Word: ephron
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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...
...even in New York City she had a circle of old family friends to fall back on, since her parents had written first for Broadway. As a young reporter at the New York Post, Ephron presumed on her mother's acquaintance with her boss, the paper's owner, Dorothy Schiff, to present fellow reporters' complaints about filthy working conditions at the Post. Schiff gave her the runaround -- a dangerous thing to do to Ephron. Though she had been doing fluffy "women's items" at the Post, Nora discovered her real (and deadly) talent when she deftly beheaded Schiff...
That was the time of the "new journalism," but Tom Wolfe, presiding over the movement, did not notice that Ephron was writing some of the best reportorial prose of the era (he predictably singled out, in his anthology of new journalism, Joan Didion). It was a period of burgeoning feminism, but some feminists closed ranks against a woman who admitted, as Ephron did, that she still had fantasies of being raped. Yet everything valid in The Beauty Myth was said in Ephron's famous essays on breast size and vaginal perfumes, and male oppression is nowhere better described than...
...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...