Journalist, screenwriter, playwright, and director Nora Ephron has earned respect in Hollywood, New York, and the international market with a clear, precise, and irreplaceable signature. Her mantra, taught by her mother, is that “everything is a copy”, but she is an example of originality that contradicts the motto. On June 26, 2023, it will be 11 years since her death and more than a decade later, she still has not found heirs. Jason Sudeikis revered her in Ted Lasso and it was a beautiful tribute. Norah was a genius.

To call her the “queen of the romantic comedy” is to reduce her unique contribution as a screenwriter, responsible for several iconic films, with phrases and scenes repeated until today (everything is a copy, I can hear her shrug). I’m a journalist and passionate about cinema and theater, and, New York, like her. Her influence on me started when I was just 16 years old and already wanted to be a reporter, aiming to one day have the fluid style of her writing, as well as her humor and wit. (I keep dreaming). Her texts – I recommend that you read her books – are written in the first person, with an unfailing ability to make us laugh, think and get emotional. Her articles came into my life after I discovered her as a best-selling author, the book Heartburn depicts the end of her marriage to journalist Carl Bernstein, famous for the Washington Post reporting on Watergate. Although it is with fictional characters, Nora does not spare her ex at all, mixing recipes for delicious dishes in the middle of a narrative of something painful and obviously makes us empathize with her pain.

Nora, for me, was the closest thing to Jane Austen that I could find: a feminine, witty, and intelligent text, where the love stories are the backdrop, not the objective. I identify with her conviction of never being a victim of any circumstance, but of always learning to explore her mistakes and start over with new eyes, transforming pain into something creative. “You should not be a victim of what happens to you. You must take credit. You must rise above it. It’s an unbelievable lesson in terms of how to live your life, especially if you’re a woman,” she said in an interview a few years before she died. “I’m very old-fashioned in that respect. I’m just in no rush to embrace the victim role instead of just saying something clever or witty or even dumb,” she continued.

Telling stories for Nora has always been relatively easy, the daughter of two screenwriters who were prominent in Hollywood (they signed classics such as Carousel and There’s No Business Like Showbusiness and the eldest. of four daughters, she decided she was going to try journalism first and not cinema. She said she was inspired by Louis Lane and Superman to choose her career, but the statement only confirms her good mood. She really wanted to go back to New York, where she was born, and leave Hollywood, where she grew up, in the background.

The fact that she was a woman in a male universe never scared her. With some difficulty against sexism, it was rejected by several newspapers and magazines, only managing to get into Newsweek because it accepted the position of distributing correspondence (yes folks, in pre-digital times the physical volume of letters was significant), but soon passed to clip maker and then researcher. “The men would write these stories and then the women would check them out. That’s how it worked in those days, ”she explained in the same interview. Fate created the unique opportunity to reverse the situation when there was a newspaper strike in New York and Nora wrote a parody of the texts published in the New York Post and Daily News. It turned out so good that friends decided to publish it. The satire obviously angered some journalists, but the paper’s editor, Dorothy Schiff, concluded that anyone who knew how to parody the Post could write for the paper. She hired Nora right away.

From there, she began to make a name for herself, covering everything from politics, murder, trials, and celebrity with a sense of humor, or as she admitted, “even a certain amount of scorn”. With that tabloid freedom, she said she was able to practice her writing and find her voice. Along the way, she gained enemies and admirers, coming into conflict with both the feminist movement and conservative women. Basically, you could say that Nora would lose the friend, but never the joke. When she married Carl Bernstein in 1976, she was as famous as he was, hence the impact of the book Heartburn when it was released in 1983. Carl cheated on her with another woman while she was still pregnant and he considered that the book was a way of revenge. He tried to sue her for defamation, but legend has it that she convinced him to keep quiet when he threatened to reveal who was the source of the Watergate stories, something that was only ‘confirmed’ in 2005, with the death of former FBI director Mark Felt. Nora was one of the few people who always knew who he was.

Part of the motivation that brought her back to film was financial. While writing the book, she was asked to help script the life of activist Karen Silkwood, who died suspiciously while investigating nuclear irregularities at a plutonium plant. The 1983 film Silkwood was one of the successes of Meryl Streep and Cher (both Oscar nominees). Mike Nichols bought the rights to Heartburn. Nora wrote the screenplay for the 1986 film, starring the same Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson, but it was three years later that Nora’s name became synonymous with worldwide success when she wrote the screenplay for When Harry Met Sally and was nominated for an Oscar, winning a Bafta.

With that successful experience, Nora. challenged himself to take on a film completely. “If I became a director, I could at least make my own films, my own scripts, and the feeling that I would be interested in subjects that men might not be interested in,” she commented. Her debut, with This Is My Life, in 1992, was lukewarm (she commented that she had no investment or support because it was a film aimed at a female audience), but with no money, she accepted the offer to direct Sleepless in Seattle, and then gained prestige. The script is considered one of the most brilliant and daring of ‘romantic comedies’, where the main couple only meets and talks in the last scene, working with great irony and intelligence all the traditional formulas of a love film. Unsurprisingly, she received another Oscar nomination. “I made [the script] – not a comedy, but a movie that had laughs,” she explained in her own way. Even working non-stop, it took another six years for her to explode again, again with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, in the very cute You ’ve Got Mail, already sharing credits with her sister, Delia.

Between books, articles, and less successful films (the remake of Bewitched, among them), Nora returned to journalism and wrote a stage play, completing her last film in 2009, the success Julia and Julia, with Meryl Streep closing a perfect shot of having your first and last movies starring the best of them all. In secret, she was already battling the cancer that would take them away from us, at the age of 71. Secrecy was due to her phobia of being a victim and a target of pity, with very few friends aware of her fragile health.

The documentary made by her son, Everything is Copy, is in the HBO collection, as well as her greatest hits. But what I recommend the most is to read your texts. Nora was a brilliant storyteller and, like me, a fan of journalism. “I fell in love with the idea that, deep down, if you analyzed enough facts, you could cut to the chase, and you had to cut to the chase. You couldn’t miss the point. That would be bad,” she commented. “I just fell in love with solving the puzzle, figuring out what it was, what the story was, what the truth of the story was.” And we for her.

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