How Harry and Sally taught me that MEN are the real fakers (about friendship, that is!)
Continuing our uproarious series from the razor-sharp wit behind THAT famous restaurant scene
THE late Nora Ephron was one of Hollywood’s wittiest and wisest screenwriters — and the Mail is exclusively serialising a new collection of her best work. Today, in our second extract, she tells of the hilarious true story that inspired the film When Harry Met Sally ...
THIS is how the movie got started. The director Rob Reiner and his producing partner Andrew Scheinman wanted to have lunch to discuss a project. So, we had lunch and they told me about an idea they had for a movie about a lawyer. I’ve forgotten the details. The point is it didn’t interest me at all and I couldn’t imagine why they’d thought of me in connection with it.
We then spent the rest of the lunch talking about ourselves. Well, that isn’t entirely true: we spent the rest of the lunch talking about Rob and Andy. Rob was divorced and Andy was a bachelor — and they were extremely funny and candid about their lives as single men in Los Angeles. When the lunch ended, we still didn’t have an idea for a movie, but we decided to meet again.
A month later, we got together. And threw around more ideas, none of which I remember.
But finally, Rob said he had an idea — he wanted to make a movie about a man and a woman who become friends, as opposed to lovers; they make a deliberate decision not to have sex because sex ruins everything; and then they have sex and it ruins everything. And I said, let’s do it. So we made a deal. Three months later we sat around for several days and they told me some things. Appalling things.
They told me, for instance, that when they finished having sex, they wanted to get out of bed and go home. (Which became Harry to Sally: ‘How long do I have to lie here and hold her before I can get up and go home? Is 30 seconds enough? How long do you like to be held afterwards? All night, right?’)
They told me about the endless series of excuses they had concocted in order to make a middle-of-the-night getaway.
(Sally: ‘ You know, I am so glad I never got involved with you. I’d have ended up being some woman you had to get up out of bed and leave at three o’clock in the morning and go clean your andirons [which support logs in an open fireplace]. And you don’t even have a fireplace. Not that I would know this.’)
They also told me that the reason they thought men and women couldn’t be friends was that a man always wanted to sleep with a woman. Any woman.
(Harry: ‘ No man can be friends with a woman he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.’
Sally: ‘ So you’re saying a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive.’
Harry: ‘No. You pretty much want to nail them, too.’)
I say these things were appalling, but the truth is they weren’t a surprise; they were my wildest nightmares of what men thought.
Rob, Andy and I noodled for hours over the questions raised by friendship and sex and life in general; and as we did, I realised — long before I had any idea of what was actually going to happen in the movie — that I had found a wonderful character in Rob Reiner.
Rob is a very strange person. He is extremely funny, but he is also depressed — or at least he was at the time; he talked constantly about how depressed he was.
The point is that Rob wasn’t at all depressed about being depressed; in fact, he loved his depression. And so does Harry. He honestly believes he is a better person than Sally because he has what Sally generously calls a dark side.
‘Suppose nothing happens to you,’ he says in the first sequence of the movie. ‘Suppose you live there [New York] your whole life and nothing happens. You never meet anyone, you never become anything and finally you die one of those New York deaths where nobody notices for two weeks until the smell drifts out into the hallway.’
HARRY is genuinely proud to have thought of that possibility and to lay it at the feet of this shallow young woman he is stuck in a car with for 18 hours. He is thrilled to be the prince of darkness, the master of the worstcase scenario, the man who is happy to tell you, as you find yourself in the beginning of a love affair, that what follows lust, inevitably, is post-lust.
‘You take someone to the airport, it’s clearly the beginning of a relationship. That’s why I’ve never taken anyone to the airport at the beginning of a relationship . . . Because eventually things move on and you don’t take someone to the airport and I never wanted anyone to say to me: “How come you never take me to the airport any more?” ’
So I began with a Harry based on Rob. And because Harry was bleak and depressed, it followed that Sally would be cheerful and chirpy and relentlessly, pointlessly, unrealistically, idiotically optimistic.
Which is, it turns out, very much like me. I’m not precisely chirpy, but I am the sort of person who is fine, I’m just fine, everything’s fine.
‘I am over him,’ Sally says, when she isn’t over him at all; I have uttered that line far too many times in my life, and far too many times I’ve made the mistake of believing it was true. Sally loves control — and I’m sorry to say that I do, too.
And inevitably, Sally’s need to control her environment is connected to food. I say inevitably, because food is the only thing I’m an expert on.
But it wasn’t my idea to use the way I order food as a character trait for Sally; well along in the process — third or fourth draft or so — Rob, Andy and I were ordering lunch for the fifth day in a row, and for the fifth day in a row my lunch order — an avocado and bacon sandwich — consisted of an endless series of parenthetical remarks.
I wanted the mayonnaise on the side. I wanted the bread toasted and slightly burnt. I wanted the bacon crisp. ‘I just like it the way I like it,’ I said, defensively, when the pattern was pointed out to me — and the line went into the script.
But all that came much later. In the beginning, I was more or less alone — with a male character based somewhat on Rob and a female character based somewhat on me. And a subject.
WHICH was not, by the way, whether men and women could be friends. The movie, instead, was a way for me to write about being single — about the difficult, frustrating, awful, funny search for happiness in an American city where the primary emotion is unrequited love.
When Harry Met Sally started shooting in August 1988, almost four years after my first meeting with Rob and Andy. What had been called Just Friends and then Play Melancholy Baby went on to be called Boy Meets Girl; Words Of Love; It Had To Be You; and Harry, This Is Sally. To name just a few of the titles. Mostly we called it Untitled Rob Reiner Project.
Rob suggested we try inserting some older couples talking about how they met. How They Met was another title we considered for at least a day. Gradually, the script began to change, from something mostly mine to something else.
Here is what I always say about screenwriting. When you write a script, it’s like delivering a great big beautiful plain pizza, the one with only cheese and tomatoes.
And then you give it to the director and he says: ‘I love this pizza. I am willing to commit to this pizza. But I really think this pizza should have mushrooms on it.’
And you say: ‘ Mushrooms! Of course! I meant to put mushrooms on the pizza! Why didn’t I think of that? Let’s put some on immediately.’ And then someone else comes along and says: ‘I love this pizza, too, but it really needs green peppers.’
‘Great,’ you say. ‘ Green peppers. Just the thing.’ And then someone else says: ‘Anchovies.’ There’s always a fight over the anchovies.
And when you get done, what you have is a pizza with everything. Sometimes it’s wonderful. And sometimes you look at it and you think, I knew we shouldn’t have put the green peppers on it. Why didn’t I say so? Why didn’t I lie down in traffic to prevent anyone putting green peppers on the pizza?
All this is a long way of saying that movies generally start out belonging to the writer and end up belonging to the director. If you’re very lucky, you look at the director’s movie and feel that it’s your movie, too.
As Rob, Andy and I worked on the movie, it changed: it became less quirky and much funnier; it became less mine and more theirs.
But what made it possible for me to live through this process — which is actually called ‘ The Process,’ a polite expression for the time when the writer, generally, gets screwed — was that Rob and I each had a character we owned.
On most movies, what normally happens in the course of The Process is that the writer says one thing and the director says another thing, and in the end the most the writer can hope for is a compromise.
What made this movie different was that Rob had a character who could say whatever he believed and if I disagreed I had Sally to say so for me.
And much as I would like to take full credit for what Sally says in the
movie, the fact is that many of her best moments went into the script after the three of us began to work on it together. ‘We told you about men,’ Rob and Andy said to me one day. ‘Now tell us about women.’
So I said: ‘Well, we could do something about sex fantasies.’ And I wrote the scene about Sally’s sex fantasy. ‘What else?’ they said. ‘Well, women send flowers to themselves in order to fool their boyfriends into thinking they have other suitors,’ I said.
And I wrote the scene about Marie sending flowers to herself.
‘What else?’ Rob and Andy said. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘women fake orgasms.’ ‘Really?’ they said. ‘Yes,’ I said. There was a long pause. I think I am correct in remembering the long pause. ‘All women?’ they said. ‘Most women,’ I said. ‘At one time or another.’
A few days later, Rob called. He and Andy had written a sequence about faking orgasms and they wanted to insert it at the end of the scene that was known (up to that time) as the andirons scene.
He read it over the phone. I loved it. It went into the script. A few weeks later, we had our first actors’ reading, and Meg Ryan suggested that Sally actually fake an orgasm in the delicatessen at the end of the scene.
We loved it. It went into the script.
AND then Billy Crystal, our Harry, provided the funniest of the dozens of funny lines he brought with him to the movie. He suggested that a woman customer turn to a waiter, when Sally’s orgasm was over, and say: ‘I’ll have what she’s having.’
The line, by the way, was delivered in the movie by Estelle Reiner, Rob’s mother. So, there you have it — a perfect example of how The Process works on the occasions when it works.
I don’t want to sound Pollyannaish about any of this. Rob and I disagreed — all the time.
Rob believes that men and women can’t be friends. (Harry: ‘Men and women can’t be friends, because the sex part always gets in the way.’).
I disagree. (Sally: ‘That’s not true. I have plenty of men friends and there’s no sex involved.’)
And both of us are right. This brings me to what When Harry Met Sally is really about — not, as I said, whether men and women can be friends, but about how different men and women are.
The truth is that men don’t want to be friends with women. Men know they don’t understand women, and they don’t much care.
They want women as lovers, as wives, as mothers, but they’re not really interested in them as friends. They have friends. Men are their friends. And they talk to their male friends about sport and I have no idea what else.
Women, on the other hand, are dying to be friends with men. Women know they don’t understand men and it bothers them: they think that if only they could be friends, they would understand them and (this is their gravest mistake) it would help.
Women think if they could just understand men, they could do something. Women are always trying to do something.
There are entire industries based on this premise, the most obvious one being women’s magazines — there are hundreds of them, there are probably five of them in Zaire alone — that are based completely on the notion women can do something where men are concerned: cook a perfect steak, wear a perfect skirt or dab a little perfume behind the knee.
When a movie like When Harry Met Sally opens, people come to ask you questions about it. And for a few brief weeks, you become an expert. You seem quite wise. You give the impression that you knew what you were doing all along.
You become an expert on friends, the possibilities of love, the differences between men and women.
But the truth is that when you work on a movie, you don’t sit around thinking: ‘We’re making a movie about the difference between men and women.’ Or whatever.
You just do it. You say, this scene works for me, but this one doesn’t. You say, this is good, but this could be funnier. You say, it’s a little slow here, how could we speed it up?
And then they go off and shoot the movie and cut the movie and sometimes you get a movie that you’re happy with. It’s my experience that this happens very rarely. Once in a blue moon.
Blue Moon was another title we considered for a minute or two. I mention it now so you will understand that even when you have a movie you’re happy with, there’s always something — in this case, the title — that you wish you could fix. But never mind. ABRIDGED extract from The Most Of Nora Ephron by Nora Ephron, to be published by Transworld on September 11, priced £20. To order a copy, go to mailbookshop.co.uk, P&P free for a limited time only. To read the unabridged version, go to MailOnline.