Word: ephron
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...program, as well as the Martin Scorsese movie based on it, GoodFellas. Nora, meanwhile, did two comic riffs on the same theme -- screenplays for Cookie (with a Bobby Kennedy imitator as prosecutor) and My Blue Heaven (in which constricted FBI men learn from expansive Italian mobsters how to live). Ephron herself is critical of these movies, which ran into casting and directing troubles; but they are typical of her unexpected blindside tackles of ideology: How many movies have you seen in which the FBI foolishly does the bidding of the Mafia...
...Ephron is better known for the screenplays that won her Oscar nominations, Silkwood and When Harry Met Sally , or for Heartburn, based on her breakup with Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein. Yet she came late and reluctantly to her mother's craft, having seen how little happiness it brought that tortured role model. Phoebe Ephron and her husband Henry were prolific and successful screenwriters in the 1940s and '50s, getting credit for at least one masterpiece, The Desk Set. Nora says her mother did the actual typing, while "my father did the pacing up and down" -- roughly the same job division...
...centerpiece in a new rogues' gallery. Mob movies are gathering, like capos at the Appalachia conference, from all over America. You want Italian-American hoods of the New York City stripe? We got 'em by the hundreds in GoodFellas. In My Blue Heaven, written by Pileggi's wife Nora Ephron as a kind of comic coda to the Scorsese picture, Steve Martin plays a Mafia rat in a Witness Protection Program out West. At Christmas, Paramount has The Godfather Part III, a climax to the gangland Nibelungen Ring, starring Al Pacino, Diane Keaton and a cast of many Coppolas...
Humor is often in short supply in books by writers who assert they are funny. This is not second grade, and the territory Wasserstein covers has been strip-mined by those who preceded her -- Nora Ephron, Ellen Goodman and Anna Quindlen. A piece about the split between women who shave their legs and those who don't would have to come up with some dazzling insights to merit another look. Ditto painted nails, being fat or single...
...person. Extramarital affairs, divorce, children out of wedlock are no longer utterly shocking (though they may bring harsher judgments on politicians than, say, screen stars, because indiscretions call character and judgment into question). "There is no one today who has the power of, say, Louella Parsons," observes novelist Nora Ephron. "Those people could really punish you." When Parsons revealed in 1949 that Ingrid Bergman had left her husband for director Roberto Rossellini, the scandal kept her from making movies in Hollywood for more than five years...