Nora ephron men and women cant be friends

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July 9, 1989, Section 2, Page 11Buy Reprints

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Rob Reiner got married in May, and it's only coincidence that the script he's now preparing to direct - an adaptation by William Goldman of a recent novel by Stephen King - is titled ''Misery.'' But it's also only coincidence that Mr. Reiner, who was divorced from the actress-cum-director Penny Marshall several years ago, met his current wife, the photographer Michele Singer, on the set of the film he's just finished, ''When Harry Met Sally . . . ,'' which, among other things, happens to be about a divorced fellow who can't get used to being single again. Dating, loneliness, sex without love - that, as the predicament of Harry Burns is portrayed, is misery. And it is solved when Harry marries his best friend, Sally Albright, the woman who has been right for him all along.

''When Harry Met Sally . . . ,'' which opens in New York on Wednesday, stars Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan in the title roles. They meet as recent graduates of the University of Chicago, driving to New York to begin their careers, a journey during which a basic antagonism/attraction becomes clear. He, an adolescent-minded cynic with a gift for glib patter, makes an unsuccessful pass at her and then establishes the resolution that the movie debates: he claims it's impossible for a man and a woman simply to be friends. She, fresh-faced and optimistic, argues with him, of course. But dropping him off at Washington Square, she, an evidently self-denying sort, tips her hand. It's an awkward parting, a harbinger: ''Have a nice life,'' she says, dolefully.

They run into each other again, five years later, at an airport, just long enough to establish that he's become a political consultant and she a journalist, that she's in love, he's about to be married and that neither one has yielded up any of the characteristics that annoyed and appealed to the other. So five years after that, when they meet a third time, both of their relationships recently defunct, they are ready to go about the real business of the film, ''rubbing up against each other,'' in Mr. Reiner's phrase, spoken without irony. They establish a friendship that burgeons into love, thus either proving or disproving Harry's original thesis.

It's not an exact parallel to the director's own circumstance, but in its muddle over the rules of romance - and, of course, in its happy ending - it is a pleasantly apt one. Acknowledging that he's a relentlessly self-examining man - ''I don't subject myself to psychic torment; it's there'' - Mr. Reiner freely admits that there's a lot of him in the film, meaning both the grief of divorce and the discomfort of having to re-enlist in the ranks of single men.

But it isn't until he's asked if, having made this film and then gotten married himself, he's figured out whether a man can, in fact, be friends with a woman, that the origin of the movie's spirit becomes clear. His brilliant, convoluted, cover-all-the-bases response illuminates the movie's comic male skew, and might easily have been written for the know-it-all Harry Burns: ''You can,'' the 42-year-old Mr. Reiner says. ''You can for a while. I think you can be friends for a while with a woman, and I think you can ultimately be best friends with a woman that you're going to be romantically involved with. I just don't think you can be intimate, close friends with a woman that you're not going to have sex with, if you're both involved with other people, or if one person's involved.''

Of his five films (among them, ''This Is Spinal Tap,'' ''Stand by Me'' and ''The Princess Bride''), the new one is closest to ''The Sure Thing,'' a 1985 comedy starring John Cusack. In it, Mr. Cusack plays a randy college freshman who travels across the country to meet a girl who, he has been told, will sleep with him, no questions asked. But having made the trip, he discovers he can't go through with the arranged liaison because he's fallen in love with a classmate, the girl he traveled with.

''It's true,'' Mr. Reiner says of the connection. ''You write the same things over and over again. You paint the same things, compose the same things,'' though he adds that the inspiration for Harry and Sally was more immediate, and that, given his own situation now, the next time he ''looks into the man-woman thing,'' there ought to be children involved.

''I had the idea for the film about six or seven years ago,'' Mr. Reiner says. ''I was in the middle of my single life. I'd been divorced for a while. I'd been out a number of times, all these disastrous, confusing relationships one after another. And I thought, 'This is an area I've never explored. Of course, it's been explored by everybody else. But what do I think about this? What would my take on this be?' ''

Indeed, if the characters played by John Cusack and Billy Crystal come to the same conclusion - that the heart is the nobler, more trustworthy organ - ''When Harry Met Sally . . . '' is the edgier, more ambitious film, if only because there are more serious consequences when adults behave like adolescents than when adolescents do. The screenplay, a collaboration, Mr. Reiner says, among himself, the co-producer Andrew Scheinman and Nora Ephron (who gets the screen credit), seems sweet and savage both, remarkably frank about the selfish and often mean-spirited attitudes - particularly men's - that otherwise responsible single people take on in their encounters.

After sex, Harry routinely leaves in the middle of the night, confessing his behavior to Sally with the justification that he shows women a good time and that no one has ever complained. The question for him, he says, is, ''How long do I have to lie there and hold her before I can get up and go home? Is 30 seconds enough?''

The women have their moments, too, most notably in a scene in which Sally, by way of proving to Harry he's not so smart, persuades him that even the savviest of men can be deluded by a fake orgasm. Her voluble argument - which consists of showing, not telling - takes place in a delicatessen, and the scene concludes with what Mr. Reiner concedes is the funniest line in the film, suggested by Billy Crystal and delivered by Estelle Reiner, the director's mother, cast as a customer at a nearby table.

The scene came about, Mr. Reiner explains, because he wanted a moment in the film to offset Harry's revelations, particularly the ''30 second'' speech. ''We already had this scene in which the women are going to mirror Meg's response, which is, 'Is that true?,' and that the men in the audience will know is exactly true. We needed something where the men are going to go, 'Is that true?' and the women are going to go, 'Yes, we've all done that.'

''What could that be? So Nora said, 'Well, faking orgasm's a thing.' So I wrote a thing about faking orgasm, and Nora added some things of her own. We talked about it to Meg, and Meg says, 'I can do a fake orgasm. She says, 'I can do one. Why don't we just put it in some incongruous place, like a deli?' I said great, because before it was just a discussion of women faking orgasm, it wasn't an actual example.

''Now we come to the day of doing it. And she is so embarrassed about having to do it in front of everybody. She's like 'What's Dennis going to think?' '' - a reference to her boyfriend, the actor Dennis Quaid.

''I said, 'Meg, it's in a deli. It's not a sex thing. It's comedy.' She says, 'O.K., I'll do it.'

''She did it the first time, but it wasn't full out. I said 'Meg, if it's gonna work, it's gotta go full.' She says, 'Like what?' I said, 'Like Ohhhh, Ohhhh God. You pound the table - like this.'

''And I'm doing this, and my mother is sitting right there, and I'm directing this woman having an orgasm. And of course, she did it great.''

On screen, the result is an extravaganza of moaning and table-pounding, and when it subsides, a stunned and deliciously deadpan Estelle Reiner delivers her line, which will not be divulged here.

Her son, however, offers an epilogue. After the scene was shot, he says, his mother told him a story from many years ago, about a friend of hers who had just begun seeing the man she was eventually to marry. ''They had sex, and she faked an orgasm, and she was all upset,'' Mr. Reiner says. ''And I asked why. And my mother said, 'Because she made him think that's the way it was. Then she had to do it every time.' ''

According to Mr. Reiner - and his new film - if the small cruelties that men and women habitually visit on each other are true, then there's truth in sentimental resolution as well. The narrative of Harry and Sally struggling toward each other is interrupted now and then by some ersatz documentary footage of older couples telling the tales of how they met. Though the couples are played by professional actors, the stories, Mr. Reiner says, are genuine, gleaned from dozens of interviews. There's one about a Chinese man who, half a century ago, sneaked into the next village to get an advance look at his arranged mate. He thought she was O.K. They're still married. There's one about the couple who lived for years in the same New York neighborhood but met in an elevator in Chicago. And there's the story of Sol Horn, who died last year, and is given screen credit ''for his inspiration.''

Sol Horn was the father of Alan Horn, Mr. Reiner's partner in Castle Rock Entertainment, the television and movie production company that made ''When Harry Met Sally . . . '' Shortly before Mr. Horn died, Mr. Reiner happened to ask him how he and his wife of more than 50 years had met. ''And he lights up,'' Mr. Reiner recalls. ''And he tells me the story. And the story is the first couple you see. He was sitting in a restaurant, and this girl walked in - he'd never seen this girl before in his life. And he turned to his friend and said, 'You see that girl? I'm going to marry that girl.' And he married her. When I heard that, I thought it was amazing.'' And what about the director himself? ''I was sitting in L.A. with Barry Sonnenfeld, the cinematographer on the film,'' he says. ''This was before shooting started, and I was bemoaning my lack-of-woman fate. And he says to me, 'I know this girl. Her name is Michele Singer, and you're going to marry her.' And I said, 'What, are you nuts?'

''And we start making the film. We started in L.A., then we did some shooting in Chicago, and we came to New York. This was, like, the beginning of October. And Michele came to the set one day, with Susan, Barry's then-fiancee, now wife. I'll never forget it. It was a scene on a stoop in front of a brownstone. Billy and Meg are having an argument. And I look over and I see this girl, and whoo! I was attracted immediately. And Barry says, 'That's Michele.' I said, 'That's Michele?'

''I wormed my way into their lunch. But that's what he said to me: 'You're going to marry her.' And one thing led to another and here we are.

''Things have changed for me quite a bit,'' he says. ''It's like Nora [ Ephron ] told me: 'It's a fitting conclusion to the film.' ''