Coming to theatres today, Friday, March 18: EVERYTHING IS COPY
Jacob Bernstein and co-director Nick Hooker’s portrait of Nora Ephron made its debut at the New York Film Festival last Fall. The doc also screened at Palm Springs and the Westchester Jewish film fests.
Bernstein, Ephron’s eldest son with her second husband, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Carl Bernstein, constructs a straightforward but warmly engaging tribute of the celebrated writer/director. Weaving together archival personal footage, various media appearances of his mother, and interviews with family and illustrious friends and admirers, from Meryl Streep, Mike Nichols, and Meg Ryan to Rob Reiner, Tom Hanks, and Gay Talese, among several others, the film relates how the daughter of mildly successful Beverly Hills screenwriters went from a mail girl at Newsweek to a famed magazine essayist for Esquire and The New Yorker before breaking in as a Hollywood screenwriter and later director, usually drawing from her personal experiences. Borrowing its title from an aphorism oft-stated by Ephron’s mother – essentially that anything that happens in ones life is fair game for use by a writer – the film makes much of her uncharacteristic decision to keep secret her diagnosis of leukemia, which claimed her life in 2012, but thankfully Bernstein doesn’t get too bogged down in this, choosing instead to celebrate his mother’s life and her deft skill in bringing humor to personal tragedies and triumphs alike through her clever writing.
what (not) to doc 