Which Lie Did I Tell? (22 page)

You think I didn’t root for Ben to win
Cameron Diaz?

The Farrellys think it’s
another
scene that makes the movie.

Peter Farrelly says, “It was where
Matt Dillon comes back and he says—wow, she’s grown heavy and she’s on welfare and she’s got kids
and she’s got all sorts of problems and we show Ben go home that night and he thinks about it and comes back the next day and says,
‘I still want to meet her.’
And he says maybe he can help her out, I can’t let it go.

“Because that’s true love. Anybody could fall in love with
Cameron Diaz. Come on, you see Cameron Diaz and you’d want to chase her fifteen years. Why root for that? You know, who wouldn’t? But even when he thought she was a whale and she was on welfare, and had a bunch of kids out of wedlock, he
still
wanted her because he was in love with her. And so at that point, the audience says
—he deserves it.
And that, I think, is why it works.”

Understand something—movie scenes, like scenes from plays, are not finally intended for the page. They were written with actors and directors very much in mind. In fiction, the novelist or short story writer is your sole companion and you view his world through his eyes. Same with a poet.

On the printed page, the explosive quality of the Zipper Scene can never totally come across. (The second time I saw it, I thought the man in front of me was literally going to die before it was over.)

But you can tell on even one reading that the quality is there.

Most brilliant movie writing tends to be ignored by the critics.

For many reasons, the writer traditionally has been ignored when it comes to kudos. Very few of us get away with it.
Callie Khouri did on
Thelma and Louise,
Bob Towne with
Chinatown,
me with
Butch.
But we are not favored by the media. We do not get sent out to do television talk shows. That you expect. What’s hard is when stars—who for the most part write as well as most six-year-olds—say they make up their parts. (I would love to have Conan or Jay ask to see a star’s screenplay, then read it on the air.) And directors rarely take less than all the credit they can get.

You must deal with that as your career goes on. It ain’t gonna change. But the media must love someone. If
Steven Spielberg had directed the Zipper Scene, all the critics you’ve ever heard of would have written something along these lines: “After all these years of thrilling us with dramatic adventures, who would have guessed his genius could move so easily to farce. There is no end to the man’s talents. You can feel his touch behind every line of dialogue. More, Steven, please.”

If
James Cameron had been behind the camera, the huzzahs would have been of this order: “Of course he is a master of size, of special
effects, but who would have guessed the man was also a comic genius. There were hints of this wit in some earlier work—especially
Aliens
—but here he just lets it fly. Next, George Bernard Shaw? Please, James.”

The fact is that both these wonderfully gifted directors are as helpless as Jo-Jo the Dog-faced Boy when given anything remotely connected with laughter. But the
Mary
scene is so good, someone has to get credit for it. Couldn’t have been the writer, could it now?

I have known Nora Ephron a quarter century, but it was not love at first sight. She was dating Carl Bernstein when I first met her, in Washington in ’74, and I was trying to figure out the story for the movie of Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s Watergate book,
All the President’s Men.

What Nora and Carl did was write their version of my screenplay and present it to Robert Redford, the producer, without my knowledge. It was the worst experience of my movie career (see
Adventures in the Screen Trade
for the gorier details). We both live in New York, didn’t cross paths often, but once, a few years after her betrayal, we happened to be at the same dinner party, one with placecards yet, and I still remember my feeling of triumph when I caught her shifting cards so she and I would not be near each other.

Then, I don’t remember really, a decade back, maybe a few years more, we were again at a gathering and she came over and said, “I’m really sorry,” and I hugged her and that was forever that.

She is very famous now, perhaps the most successful woman director in the world (
Sleepless in Seattle, Michael, You’ve Got Mail,
among others). But she has
always
been famous, odd for a writer. Before movies, her novel
Heartburn
headed all the lists. She was well known when she first came to town, as a journalist.
Wallflower at the Orgy,
her first book of essays, established her, thirty years back.

Her folks were in the business, too,
Phoebe and Henry Ephron, a top screenwriting team
—Carousel, The Desk Set,
among many others. They also wrote plays about her infancy
—Three’s a Family
and
Take Her, She’s Mine
—based on her letters from college.

Her first screenwriting credit—with
Alice Arlen—was for
Silkwood,
a
marvelous movie. Probably her most famous work, now and maybe forever, is going to be
When Harry Met Sally.

It was a total sleeper, the first movie made by Castle Rock films. Rob Reiner had never had a commercial hit. Meg Ryan—and how did she miss getting an Oscar nomination for this work?—had never costarred in a hit. Billy Crystal had costarred in a couple of films, but a romantic lead?

And everyone fell in love with it. Good as it was then, it’s much better now, because the
quality of movies—not counting special-effects flicks—has dropped so low.

Ephron’s screenplay does the heavy lifting, so all the others can twinkle. A bubble of a film, stylish as hell, filled with short witty scenes about the impossibility of love, gorgeous montages of New York as we all want it to be, and little vignettes of older couples talking to the camera of their love experiences—try getting that past a studio executive today.

Crystal’s character fucks everything that moves. Ryan’s, though she claims sexual knowledge, is mocked by him. He is the stud, she the professional virgin. Then, forty-four minutes in, they go to the Carnegie Deli for a snack. And this happens.

What you cannot imagine now is the shock value of that scene. Yes, huge laughs, all that, but people simply could not believe that Meg Ryan FAKED AN ORGASM! When people talked about the flick, there was the usual
have you seen?
and then the bleed into
didn’t you love?
and from there, quickly,
could you believe it?
And then the babble babble babble,
is it true?