Queen of romantic comedy is focus of new study

Hollywood writer and director Nora Ephron, famed for her hits When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, is the subject of a new project exploring her impact on ‘male-genre’ filmmaking.

Researcher Dr Sarah Louise Smyth, who fell in love with Ephron’s classic romantic comedies as a child, will study her lesser-known early screenplays for thrillers and war films.

Funded by the British Academy, Dr Smyth will focus on early drafts of Ephron’s paranoid thriller Silkwood (1983), possible uncredited contributions to political investigative thriller All the President’s Men (1976) and various versions of her unmade war film Higgins & Beech.

Dr Smyth’s study, which will contribute to a book she is writing about Ephron’s wider contribution to cinema, aims to discover how women contributed to conventionally masculine genres, understand why those contributions were often uncredited, dismissed or forgotten, and establish new methods for researching women in film.

Dr Smyth, from the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies, was inspired to explore Ephron after noticing the lack of academic analysis of her work. Despite growing interest in the work of women filmmakers, she was shocked to discover that there was little discussion about Ephron’s contribution.

“Film studies is beginning to look at women in film but a lot of this work is around experimental or art house filmmakers. While there has been some growing interest in Hollywood filmmakers like Nancy Meyers and Amy Heckerling, there has been much less interest in Ephron,” said Dr Smyth.

She explains this is largely down to Ephron’s fame for romantic comedies.

“It’s not a genre that is taken very seriously. Because they are associated with women, are targeted at women, and lean on women’s feelings, they are disparaged. But they deserve to be analysed.

“Ephron was a journalist before becoming a scriptwriter and she was central to a lot of cultural conversations about women and feminism in the 70s, 80s and 90s. It’s surprising that she has been largely ignored by film critics and film studies more broadly since she wrote one of the greatest romantic comedies of all time, When Harry Met Sally, and was one of the first women to make $100 million at the box office.”

For this study, Dr Smyth will look at Ephron’s contribution to genres more typically seen as ‘masculine’, such as thrillers and war films. Her archival research, looking at previously unexamined screenplays and documents, will focus on films including the Oscar-nominated Silkwood, a left-leaning film about union politics starring Meryl Streep as union leader Karen Silkwood and Cher playing a gay woman.

“This is a very interesting film because Ephron’s romantic comedies are generally seen as very conservative. They are about middle class, white, straight couples and they aren’t seen as political or culturally complex. And yet Silkwood demonstrates that Ephron was interested in exploring political and cultural issues. I’m interested in this tension. If we understand this film better, it casts her romantic comedies in a new light,” Dr Smyth explained.

She will also study Ephron’s scripts for the film Higgins & Beech, which was never made. It told the story of real-life woman journalist Marguerite Higgins who reported on the Korean War but was constantly challenged by men.

Also under the spotlight will be possible contributions to Oscar-winning All the President’s Men. It’s thought Ephron wrote a draft of the screenplay with her then husband, Carl Bernstein, who broke the story of the Watergate scandal.

This research will form the basis of Dr Smyth’s book, ReFocus: The Films of Nora Ephron. This book is contracted to Edinburgh University Press and is due to be published in 2026.

Header image: Meryl Streep in Silkwood (1983), courtesy of Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo