Nora Ephron's Journalism Skills Came In Handy While Planning When Harry Met Sally

"When Harry Met Sally..." is a love story that hinges, to some degree, on fate. It'd be easy to imagine that the off-screen match between screenwriter Nora Ephron and director Rob Reiner would be similarly serendipitous. But according to Scott Meslow's "From Hollywood with Love: The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of the Romantic Comedy," Ephron and Reiner's first meeting was not unlike Harry and Sally's — a little awkward, and initially, a little mismatched. Ephron met Reiner and his producing partner, Andrew Scheinman, to discuss a project in 1984 but it wasn't "When Harry Met Sally..."

"They told me an idea they had for a movie about a lawyer," Ephron told Meslow (via i). At the time, Ephron was in the midst of a transition from journalism to screenwriting — in the past year, she had co-written the script for "Silkwood," and earned an Oscar nomination for it. And her debut novel, "Heartburn," was soon to be adapted as a feature film as well. Both were at least partially rooted in some measure of the female experience. Needless to say, a "movie about a lawyer" just didn't cut it for Ephron. "It didn't interest me at all, and I couldn't imagine why they'd thought of me in connection with it."

Ephron swiftly turned down the offer, and the conversation could have ended then and there. Thankfully for fans of the film, Ephron used the remaining time to do what any good journalist does — ask (personal) questions.

At that fateful first meeting, Nora Ephron used her investigative skills to get to know Rob Reiner and Andrew Scheinman. The former was recently divorced and the latter had always been single. Ephron was desperate to know, among other things, how single men moved through the world. When the three met a month later and started to unpack the differences between men and women, they realized there might be potential for a movie here.

Reiner had been kicking around an idea for a story, one that would ask whether or not men and women could be friends without sex getting in the way. That was an idea that Ephron could get behind. She already had one side of the argument down — the side that would eventually inform the character of Sally — but in order to convincingly write from both perspectives, she needed a bit more from Reiner and Scheinman.

"She interviewed us like a journalist, got all these thoughts down, and that became the basis for Harry," Reiner said. "She became the basis for Sally."

Over the next five years, Nora Ephron interviewed Rob Reiner and his producing partner, working the quirks, the discussions, and the debates into the script that would become "When Harry Met Sally..." Ephron and Reiner "fought bitterly" over every topic that concerned both men and women, but for the writer, those arguments were "as much fun as [she has] ever had." The film's most iconic scene — the one in the deli where Sally fakes an orgasm to prove a point to Harry — was also the result of a collaboration, with Meg Ryan (who played Sally) suggesting it.

While Ephron and Reiner's collaboration didn't exactly answer the question they set out to debate — Harry and Sally do hook up, and it does briefly ruin everything before they wind up married — it did signal the beginning of a beautiful friendship between the writer and director. More importantly, it basically spawned the '90s rom-com renaissance. Is that mission accomplished, in a manner of speaking?