BLVR: Having spent the last while reading most of your essays and watching your movies, I came to the conclusion that your two greatest skills are that you elevate the minute to make it interesting, and you ground the tragic to make it relatable. I feel like those are the hallmarks of your voice. NE: No. I think, for instance, that Joan Didion found her voice very early.
She may have been born with her voice. I did everything. And then at a certain point they wanted to offer me a column. That was a huge deal; I was about twenty-four. It was a total failure! I think I was still floundering around in all sorts of ways.
I really did not know how to do it. I was at the Post for five years, then I was a freelance writer, and then when Esquire offered me a column, when I was thirtyish, I was ready. When the Post hired me, I was twenty-two. They knew I had never been a newspaper reporter. They started me slow, with three-hundred-word pieces. NE: Well, I knew enough not to go get a job as a reporter at some little newspaper outside of New York and hope that someone would knock on my door one day….
It was fun to go into something I really knew nothing about. NE: Yes, absolutely! BLVR: Screenwriting is very specific in terms of its structure. Journalistic work is slightly looser. Did you have any difficulties adapting to that more-rigid format? What I really understood as a magazine writer was when the beginning had to start to end, and the middle had to begin, and when the middle had to start to end and when the ending had to begin. People who go to those seminars with—. I never have done it.
All that stuff that you learn about act structure, and scene structure, that every scene has three acts, all that stuff… I knew very instinctively from magazine writing. You had found your voice. NE: Sure—and all that material that ended up in Wallflower at the Orgy. But the great thing about the Post was that—unlike the New York Times —in that period you were allowed to be whatever you were.
I remember covering those Johnson girl weddings with at least other people, most of them women, and they were basically writing about how many raisins were in the fruitcake. I was the only one who would write it as this hilarious cultural event instead of taking it completely seriously. I had an editor there named Stan Opotowsky, and he was always coming up with these great ideas for me. BLVR: I was expecting you to say endings, for some reason. NE: I can never make my endings very long.
When we were doing When Harry Met Sally… the ending was about seven pages. Or to get a sad movie made. In the old days, I would just type the piece over and over in the hopes that it would somehow push me into the next sentence.
NE: I think one thing that you do is just make notes. Or you can read things that will help you. I just did a script that has Pride and Prejudice as one of its themes…. NE: Right. And I read the book a zillion times, and I did a kind of outline of the book, and in the end I used absolutely none of it except maybe the first six chapters. The outlines are endless, at least fifty pages long. But when I write by myself, I almost never have an outline; I just do it.
I know the structure. I know the beginning, the middle, the end. Collaboration is a tricky thing. BLVR: Do you ever apply a screenplay structure to your own life? Has a part of your life reminded you of act three? But I definitely divide my life into decades. Almost every ten years, something in my work life has changed. My twenties were my journalistic phase, then there was my screenwriting phase, then I became a director, then I started doing some plays….
BLVR: You have a strange amount of pioneering, ambitious women in your family. Part of it was that in my house, unlike Long after she is on the planet, by the way. And I really wanted to get a movie made. And I really wanted to direct a movie.
Sometimes I speak at film schools, and I speak to rooms of women. BLVR: Have you noticed an evolution of how your ambition has been received? I wonder if it was more punishing to be an ambitious woman in the s, even though there are still myriad ways in which ambitious women are punished. They buy a house, have a daughter, and Rachel thinks they are living happily ever after until she discovers that Mark is having an affair while she is waddling around with a second pregnancy.
Did you know Edit. Trivia The main reason Jack Nicholson agreed to appear in this movie: he wanted to work with Meryl Streep. Goofs Rachel pays for a flight with a credit card, on board the plane, but this is mostly likely on the Eastern Shuttle, between NYC and DC, which allowed you to pay on board. Remember that this movie was long before , back when air travel was more relaxed. Quotes Mark Forman : [taking a very pregnant Rachel to the hospital] Just keep breathing, you can do it.
Sanders as Julio Sanders. User reviews 60 Review. Top review. A Highly Underrated Film. Am I blind, or did I just see that this film has an overall rating of 6.
Acting: Alright, so let me start this review by stating that I'm a die-hard fan of Jack Nicholson. So, I might be slightly transparent about the flaws of the movie, but there aren't many. This film is very hard to get a hold of actually. I stumbled upon a used DVD store and being a collector of Jack Nicholson's films and a huge fan, I immediately purchased it.
I hadn't ever heard of this film until then and made a quick research on IMDb and Wikipedia about the movie. This movie's story is written by Nora Ephron and is loosely based on her life and relationship with real-life journalist Carl Bernstein. On paper, the story of the movie goes like this: Divorced woman meets a sort-of heartless playboy, falls for him, marries him, has children with him, and leaves him after figuring out that he's been cheating on her.
Sounds so simple, but in reality, it isn't. That's the reason why we have veteran actors like Nicholson and Meryl Streep on board. Meryl Streep is brilliant.
Many people might be surprised, but this is actually the first film of Meryl Streep I've seen. I had always wanted to see her work ever since learning that she has the most number of Academy Award nominations for Best Actress or Supporting Actress, but never really got around to doing so. I wonder what her really brilliant performances would be like, if this was off the hook itself. Jack Nicholson plays the uber cool guy he always is and as we always have more often than not, there is a scene of him going totally crazy.
But I don't want to give away too many things. You should check out the movie for yourself. This movie also marks the feature-film debut of Kevin Spacey, whom I was quite surprised to see actually, but it turned out that it was only a small cameo.
Story, Screenplay and Direction: Enough about actors. Lets get down to the story, screenplay and ultimately, the execution of the overall film. This film is ultra-realistic. Except a couple of teeny-tiny moments in the film, you'll be surprised at how super realistic that this film is. Being born in the 90s, I was able to get a slight sense of how life revolved in the 80s and was super-thrilled and totally upset in not being able to experience the US of that era.
That is also where the film goes awry, in a sense. It is so realistic, that it loses itself onto you at a point where you wouldn't know what is going on. There are hints of Mark Jack Nicholson being a brilliant and a sincere reporter, but we really don't get to see much of that. However, we do get to see a couple of scenes of Rachel Meryl Streep working in her NY paper where she's a food journalist, but it doesn't go beyond that.
How anyone gets anything done in these places is a mystery to me. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself.
Reading is grist. Reading is bliss. All of this happens to me when I surface from a great book. Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.
Is life too short, or is it going to be too long? Do you work as hard as you can, or do you slow down to smell the roses? And where do carbohydrates fit into all this? Are we really all going to spend our last years avoiding bread, especially now that bread in American is so unbelievable delicious?
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