Jacob Bernstein on Memorializing His Mom, Nora Ephron, in Everything Is Copy

Everything Is Copy, the new documentary about the late Nora Ephron, directed by her older son, Jacob Bernstein, takes its title from a phrase the essayist, screenwriter, and filmmaker learned from her own screenwriter mother.

“Everything is copy” meant “take notes,” even in the most emotionally perilous circumstances. The motto gave Ephron carte blanche to write about the implosion of her two early marriages, first to the writer Dan Greenburg, then to Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein, the philandering father of her then-baby sons. (The latter breakup yielded her autobiographical novel, Heartburn, and the movie adaptation by Mike Nichols.) It meant she had no compunctions about sending up her early boss, New York Post owner Dorothy Schiff, or about writing what Bernstein calls a “delightfully bitchy essay” about New York magazine head honcho Clay Felker and writer Gail Sheehy. And most enduringly, it meant she was willing and able to chronicle her own foibles with radical, humorous honesty. “When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you, but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh,” Ephron explains in a bit of archival audio in the documentary’s first few minutes. “You become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.”

After his mother’s death in 2012 at age 71, her credo also gave Bernstein implicit permission to make this documentary, and in so doing, to investigate even the least savory chapters in her glamorous life: her acrimonious and very public divorce from his father; her tortured relationship with her own alcoholic mother; her complex collaborations with her younger sister Delia. Through interviews with many of Ephron’s most high-profile intimates—actors Bob Balaban, Meryl Streep, and Tom Hanks; directors Mike Nichols, Rob Reiner, and Steven Spielberg; writers Gay Talese and Marie Brenner; and her sisters, Delia, Amy, and Hallie Ephron—Bernstein paints his mother as a painstaking architect of her own public persona: brilliant, warm, witty, exacting, and, at times, as Talese remembers fondly, “pretty cruel and pretty wicked.”

“She was a control freak,” the gossip columnist Liz Smith declares about her old friend, and it was true to the end: When she died, no one but Ephron’s closest inner circle had any idea the writer had been sick for years, first with a rare blood disorder called myelodysplastic syndrome, then with acute myeloid leukemia. Those who assumed her health was good could be forgiven: In her last years, the quietly ailing Ephron published two essay collections, wrote the Broadway play Lucky Guy and mounted Love, Loss, and What I Wore off-Broadway (with her sister Delia), and wrote and directed the Oscar-nominated film Julie & Julia.

All too familiar with his mother’s willingness to mine her own life for material, with her remarkably high standards and with her desire, always, to control the story, Bernstein approached the documentary, which airs tonight on HBO, with some trepidation, and a determination “not to screw this thing up,” he told me by phone. “She was an intimidating mother in certain ways. I could see her eyebrow raised, going: What were you thinking?” We chatted about how he navigated those fears, and how he came to make Everything Is Copy.

You speak on camera about how, as a journalist, you’ve been trained “to take yourself out of the equation.” But this is a very personal film. Was it cathartic for you?
Everyone says: Was this closure? And I say, no, it was the opposite of closure. I think closure is a kind of overrated American concept. This, to me, was continuance. It was a way to keep watching her on a monitor, to read all the old essays in Esquire and New York magazine, the pieces in the Post, the book on Johnny Carson. She was constantly there. The hardest thing was the moment after it was done. In September, we screened it at the New York Film Festival, and 24 hours [later] I felt a little like I’d been punched in the gut. The process of making the film was technically difficult, and certainly the moments where my family was not so enthusiastic were trying. But it was a lot of fun.

The tone is mostly lighthearted and fun, but there are dark moments. Were there things you learned about your mom in making this?
The thing that surprised me the most about my mother was how many people she whacked and got away with it. We now live in this era where journalism is a much more carefully stage-managed profession. You have these armies of publicists, people who are trying to prevent any authentic interchange between a client and the place that’s covering them. If you don’t play nice, you pretty much don’t play at a certain point. She managed to do quite a lot of damage in those early years. There was this delicious naughtiness to her that she really got away with. Some of those stories I knew, some of them were fresh, and there were quite a lot of them that ended up on the cutting-room floor. There were two ex-husbands, Dorothy Schiff, Clay Felker at New York magazine. She wrote this delightfully bitchy essay about his relationship with Gail Sheehy, and did it as a parody of a Gail Sheehy piece. She goes back to Esquire from New York magazine and edits a piece that the publishers decide to retract. Then she goes and writes a scathing piece about them for More, the journalism review. If you did that now, you wouldn’t ever work again.

So it was a different time. But it was also personal to her.
Yes, I think it was both the time and it was the fact that she had this voice. She managed to do this in a way that felt not horrible and mean-spirited but honest and refreshing.

A lot of people talk about wanting her approval, including Steven Spielberg, who said he was always trying to make her laugh. Did it validate you to hear these bigwigs saying they found her intimidating?
Yes, and I wasn’t completely expecting it. I did actually think with people like Steven perhaps she had been a little more edited. Probably with some of them she was. But she managed to become who she became without a lot of triangulation or sublimation. And I think that’s very uncommon. I think most people who wind up in the rooms that she wound up in are diplomats. I don’t think she was a diplomat.

I noticed that Nick [Pileggi], her husband, wasn’t on camera, nor was your younger brother. Why?
With Nick it was purely a feeling that he was going to break down. They had a fantastic love affair. And he was quite enthusiastic about my doing the doc. If we’re talking about family really being unenthusiastic about this, my father took two years to come on board. He was just not happy with the idea I was going to do this.

That put my brother in a tricky position. I think he was torn between wanting to be loyal to my mother and to be in this thing that would honor her, and his relationship with my father, whom he’s really close with. I think everyone was rightfully concerned that this could easily have turned into a misguided narcissistic exercise. Most people’s children are not totally clear-eyed about who their parents are. How do you make a coherent biographical portrait of someone with whom you are entangled in so many ways? That was complicated.

How did you check yourself?
Well, for one, I knew the through-line of the story was going to be about her as a writer, and how the personal and the public met up and diverged. I think comedy exists in this intersection between bravery and ruthlessness: That was the fun and the terror of her. The voice-overs that I do in the film, nevertheless, took a huge amount of time to sort out, and the structural element of me in the film was one of the things that took the longest.

Did you feel exposed?
More than anything, I felt the fear of failure. I think the knowledge of what some of the trapdoors were wound up being extraordinarily helpful. I knew that if there were too many celebrities, it would look like I was a coffin fly and a barnacle. And I knew that if too many scenes were about me, that I was going to look opportunistic. I knew that at a certain point, the question with me had to do with Heartburn, and what that meant. I needed to be there to help facilitate that story.

What convinced your dad to participate after two years?
A lot of ass-kicking and lot of psychological pressure. There were real stretches of time where I was sort of nonresponsive to him.

It made me angry. They’re your parents! You want them to do what you’re asking them. I suppose there are children who are slightly more generous than me.

Early on I went to see Mike Nichols, when I thought I was going to do this. He said to me very clearly: “If you’re not prepared to deal with this divorce, you don’t have a movie, because the divorce is the center of this.” Another friend of mine had seen a couple different celebrity documentaries and said: “Just make sure that you actually know what your movie is about.” Both of those things were invaluable. The fact that you were there for some of it does not make it inherently a good story. You have to know what it means, and what your through-line is.

You were so young when the divorce happened. Your dad talks on camera about his own concern with how the movie adaptation of Heartburn might adversely affect you. But you don’t talk much about how it actually did.
There was certainly a period of my childhood where I did not regard my father as the model parent, and certainly part of the sense of that came from my awareness of what happened with him and my mother.

Do you think your interviewees were more open and honest with you because you’re Nora’s son, or less?
I think it was probably a mix of both. It made it easier to get into the room. And more difficult to get beneath the surface. I think there were many people who were probably inclined to go in there and tell me about how many doctors, hairstylists, and restaurants she referred them to.

You went into journalism, like your mom, and now, like her, you’re going into filmmaking. Did it ever occur to you that you might want to do something completely different?
Look, I think anybody who tells you it’s not intimidating having successful parents is probably not telling you the truth. It’s like people who tell you that they liked Boyhood and Birdman equally. I think all people are probably one or the other, and if they tell you they liked both equally, it’s like: Figure out who the fuck you are. So yes, it was difficult at points. It was also why I knew that I needed to not screw this up. It gave me something to aspire to.

This interview has been condensed and edited.