least a day. And gradually, the script began to change, from something that was mostly mine, to something else.
Here is what I always say about screenwriting. When you write a
script, it’s like delivering a great big beautiful plain pizza, the one with only cheese and tomatoes. And then you give it to the director, and the director says, “I love this pizza. I am willing to commit to this pizza. But I really think this pizza should have mushrooms on it.” And you say, “Mushrooms! Of course! I meant to put mushrooms on the pizza! Why didn’t I think of that? Let’s put some on immediately.” And then someone else comes along and says, “I love this pizza too, but it really needs green peppers.” “Great,” you say. “Green peppers. Just the thing.” And then someone else says, “Anchovies.” There’s always a fight over the anchovies. And when you get done, what you have is a pizza with everything. Sometimes it’s wonderful. And sometimes you look at it and you think, I knew we shouldn’t have put the green peppers onto it. Why didn’t I say so at the time? Why didn’t I lie down in traffic to prevent anyone’s putting green peppers onto the pizza?
All this is a long way of saying that movies generally start out belonging to the writer and end up belonging to the director. If you’re very lucky as a writer, you look at the director’s movie and feel that it’s your movie, too. As Rob and Andy and I worked on the movie, it changed: it became less quirky and much funnier; it became less mine and more theirs. But what made it possible for me to live through this process—which is actually called “The Process,” a polite expression for the period when the writer, generally, gets screwed—was that Rob and I each had a character we owned. On most movies, what normally happens in the course of The Process is that the writer says one thing and the director says another thing, and in the end the most the writer can hope for is a compromise; what made this movie different was that Rob had a character who could say whatever he believed, and if I disagreed, I had Sally to say so for me.
And much as I would like to take full credit for what Sally says in the movie, the fact is that many of her best moments went into the script after the three of us began work on it together. “We told you about men,” Rob and Andy said to me one day. “Now tell us about women.” So I said, “Well, we could do something about sex fantasies.” And I wrote the scene about Sally’s sex fantasy. “What else?” they said. “Well,” I said, “women send flowers to themselves in order to fool their boyfriends into thinking they have other suitors.” And I wrote the scene about Marie sending flowers to herself. “What else?” Rob and Andy said. “Well,” I said, “women fake orgasms.” “Really?” they said. “Yes,” I said. There was a long pause. I think I am correct in remembering the long pause. “All women?” they said. “Most women,” I said. “At one time or another.”
A few days later, Rob called. He and Andy had written a sequence about faking orgasms and they wanted to insert it at the end of the scene that was known (up to that time) as the andirons scene. He read it over the phone. I loved it. It went into the script. A few weeks later, we had our first actors’ reading, and Meg Ryan, who by then was our Sally, suggested that Sally actually fake an orgasm in the delicatessen at the end of the scene. We loved it. It went into the script. And then Billy Crystal, our Harry, provided the funniest of the dozens of funny lines he brought with him to the movie; he suggested that a woman customer turn to a waiter, when Sally’s orgasm was over, and say: “I’ll have what she’s having.” The line, by the way, was delivered in the movie by Estelle Reiner, Rob’s mother. So there you have it—a perfect example of how The Process works on the occasions when it works.
I don’t want to sound Pollyannaish about any of this. Rob and I disagreed. We disagreed all the time. Rob believes that men and women can’t be friends (HARRY: “Men and women can’t be friends, because the sex part always gets in the way”). I disagree (SALLY: “That’s not true. I have plenty of men friends and there’s no sex involved”). And both of us are right. Which brings me to what When Harry Met Sally is really about—not, as I said, whether men and women can be friends, but about how different men and women are. The truth is that men don’t want to be friends with women. Men know they don’t understand women, and they don’t much care. They want women as lovers, as wives, as mothers, but they’re not really interested in them as friends. They have friends. Men are their friends. And they talk to their male friends about sports, and I have no idea what else.
Women, on the other hand, are dying to be friends with men. Women know they don’t understand men, and it bothers them: they think that if only they could be friends with them, they would understand them and, what’s more (and this is their gravest mistake), it would help. Women think if they could just understand men, they could do something. Women are always trying to do something. There are entire industries based on this premise, the most obvious one being the women’s magazines—there are hundreds of them, there are probably five of them in darkest Zaire alone—that are based completely on the notion that women can do something where men are concerned: cook a perfect steak, or wear a perfect skirt, or dab a little perfume behind the knee. “Rub your thighs together when you walk,” someone once wrote in Cosmopolitan magazine. “The squish-squish sound of nylon has a frenzying effect.”
When a movie like When Harry Met Sally opens, people come to ask you questions about it. And for a few brief weeks, you become an expert. You seem quite wise. You give the impression that you knew what you were doing all along. You become an expert on friends, on the possibilities of love, on the differences between men and women. But the truth is that when you work on a movie, you don’t sit around thinking, We’re making a movie about the difference between men and women. Or whatever. You just do it. You say, this scene works for me, but this one doesn’t. You say, this is good, but this could be funnier. You say, it’s a little slow here, what could we do to speed it up? You say, this scene is long, and this scene isn’t story, and we need a better button on this one.
And then they go off and shoot the movie and cut the movie and sometimes you get a movie that you’re happy with. It’s my experience that this happens very rarely. Once in a blue moon. Blue Moon was another title we considered for a minute or two. I mention it now so you will understand that even when you have a movie you’re happy with, there’s always something—in this case, the title—that you wish you could fix. But never mind.
—February 1990
The Foodie
Serial Monogamy: A Memoir
MY MOTHER GAVE me my first cookbook. It was 1962, and I began my New York life with her gift of The Gourmet Cookbook (volume 1) and several sets of sheets and pillowcases (white, with scallops). The Gourmet Cookbook was enormous, a tome, with a gloomy reddish brown binding. It was assembled by the editors of Gourmet magazine and punctuated by the splendid, reverent, slightly lugubrious pictures of food the magazine was famous for. Simply owning it had changed my mother’s life. Until the book appeared, in the fifties, she had been content to keep as far from the kitchen as possible. We had a wonderful Southern cook named Evelyn Hall, who cooked American classics like roast beef and fried chicken and a world-class apple pie. But thanks to The Gourmet Cookbook, Evelyn began to cook chicken Marengo and crème caramel; before long, my mother herself was in the kitchen, whipping up Chinese egg rolls from scratch. A recipe for them appears in the book, but it doesn’t begin to convey how stressful and time-consuming an endeavor it is to make egg rolls, nor does it begin to suggest how much tension a person can create in a household by serving egg rolls that take hours to make and are not nearly as good as Chinese takeout.
Owning The Gourmet Cookbook made me feel tremendously sophisticated. For years I gave it to friends as a wedding present. It was an emblem of adulthood, a way of being smart and chic and college-educated where food was concerned, but I never really used it in the way you’re supposed to use a cookbook—by propping it open on the kitchen counter, cooking from it, staining its pages with spattered butter and chocolate splotches, conducting a unilateral dialogue with the book itself—in short, by having a relationship with it.
The cookbook I used most my first year in New York was a small volume called The Flavour of Fr
ance. It was given to me by a powerful older woman I’ll call Jane, whom I met my first summer in the city. She was twenty-five, and she took me in hand and introduced me not just to the cookbook but also to Brie and vitello tonnato and the famous omelet place in the East Sixties. In fact, the first time I went to the omelet place, which was called Madame Romaine de Lyon, I was a mail girl at Newsweek, making $55 a week, and I almost fainted when I saw that an omelet cost $3.45. Jane also introduced me to the concept of One Away. You were One Away from someone if you had both slept with the same man. Jane had slept with a number of up-and-coming journalists, editors, and novelists, the most famous of whom, at the end of their one night together, gave her a copy of one of his books, a box of which was conveniently located right next to his front door. According to Jane, his exact words, as she made her way to the exit, were “Take one on your way out.”
