Ilana Kaplan was watching a movie marathon on TV as a child when she caught her first Nora Ephron rom-com, the 1998 classic You’ve Got Mail.
Too young to side-eye an enemies-to-lovers plotline in which big-box executive Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) forces indie children’s-bookstore owner Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) to shutter her beloved shop, Kaplan simply swooned. “I was like, Oh, so romantic!” she muses. “Meanwhile, I’m totally oblivious to the fact that he’s putting her out of business.”
And yet, decades later, their chemistry still captivates her. Sure, the storyline is “such a commentary on capitalism,” she says, but “you can’t deny—Nora knew how to pair actors together in a rom-com.”
Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail (1998). Warner Bros. Pictures/Courtesy of Everett Collection
Kaplan, 36, is now a certified expert on both Nora Ephron, the revered writer/filmmaker who died in 2012 at age 71, and the romantic comedy. Last fall, the Union County native published her debut book, Nora Ephron at the Movies: A Visual Celebration of the Writer and Director Behind When Harry Met Sally, You’ve Got Mail, Sleepless in Seattle, and More (Abrams).
It’s a critical survey not only of Ephron’s celebrated trio of timeless rom-coms from the 1980s and ’90s, but also of her entire oeuvre: her novel-turned-film Heartburn (a fictionalized account of her second marriage, to Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein), her lesser-known and more eccentric films, misfires, groundbreaking journalism and searingly honest essays.
Ephron’s mammoth legacy and legions of fans, ever hungry for Ephron lore, warranted a weighty tome. Nora Ephron at the Movies is built like a coffee-table book worthy of a cameo on a well-stocked bookshelf in an Ephron heroine’s impeccably shabby-chic brownstone. It’s the first illustrated monograph on Ephron, so a photographic feast surrounds Kaplan’s deeply researched analysis. (Though Ephron’s family declined to grant interviews, her third husband and widower, the Oscar-nominated Goodfellas writer Nicholas Pileggi, mailed Kaplan a handwritten note thanking her for “a blissful book about Nora.” It hangs on her fridge.)
Nora Ephron Paramount Pictures/Courtesy of Everett Collection
Kaplan dubs Ephron, the daughter of screenwriters who worked during Hollywood’s Golden Age, “the fairy godmother” of modern romantic comedies. “After years of a genre lying in wait,” she writes, “she waved her magic wand and penned dazzling scripts…for women who wouldn’t take any shit.”
Ephron “moved the needle on rom-coms,” Kaplan tells New Jersey Monthly, “in terms of showcasing these flawed heroines who were…very tightly wound, but then could explode….and then that shiny veneer could be gone….She really made rom-coms with the female gaze in mind.”
These leading ladies, she writes, are “having fake orgasms in restaurants, letting men see them when their nose is red and they ‘have a terrible cold,’ and letting their frizzy hair fall where it may during an emotional breakdown.”
The iconic Katz’s Deli scene in When Harry Met Sally (1989). Columbia Pictures/Courtesy of Everett Collection
“Nora’s work transformed the way I saw myself,” Kaplan declares in the intro. “I could be frustrating and flawed and resist tradition; I could be seen.” (At her own wedding, Kaplan tearily shouted out Ephron in her vows, “a weird, full-circle moment,” she explains, since she had helped “turn me into a hopeless romantic.”)
Born in Elizabeth, Kaplan grew up in Roselle Park before moving to Westfield in fourth grade. Her teenage haunts included concert venue Crossroads in Garwood and the now defunct Sound Station record store in Westfield. She often took the train into Manhattan to check out bands at the Knitting Factory or wander Washington Square Park. “I always envisioned my life in New York,” she recalls. “I thought it was glamorous.”
As an aspiring music writer—a dream cemented by Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield’s memoir, Love Is a Mix Tape—Kaplan double-majored in English and journalism/media studies at Rutgers, where she DJed at campus radio station 90.3 The Core, cohosting The Greenhouse Effect—“Like, polluting your airwaves with great music,” she laughs.
When she landed a post-grad job in social media, Kaplan commuted to Manhattan from Westfield. Weeknights, she attended concerts and penned freelance pieces; weekends, she waitressed at Old Man Rafferty’s in New Brunswick. She moved to New York City around 2013 and currently works as a music editor at People.
Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail Warner Bros. Pictures/Courtesy of Everett Collection
Sometime this fall—if she hasn’t already—Kaplan will sit down for her seasonal rewatch of You’ve Got Mail, the Nora Ephron film that started it all. “It feels like home; it’s nostalgic; it reminds me of my childhood,” she says. “It’s a rite of passage.” And she still gets goosebumps.
