Nora Ephron Fought to Be More Than Queen of Romantic Comedy

“Remember this moment, because it’s a hit—and they don’t come along very often,” Nora Ephron reportedly said the night her 1998 film You’ve Got Mail premiered. Her words rose from experience. While the acclaimed reporter turned filmmaker is remembered for creating some of the best romantic comedies of all time, including When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, Ephron was also no stranger to a flop.

It is the unavoidable truth nestled within Nora Ephron at the Movies, a new book devoted to the writer-director’s career written by Ilana Kaplan (a past Vanity Fair contributor): most of Ephron’s films didn’t work.

Ephron’s filmography was bookended by success. She earned an Oscar nomination for her first screenplay, Silkwood, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Meryl Streep. Streep also got an Oscar nomination for Ephron’s final film, Julie & Julia. But you’d be forgiven for forgetting some of her other titles, like 1989’s father-daughter mobster comedy Cookie, or the 1996 John Travolta vehicle Michael—a movie that made more than that year’s Jerry Maguire in its opening weekend, but has otherwise evaporated from public consciousness. Ephron also helmed not one, but two Steve Martin bombs (1990’s My Blue Heaven and 1994’s Mixed Nuts), showing how the sardonic voice of her essays didn’t always translate to film. Her seminal debut novel Heartburn, which recounted the end of her marriage to Washington Post Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, had a similarly rocky transition to the screen: the adaptation, starring Streep and Jack Nicholson, was met with a far chillier reception than the book had been.

“Failure, they say, is a growth experience; you learn from failure. I wish that were true,” Ephron wrote in her 2010 book, I Remember Nothing. “It seems to me the main thing you learn from a failure is that it’s entirely possible you will have another failure.” But while she was well-aware of her misfires, they didn’t stop Ephron, who “did not want to just be seen as a rom-com queen,” Kaplan tells Vanity Fair. “That is a part of her identity, but I don’t think it’s her full identity.”

Kaplan, who was introduced to You’ve Got Mail as an eight-year-old and later referenced the filmmaker in her own wedding vows, admits to falling for the popular conception of Ephron. “Honestly, I romanticized my whole life,” she says. “I thought that I was living a rom-com and that every year on Christmas—I’m Jewish, by the way—I would meet my husband. I was totally delusional.”

Yet it is Ephron’s own contradictions—an iconic filmmaker with more misses than hits, an often prickly person now forever associated with coziness—that have kept people fascinated even more than a decade after her 2012 death. “Her life is boiled down to the equivalent of one of her rom-coms. But Nora’s work wasn’t always loved—it was often divisive, reviled, and written off by critics,” Kaplan writes. “Of course, there have been some reappraisals over the years, but the conflation between the adoration for Nora and her work remains.”

Vanity Fair: You come to the conclusion that Nora’s “everything is copy” credo was less about divulging everything than shaping one’s own narrative. What was vital to you in telling the story of Nora?

Ilana Kaplan: I wanted to capture how she revitalized the rom-com genre, how she was progressive in certain ways, but there were also blind spots in her work because of the time, because of her social status. I wanted it to be largely a celebration of her work, but it was important to really grapple with things that might’ve been problematic in it. There are barely any people of color in her movies. You can count the ones that you’ve heard of on one hand, or they’re just side characters like Dave Chappelle in You’ve Got Mail. If you’re looking at a movie like Mixed Nuts, in some ways you could be like, oh, this is progressive because there’s a trans character in it, but it’s pretty transphobic. You can celebrate the way that she pushed the genre forward by also critiquing what she could have done better.