Sister Mother Husband Dog: (Etc.) (14 page)

While I was often an intermediary, I wasn’t a pushover. I want to say that right here and now. I never recommended anything I didn’t agree with.

What prepared me best for this role, however—lobbying Nora for changes (ones I wanted and ones others did that I agreed with)—was not being a middle child. It was being a stepmother. A stepmother has no direct control over her stepkids. Not really. She has to convince the more “legitimate” parent that her opinion/idea is right. With our baby the movie, Nora the director was the more legitimate parent. So what I was doing at home with my husband, Jerry, lobbying him endlessly about his kids, I was also doing on the set.

I often drove her crazy because I was certain she wasn’t going to do what I wanted even when she promised she would. I would tell her the same thing twelve times. I was right, she didn’t always listen. Sometimes she would boss me around, and then I would go home and try to boss my husband around. This did not go over well. As my friend Alex said, a Mormon marriage.

•  •  •  •

Each movie Nora and I did had its own anatomy. The first was the purest, just us.
Sleepless in Seattle
, on the other hand, was based on a script by Jeff Arch, rewritten by David Ward, then by Nora, and then by both of us. Even
though we didn’t collaborate directly with those writers, we built on their scripts. Tom Hanks had a lot of input, too. On his character. He was very demanding—we had to repeatedly juice up his scenes—and I learned from him about writing for stars: how stars need stuff, interesting stuff, how they have to drive the action.

What I remember most about the
Sleepless
shoot, however, was the car accident I had on the day I arrived. In an underground parking garage with those giant cement columns every few feet, I backed into a man’s brand-new Lexus. It still had dealer plates. The car didn’t have a scratch on it, but the driver went ballistic. He kept shouting that maybe it had internal injuries. And I kept saying, “It’s not a person.” But this is the amazing part, the part about moviemaking I can never get over: All I had to do was call someone in the production office, tell them I smashed my fender (mine was a bit dented), they picked me up, and the next day I had a new rental car. I never had to think about it again. What I’m saying is, working on a movie can spoil a girl rotten.

On
Michael
we rewrote a script by Pete Dexter, the novelist, and Jim Quinlan, a journalist who had worked in the tabloids (the world the story takes place in). Here’s the nasty on being a screenwriter: After being replaced
yourself, after having your heart broken or sort of, you go and replace someone else. In fact, you are thrilled to do it. A rewrite. Good money. We did this on
Sleepless
and
Michael
, believing the screenplay needed us to fix it and wanting it to be Nora’s/ours. In other words, every screenwriter, whether or not she or he has a collaborator, is a collaborator—not in the good sense of the word. More like Vichy and the Germans in World War II. They collaborate with a system that mistreats them. Screenwriters are pitted against one another—the weak against the weak.

Dexter and Quinlan invented the grubby, irresistible archangel that John Travolta brought to life. The character of Michael was their creation. I don’t think anyone except Travolta could have played that part. It was our great good fortune that he did. The script had been in turnaround (this is when a studio doesn’t want to make it and gives you some time to place it at another studio). In this case, the studio releasing the movie, in an attempt to make it hard for us to cast it, gave us a list of actors that we couldn’t use. Studios are always worried they are going to put something in turnaround that will turn out to be
E.T.
, a humongous turnaround embarrassment. How do you explain to the world and the stockholders
such a creative and, more important to them, economic miscalculation? Universal gave us a no-Michael list, but Travolta wasn’t on it.

Mixed Nuts
, based on the French comedy
Le père Noël est une ordure
(translation:
Santa Claus Is a Shit
), was a flop. Starring Steve Martin, it was about six misfits at a suicide hotline center on Christmas Eve. In retrospect, a flop is obvious. Of course. What were we thinking? Many of life’s flops, like marriages, are obvious in retrospect. If you knew it, you wouldn’t do it, but you didn’t, so you did. Probably Nora and I should never have tried to adapt something French. We are so not French. French comedies are French in the most peculiarly French way, largely because they’re played by French people.

I loved the shoot, however. In the magical land of moviemaking, artists of all sorts collaborate. Being on a set and/or being involved with the entire moviemaking process, not simply writing (and I was fortunate to be welcome), means you learn from everyone—from your producer, casting person (casting sessions teach a writer whether their scene works or how it might work better), editor (film editors are temperamentally the most like writers and, in my experience, very generous with their
knowledge), costume, makeup, production designer. You see them work, they share, and you absorb. On
Mixed Nuts
, I got to know Sven Nykvist, the brilliant cinematographer who had shot many of Ingmar Bergman’s films. He had shot
Sleepless
as well, but on
Mixed Nuts
, I hung out with him on night shoots, of which there were many—balmy LA nights under the palm trees near Venice Beach. He would tell me how and why he would frame and light the shots. He could light a shot with candles and was famous for doing it in a Bergman masterpiece called
Fanny and Alexander
. I treasure those memories. I have a photo in my office of Sven and me talking, sitting on the set in director’s chairs—him, a hulking Swedish guy with a Swedish beard (a hedgelike trim around his chin that never looks good on any man, but looked great on Sven), wearing a wide-brimmed white straw hat with a black band. My face is mostly obscured by a baseball cap, the ubiquitous movie-set headgear.

Sven, seventy-two then, was a movie animal (my term)—someone who was alive only on a set. Everything else that movie animals do is what you might call “between.” He had worked on sets since he was seventeen, he told me. He had houses in Europe he rarely visited. I think he had wives, too, he never saw when he had them,
although he didn’t have one then. He had groupies who hung about, mostly at the hotel. Until I met Sven, I didn’t know cinematographers had groupies. The night we wrapped, he flew to Sweden (perhaps it was Norway) to start another film,
Kristin Lavransdatter
. Liv Ullmann was directing this movie, based on an epic novel (think Swedish
Gone with the Wind
). It takes place in the Middle Ages. I had read the book in college. Every time a man leaves the house, he is eaten by a bear. Every time a woman has sex, she gets pregnant. Bear/pregnant. Bear/pregnant.

Sven died ten years later, after shooting four more features and a few documentaries. He had been the cinematographer on more than 108 movies, according to his IMDb page. Thanks to the wonderful world of movie collaboration, I got to spend time with him.

•  •  •  •

Here’s a weird thing about collaborating with a sister: Some people you work with can’t be friends with both of you. “Friends” doesn’t quite describe it, because Nora and I didn’t often share friends. They can’t relate to both sisters. I don’t know why, and I don’t know whether it’s true when the collaborators are brothers. People feel they
have to choose. They simply can’t like both of you. Not always, but it happened often enough that I wondered about it. I wondered if they were bringing their own sibling problems into the mix.

Having said that, one of the remarkable things about moviemaking is how many collaborators become lifelong friends. The closest thing to a location shoot is camp (at least our shoots, because they were friendly; some don’t have that atmosphere). You’re all away from your real lives in a strange place, which breeds an intensity and an intimacy. It’s as if you’d all gotten lost in the woods together, fallen out of a canoe, hiked miles, and killed a snake. To survive, you had to trust one another.

You’ve Got Mail
was an especially good collaboration because, once again, we had tons of common ground. We set it in the world of books. We both loved books, had grown up in a house where books were worshipped. In 1996, which this was, big chain stores were putting independent booksellers out of business, which was not only personally upsetting but gave us a perfect plot for the most important romantic comedy element: Why can’t two people be together? In this case, he was putting her out of business. (How quickly things change—now Amazon is destroying the chains and the independents
are staging a comeback.) We both loved children’s books. That’s why Meg Ryan/Kathleen Kelly has a children’s bookstore. We set the movie on the Upper West Side of New York City, where we were both then living, in the same building as a matter of fact. To collaborate, we had only to cross a courtyard. Also we were both crazy about
The Shop Around the Corner
, the 1940 movie on which
You’ve Got Mail
is based.

Actually the movie began life in 1937 as a Hungarian play,
Parfumerie
, by Miklós László. Then came
The Shop Around the Corner
, followed by a musical version,
In the Good Old Summertime
(1949), followed by
She Loves Me
, a Broadway musical (1963). The score by Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock is divine.

This is rare—when a story and characters are so winning that they continue to inspire and enchant. The plot is simple: A man and a woman, pen pals (in our update, e-mail-pals), are in love in their letters but hate each other in person. They have no idea they know each other . . . and then one of them finds out. In writing
You’ve Got Mail
, we collaborated not only with each other but in spirit with Samson Raphaelson, who wrote both previous movies, and with the original playwright as well. It was an honor.

•  •  •  •

Sometime during our third movie, which was
Mixed Nuts
, I started writing novels. I didn’t want to be a director and I didn’t want to be angry. Fortunately I had another path. Faith Sale, an editor at Putnam, offered me a contract. Books were my first love. I needed to tell stories my way. I needed to hear my own voice. My idea of an ideal workday is six hours alone in a room. That means, by temperament, I’m not a director, and truly a movie belongs to the director. That’s the dilemma of screenwriting. A movie isn’t writing. It’s based on writing. The movie wouldn’t exist without a script, but it isn’t a script. Screenwriters have to live with that truth. A lot of time they live in denial. A movie is a visual medium. Bottom line: If you don’t
see
something in a movie, odds are, you don’t remember it.

My favorite movie memories are often random moments seen, not spoken. In
Radio Days
, a complex back-and-forth between Woody Allen’s fictionalized 1940s childhood and the glamorous life of the folks on the radio, in this film dense with character and funny lines, what pops to mind: Mr. Zipsky. Is it even a minute? I don’t think so. Mr. Zipsky in his boxer shorts, waving a
meat cleaver, runs amok down the street to the tune of “Mairzy Doats.” I love that.

I had not gotten a credit on
Sleepless
. Three other writers did. That fact did not push me into novels—the luck of receiving the offer did—but no question it made me aware that I needed to do it. The Writers Guild decides who gets credit when more than one writer is involved. In Jeff Arch’s original, the leading man/Tom Hanks goes on the radio himself to say he needs a new wife. David Ward made a critical story/structural change: His son called the radio. Nora had done a draft, and then when she was hired to direct, I came on to do the final draft. All the other writers had made major structural changes. I hadn’t, and to the Writers Guild that is big stuff, rightfully so. Nora called to tell me. I remember where I was sitting, at my husband’s desk. Even though we expected it and I laughed, I remember it, so it wasn’t nothing. Ever generous (and a bit guilty), Nora gave me a cut of profit points and an associate producer credit. The movie did go into profit, although the studio had to be sued to admit it.

At this moment, I’m suddenly thinking about something Nora said that has nothing to do with the movies. Shortly before she entered the hospital, she had a conversation with our dentist about a temporary inlay she
had. She said to Dr. Bruno, “I can’t discuss this now. I have low platelets and I’m going to lunch at Grenouille.” (La Grenouille is an elegant old-world New York restaurant.) This line, as much irony as pluck and so adorable, sums up how much fun mattered to Nora. It was always part of the equation. In our collaboration, her energy was contagious, unflagging, and always buoyed me—even on set, when we were exhausted or the shoot was difficult. (One cannot overstate the potential for hysteria on a movie set. Everyone always acts as if making the movie is as important as eradicating malaria.) But this funny/sad/dear thing she said also popped to mind because of La Grenouille, because I’m thinking about how absolutely impossible Nora was when it came to choosing a restaurant. She would say, Where should we eat? and eventually we would decide to eat where she wanted to eat, which she definitely knew before she asked the question. She needed decisions to be hers . . . not only where we would eat, but what we would work on. She was not simply a director of movies, she was the director of life. And she was my older sister, too.
Quel
nightmare. This was another reason why I wanted to write novels. I wanted control, too. I needed to fly solo.

As we both got more confident and needed each other less, we began to drive each other more nuts. Once
I sat down to write a scene and typed two letters—that’s letters, not words—and she said, “No.” I swear this is true, not that you’d doubt it if you knew her. I banished her immediately: “Go make lunch.” She made us the best lunches. I’m always remembering her standing at the kitchen counter with her perfect hair, flats, long shirt, and skinny pants, tossing mesclun salad in a bowl. And by the way, I snapped at her often, although how is this possible, nothing comes to mind. Sibling relationships are essentially primitive. Nora bit into a tomato when she was seven or so in such a perfect way as to spray juice in my eye. That is my first memory of us. I don’t remember torturing Hallie, although I’m sure Hallie remembers. I told Amy that a little blue man lived under her bed and would get her in the middle of the night. Sisters share an uncivilized history. Now and then, as adults and as collaborators, it surfaced.