Sister Mother Husband Dog: (Etc.) (13 page)

F
orgive me if I tend to romanticize the past.” That’s the beginning—nearly the beginning—of the Woody Allen memory movie about childhood,
Radio Days
, perhaps my favorite movie ever. “Forgive me if I tend to romanticize the past” is his voice over a sepia-drenched, windy, rainy Far Rockaway. That’s how I remember my first collaboration with Nora: bathed in nostalgia.

Before I discuss collaboration, however, a bit about screenwriting.

There comes a point in every screenwriter’s life when she or he has to decide: Do I want to be a director or do I want to be angry?

There are many things to say about being a
screenwriter, much of it positive, but this is the most important: Screenwriters get fired. You are hired and you are fired. Often, when you are fired, if your script isn’t going to die on a shelf, another screenwriter replaces you.

Even when you are not fired, when you have managed to survive the often byzantine development process, once the script is on its way to production, you are kissed good-bye. And that’s sad, because that is when the fun begins. When everyone gets to make a movie. Because of your script, hundreds of people may get to work in all sorts of creative and interesting ways. Because of your script, if you shoot on a location, a whole town gets a boost economically and has an adventure. The screenwriter, however, doesn’t have a job on a set. Everyone else is collaborating now, contributing their particular expertise, but your work is essentially done. You could be bored witless. Nevertheless, it’s nice to be welcome, nice when the director welcomes you. Maybe three minutes out of the day you will notice something, or get asked a question, or realize your intent is being compromised by the way the scene is being shot, or something might be funnier another way—some random three minutes in a twelve-hour day—and you better hope you are paying attention. You might instead be at craft services (where the food is) wolfing down a sandwich.
Craft services on Nora’s movies were always spectacular, no surprise. Parties and movies were a bit mixed up in her head, at least in the beginning. Which reminds me that before we shot
Sleepless in Seattle
we all had a cherry pie tasting.

Nothing is more seductive than screenwriting. It is playful. Not easy, but so much fun it has the illusion of easy. There are books on screenwriting, so I won’t ramble on about how to do it (and Nora has written about it, too, so forgive any repetition here), but every time you write a screenplay, you are seduced. You fall in love. You think you are safe.
They will make this for sure. This script will never get lost in development hell. You will never be replaced. Not on this one. This is good.

But no writer is safe. And since I’m complaining about the good life, forgive me, I’m going to keep on for a short time. “Notes” are criticisms and requests for changes that a screenwriter gets from everyone, especially from all the collaborators who are your bosses, higher-ups on the food chain—studio executives, producers, occasionally producers’ children, actors (almost always good ones from actors). I’ve never received notes from a book editor the way I do from a studio executive. In my experience, a book editor is trying to help you get where you need to go. With a movie, what they want may
have nothing to do with what you want or what they told you they wanted to begin with, which they didn’t realize was all wrong until they read your script. A book editor gives compliments. Studio executives and many producers should go to compliment school. They barely spend a second on what’s good before they’re off to what they want changed. And this is, excuse the expression, stupid. Because knowing what’s working is as important as knowing what isn’t. Where’s the gold? Tell me. Then I can mine it further. Writers write better if they’re appreciated. Everyone does better work if they’re appreciated. Elementary, my dear Watson. Screenwriters often compliment the person giving them notes. What a good note, they say. They do this because they have low self-esteem, which they acquired from being screenwriters. Screenwriters might also think brownnosing makes them safer, less likely to be fired. It does not.

A director comes on and either wants to write it himself/herself or has a writer they love to work with, or the actor has a writer he or she never leaves home without, or the studio wants it funnier, or the studio decides they want another “take,” another “tone.” Really, half the time you have no idea why you’ve been fired because there is a lot of lying. If it’s not lying, it’s spinning.
You can be spun so fast or cleverly, you don’t even know which direction you are facing. With some producers it’s practically an art form. Even producers who are friends, who are helpful and smart, whom you like and respect and who like and respect you, will ax you if a studio/director/actor wants it. It’s not surprising the business of screenwriting happens in Los Angeles, the land of earthquakes, because the ground is never solid under you.

Nora and I once did an adaptation of a charming book,
Flipped
by Wendelin Van Draanen. Rob Reiner came on to direct. The same Rob Reiner who had directed
When Harry Met Sally
. So Nora had history with him, good history. A relationship. He dumped us and wrote a script of his own. (And asked us to cut our bonus, but never mind.) We had nothing to do with his movie.

Inevitably many screenwriters feel insulted, jilted, or powerless. And it’s confusing—how can they be miserable if they are so lucky to be screenwriters? Half the world wants to be a screenwriter. How
can
they be miserable? They have no right, they are spoiled.

Even if they are successful and have a movie well made, even beautifully made, eventually screenwriters still want it their way. They want the movie the way they imagined it. If something they wrote isn’t captured
properly cinematically, they would prefer it to be their own fault. This can only happen if a screenwriter directs his own script. I’m generalizing here, but not wildly.

Nora had reached that time when she had to choose—anger or direct. She chose direct. You have to be awfully successful to make that choice. She was and she did. She had a wonderful book,
This Is Your Life
by Meg Wolitzer, about two sisters (Erica, sixteen, and Opal, ten) and their single mom (Dottie), who decides to follow her dream of becoming a stand-up comic. Nora asked if I would write it with her. She didn’t want, she said, to set off on this voyage alone. She needed help, someone she trusted. She needed a collaborator. The material was perfect for us.

At the time Nora was living in New York and I was in Los Angeles, remarried happily, with two stepchildren. I had worked as a journalist at
New York
magazine and had had several books published, books of humor and essays. I had just begun my screenwriting career—my husband, a screenwriter, taught me how to do it—and I had completed two commissioned but unmade scripts, one based on my book
Teenage Romance
. Nora had just had her tremendous success with
When Harry Met Sally
.

This collaboration was fantastic for me. I wasn’t going to get fired. No way would my sister fire me, and
she was the director. It was a great adventure creatively. A leap. An adventure in sisterhood, too. As Nora had promised, the material was perfect, all common ground: sisters, a working mother, female dilemmas, the stuff of female relationships that American movies are rarely about, and show business, which we grew up around.

Our goal with
This Is My Life
was to launch her directing career. That might seem obvious, but what I mean is the movie didn’t have to be a big hit (although of course we had dreams), but it had to be good enough to land her a second. That’s another reason we were happy that the material was nearly autobiographical. It gave Nora a comfort zone. It raised the odds of her directing a movie that worked.

Most of my writing up to that time had been about children, which I knew meant I was bringing something Nora needed to the writing mix. We began traveling back and forth between Los Angeles and New York, doing the hard work of finding the movie in the book, then outlining, writing scenes, exchanging scenes. That time is mostly a blur of hanging out in my office or hers, sometimes in her kitchen at her round table, taking breaks for eating and shopping. It was before our wearing-only-black phase (at least it was before mine because I was
living in LA, which I think of as baby-blue land). There was a lot more to buy.

Neither of us quite knew what we were doing. I was learning more and more about screenwriting, and she had never directed. Both being somewhat ignorant, we needed each other for skill as well as emotional support. Also, it was fun (not to mention easier) to collaborate. Nora and I would say to each other, I almost got this, please finish it, or we need a joke here, or why isn’t this working?—send the scene off and back it came, done.

The movie, renamed
This Is My Life
, starred Julie Kavner, Samantha Mathis, and Gaby Hoffmann, with supporting roles played by Dan Aykroyd and Carrie Fisher (and an original score by Carly Simon). Because it was low-budget, there was an in-the-trenches feel to the shoot. We all stayed in the same Toronto hotel, hung out nights in the bar, and we laughed. We laughed all the time.

We also drank tons of water. I remember this very clearly, and oddly it’s barely all I remember specifically—the set of
This Is My Life
was the first time I noticed everyone walking around with plastic bottles of Evian and taking sips. I started doing it, too. Every woman who works in the movie business has a bottle of water in her purse. Hydration is a big deal.

•  •  •  •

Collaboration, I discovered, is a kind of marriage. Like marriage, it works best when you both want the same things, like the same things, and laugh at the same things. Shared sensibility is critical. Loyalty, too. And trust. You should also be a little bit in love with each other’s brains.

Since collaboration is a kind of marriage, it follows, theoretically speaking, that if the collaborators are already related, it’s incest. Incest because, well, you are making babies. I always think of my books and movies as babies. Although now that I have had that sick thought, I will try to banish it. Let’s just say collaboration between relatives is a kind of incest. This might account for the twisted weirdness of the Coen brothers’ movies, although probably, like Nora and me, Joel and Ethan Coen share half a brain. This freaky/creepy posit should be a warning to Judd Apatow, who is now collaborating with his entire nuclear family.

The other day I was discussing collaboration with my screenwriter friend Alex. He collaborates with another friend, Brian. Their wives have become close friends. Alex feels, he said, as if he’s living in a Mormon marriage.

I saw a new print of
This Is My Life
recently (I hadn’t watched the movie in years). It was screened at MoMA. I heard Nora’s and my voices so clearly—me more in the sisters, her more in the mother, but really it was harmony. Deeply personal for both of us. It’s my belief, in terms of collaboration, deeply personal is rare.

Rare . . . partly, I think—excuse this theoretical diversion—because collaboration dilutes intimacy. The intimacy you have with your own thoughts, your passions and quirks that you can access if you work alone, in isolation. Thoughts you might feel freer to access if you didn’t need to please the other person. This requirement to please inevitably means that there is, in every collaboration, the potential for conflict. But I did not know this when Nora and I started writing together.

This Is My Life
opened at the Sundance Film Festival and was released in New York, Chicago, and LA. The studio was going to release it wide (across the country) if its grosses were high enough, but they weren’t. Whether the world will love your movie as much as you do is always a question, but at least your collaborator will. And that is a comfort. Nevertheless, it did the trick. Just as we’d hoped, Nora got offered a second chance:
Sleepless in Seattle
.

Our collaboration was a fortress—us against the unpredictable, whimsical movie business, where there is
jealousy and competitiveness and tough times in addition to great and glamorous ones. The movie business knows how to insult you better than it knows anything. Where you park, where you sit, where your table is located, when your call is returned, if your call is returned. On the Warner lot is an original 1928 building where the executive offices are located. In front of the building is a circular driveway. Small. Room for very few cars. We knew
You’ve Got Mail
was going to be made not only because Tom Hanks had agreed to star . . . or because, as our producer Lauren Shuler Donner told us, the copresident of Warner, Bill Gerber, believed in it . . . but because of the driveway. That’s where we got to park.

•  •  •  •

Temperamentally, Nora was more suited to the movie business than I am. She was tough and could intimidate. Knew how to intimidate. No one understood the power of silence better than she did. Just not saying anything. She understood fame. Even before she was famous, she had an East Coast cachet. Then she became famous herself—and fame is worshipped in the movie business because it’s what everyone is after. Fame is power. Studios love doing business with stars. If a star could do everything
there is to do on a movie, studio executives would be happier. They might protest, but in fact it would make them giddy all the time. Stars make everyone giddy. This is one reason actors always win Oscars in non-actor categories, for instance when they direct or write (Emma Thompson, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Mel Gibson and Clint Eastwood, to name a few). Of course, that also happens because actors are the largest wing of Academy voters, and they like to vote for themselves. I’m generalizing here, but not wildly.

Working with Nora in Hollywood was like traveling in an armored vehicle. Once she left a studio meeting for a few minutes and everyone fell on me, giving me all the script notes they didn’t have the nerve to tell her. This happened as well on our movie sets all the time. And I, blessed (or doomed) to be the middle child—always understanding everyone else’s point of view—would tell Nora their notes/concerns/complaints, which she sometimes listened to and as frequently dismissed with a face. From seeing it so often, I can make the face, too. It’s just scrunching up a bit, nothing too extreme.