Ephron’s legacy in ‘Everything is Copy’ – Bernstein’s film entertaining, illuminating docu

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LOS ANGELES, March 22, (RTRS): After Nora Ephron died in 2012, her son Jacob Bernstein knew he wanted to tell the story she never told. That mission became his first documentary feature, “Everything Is Copy,” which debuted at the New York Film Festival last year and premieres tonight on HBO.

Ephron’s life was famously well documented in her essays, books and even through certain biographical details that slipped into her films: the way Sally orders at restaurants in “When Harry Met Sally,” worshiping at the culinary altar of Julia Child in “Julie and Julia” and the sibling dynamics of “Hanging Up” — to name a few.

As Bernstein explains, this instinct to share intimate aspects of her private life in a public fashion can be traced back to a three-word mantra passed on to Ephron from her screenwriter mother, Phoebe Wolkind: “Everything is copy.” But when it came to the fatal disease that took her life, Ephron went radio silent. She didn’t even let many of her closest friends and colleagues know that she was near death.

Bernstein, who writes for the New York Times, tries to find an answer to that curious decision in his entertaining and illuminating documentary. He also corrals a star-studded line-up of subjects to help bring his mother into focus, including Meryl Streep, Meg Ryan, Tom Hanks, Lena Dunham, Rosie O’Donnell, Rob Reiner, Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw, Barry Diller, Bryan Lourd, Gay Talese, the late Mike Nichols and Bernstein’s own father, Carl (who was the subject of the film “All the President’s Men” and Ephron’s bitter post-divorce memoir “Heartburn,” made into a film directed by Nichols and starring Streep and Jack Nicholson).

Question: What prompted the decision to make a movie about your mother?

Answer: I knew when she died that I was going to write about her in some way. And I was also self-aware enough to know that I wasn’t going to write a book that was better than any of the books she wrote about herself. I had seen this avalanche of great cultural documentaries, from “Bill Cunningham New York” to “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work.” It seemed to me the structure of one of those might be a good way to go about exploring who she was, while at the same time giving me some cover. She could be the star of it. I knew that she was the person people wanted to see.

Q: Was there anyone you wanted to talk to who either couldn’t or wouldn’t talk for the film?

A: There were a few. My brother (Max) is not in the film, and I think he would’ve added to it. When I decided to make the film, my father wasn’t so enthusiastic about it, so that put my brother in a difficult position. (Neither is) my stepfather (author Nicholas Pileggi) — just the grief of losing her was palpable.

I didn’t turn into Patti Davis doing this, but it was complicated for people. Even with a well-intentioned, basically intelligent person, this could’ve gone all sorts of wrong. I don’t think there’s anything standard about people’s adult children having a clear-eyed view about who their parents are. People get very twisted around, both pro and con, about where they come from. That was always going to be a particular thing to work through and get around.

To that point, I know it really took a lot of arm-twisting to get your father in the film.

It was not a short conversation. It took two years, and a lot of psychological manipulation on my part. And a certain amount of basic reporter etiquette, saying, “This is going to be better for you if you cooperate.” I don’t think he would say that’s why he did this. I think he believes very much that he did this out of love for me. But people are complicated. My intentions and methods were not pure, and probably his weren’t either.

Q: Inevitably you have to ask him about “Heartburn.” What was that like, especially since you both know you’re on camera? Was it the first time you discussed that?

A: No, it wasn’t. In fact, I think some of the other conversations I had with Mike Nichols, Meryl Streep, Bob Gottlieb and Marie Brenner were somewhat more unexpected. There wasn’t any pre-interviewing really. There wasn’t a long, protracted, Mexican standoff (before the other interviews). And there also wasn’t the intimacy that exists between my father and me.

I had always said there was a period in my life when things were strained between me and my father, and there was a period where it got better. But I don’t think I’d ever acknowledged that part of why I was upset with him was “Heartburn.” I think I always stuck to it that, as a kid, it was the affair itself and not the embarrassment of (the book and the movie) that was upsetting to me. When he said that thing about “I really felt that publicity was the thing that was going to ruin our relationship,” I thought, “He’s got a point there.”

I did go into this documentary with the belief that this should be about the tricky negotiation of the public and the private when a person is a writer or an artist. There’s almost no greater power than the ability to tell your own story and, at the same time, I don’t think you really tell your own story without somebody in it getting swiped. The most compelling stories all involve a victor and a victim. Someone is triumphant; someone gets f—ed.

Q: How did you decide how much of the conversation with your father to include in the film?

A: The best stuff from that conversation is in the film. There were parts that were just enervating and not all that illuminating ultimately. At one point I had asked him about why he had had this affair. There was a real disagreement among everyone on our creative team about whether it should be in there. It was a tricky conversation. I had it in at one point, I was inclined to use it. And Sheila Nevins said: “This is not authentic. It seems like (something for) a different movie. You don’t need it.”

Also:

LOS ANGELES: “The Perfect Guy” star Michael Ealy has been attached to LD Entertainment’s reboot of supernatural thriller “Jacob’s Ladder.”

The reboot is a modern-day paranoid action thriller about two brothers. David Rosenthal, who directed Ealy in “The Perfect Guy,” is set to direct.

Producers are Mickey Liddell, Pete Shilaimon and Jennifer Monroe at LD Entertainment; Alison Rosenzweig and Michael Gaeta of Gaeta/Rosenzweig Films; and Will Packer via his Will Packer Productions banner.

Will Packer Productions’ James F. Lopez will executive produce.

The script was written by Jeff Buhler (“Pet Cemetery”) and Sarah Thorp (“The Bounty Hunter”). The project was originally sold as a pitch by Jake Wade Wall.

Principal photography is set to begin mid-May.

The original “Jacob’s Ladder” was released in 1990 and directed by Adrian Lyne, written and produced by Bruce Joel Rubin and starred Tim Robbins, Elizabeth Pena and Danny Aiello.

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