When Harry Met Sally...

Rob Reiner’s film was written by Nora Ephron, and Harry came straight out of interviews: Ephron talked at length with Reiner and producer Andrew Scheinman, handed the results to Harry, and built Sally out of herself and her friends. The thing worth having is the ending. Ephron’s first draft left the two as friends, and she considered that the true ending. Reiner changed it after meeting his second wife, Michele Singer. So the reunion on screen is the writer’s own view reversed. The older couples talking between scenes look like documentary but are not: real interviews, rewritten and reshot with actors. In the deli scene Ephron proposed the subject, Meg Ryan chose the setting, Billy Crystal wrote the closing line, and the woman delivering it is the director’s mother, Estelle Reiner. Columbia did not open it wide: 41 theatres first, 775 only a week later. Ephron was nominated for the writing Oscar, which went to Tom Schulman for Dead Poets Society; she won the BAFTA for original screenplay that season. A good fit if you want to argue whether the reunion is earned or imposed, knowing Ephron’s own true ending was reversed. Not for anyone who wants incident: across twelve years the only obstacle is what the two of them think, and the film runs on talk.