MOVIES : This Is Her Life, Too : Screenwriter and working mother Nora Ephron recognized herself in Meg Wolitzer’s novel--and seized the chance to direct the movie

Oscar-nominated screenwriter Nora Ephron didn’t have to read much of Meg Wolitzer’s 1988 novel, “This Is Your Life,” to know she had found the perfect project for her directing debut.

“By the time I was on Page 30 of the book,” says the 50-year-old Ephron, “I knew I wanted to direct this. It kept reminding me of things in my own life.”

The movie is called “This Is My Life” (the name was changed when the producers of the “This Is Your Life” TV show refused use of that program’s title). The comedy, which arrives in theaters Friday, stars Julie Kavner as a single mother of two young girls who is caught between the tug of motherhood and her rapidly ascending career as a stand-up comedian.

Ephron, who joins a long list of screenwriters-turned-directors, has carved out an enviable career, churning out scripts for more than a decade and getting Oscar nominations for her screenplays “Silkwood” (co-written with Alice Arlen) and “When Harry Met Sally . . .” along the way.

Ephron, a working mother herself raised by one--her mother, Phoebe Ephron, was a successful screenwriter-playwright--and the eldest of four sisters, says it was the book’s subject matter that made her take the plunge into directing.

“This material is the thing that made me more dying to direct than anything,” says Ephron, between sips of iced tea, poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “I knew that because of how I related to the book on so many levels, it was the perfect project for me.”

But tapping into the book and its characters wasn’t the only reason. Another is the one given by almost every other writer yearning to direct: The need to control their own material. “When you do screenplays, sometimes you get really lucky and your movies work out and other times, unfortunately, they don’t,” she says.

One of those that didn’t work out was “Heartburn,” the 1986 adaptation of Ephron’s own best-selling and autobiographical book that chronicled her disastrous marriage and subsequent divorce from Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein. The film, which exposed many details of their life, including Bernstein’s extramarital affair while Ephron was pregnant, sank at the box office even with the presence of stars Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep.

In describing the process of writing material for a director, Ephron says: “It’s like cutting a very nice double-breasted suit and then someone says, ‘I love this suit, but I look better in a single-breasted suit.’ That’s part of what you do as a screenwriter--fit the suit to the director.”

And tailoring words for filmmakers is what Ephron has been doing ever since she made the jump from journalist--pounding out copy for such magazines as New York, Esquire and Cosmopolitan--to screenwriter in the late ‘70s.

Although she describes her first produced project--the 1978 television movie “Perfect Gentlemen”--as “terrible,” she got luckier in 1983 with her first produced feature, the Mike Nichols-directed “Silkwood.” Next came “Heartburn,” another Nichols collaboration, and in 1989, “When Harry Met Sally. . . .” There have been other misses, like 1989’s “Cookie,” which quickly crumbled at the box office.

But in an industry where writers with less accomplishments and credits than Ephron’s routinely get offered the chance to direct and even more women are doing it, what took her so long?

For one thing, Ephron says that up until a few years ago, she wasn’t all that interested. “I didn’t go into writing movies thinking someday I’m going to direct,” says Ephron, who admits the offers started rolling in after the success of “When Harry Met Sally. . . .” “I wasn’t a person walking around saying, ‘But what I really want to do is direct.’ ”

One person who thought she should get a chance to direct was producer Lynda Obst (“Adventures in Babysitting” and last year’s “The Fisher King”) who knew Ephron from Obst’s journalism days.

“We see kids all the time, who barely have a produced screenplay out there demanding to direct and there’s Nora, who’s gotten two Academy Award nominations and is one of the most important screenwriters in town not getting to direct,” says Obst, who produced “This Is My Life.” “It was an insult.”

Carrie Fisher, who stars in “This Is My Life,” partly blames the Hollywood “boys club” mentality for Ephron’s exclusion from the circle of directors.

“If she were a man, she would have done this eight years ago,” says Fisher, who also starred in “When Harry Met Sally. . . .” “As soon as you are nominated for an Academy Award as a screenwriter, they start coming after you to direct. But that didn’t happen to Nora.”

With the idea of finding a project for Ephron, Obst in 1988 enlisted the aid of then-Columbia Pictures President Dawn Steel, another fan of Ephron’s work. “Her ability to tell a story was great,” says Steel, who, as Paramount’s president of production, had worked with her on “Heartburn.” “You always saw the stories she was talking about. It wasn’t a difficult decision to let her direct.” One of the immediate connections Ephron made to the Wolitzer book was the way aspiring comic Dottie Ingels--played by Kavner in the film--would take real-life situations about her children and turn them into comedy routines, something that Ephron had gone through while growing up with her successful screenwriting parents, whose films include such classics as “Carousel” and “The Desk Set.”

“Once, my sister got her head caught between the iron banister in our house,” she says, “and the next thing I knew, Natalie Wood got her head caught in the banister in ‘The Jackpot,’ which my parents wrote. Something would happen to us and then it would turn up in a movie.” And years later, letters Ephron sent to her parents while away at college were used as the basis of Henry and Phoebe Ephron’s hit play “Take Her, She’s Mine.”

“If you went to my mother with something horrible that had happened to you,” says Ephron, “she would listen to it and nod sympathetically and then say, ‘Everything is copy.’ What she meant was that something can be horrible, but eventually a writer can make something out of it. She taught me in those three words the fundamental basis of humor--if you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you, but if you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your joke and you become the hero of the episode.” According to Ephron, much of that philosophy was right there in Wolitzer’s novel.

By the time she finished the book, Ephron was thinking, “Who else could direct this?” Not that she was being arrogant, she claims, she just figured she related to the material so strongly and didn’t want to get involved with another director.

“Any director who is going to commit a year of his life to a movie wants to find a way into the material,” she says. “He wants, on some level, for the movie to be about him. So when you do something that’s already about yourself, why should you bring in another person that the movie has to be about?”

Ephron did recruit her younger sister, Delia, an accomplished author herself, to collaborate on the screenplay.

“I think it’s very hard to direct a movie that you’re the only writer on,” she says. “There’s always going to be a moment when you need a line of dialogue and that’s the last thing you want to think about when you’re directing.”

The younger Ephron admits there was some reluctance to working with her big sister, but those feelings quickly vanished. “When you’re sisters and you work together,” says the author of “How to Eat Like a Child” and “Funny Sauce,” “you stop being sisters and it’s just about the work.”

By the time the Ephrons finished their script, however, they lost one of their strongest supporters when Dawn Steel left her post after Columbia was sold to Sony. “We were in Guber-and-Peters hell,” says Ephron, referring to Sony’s installation of producers Peter Guber and Jon Peters as heads of the studio.

Eventually, the script ended up at 20th Century Fox, where studio chairman Joe Roth, known for giving first-time directors a chance, green-lighted the under-$10 million film to star Kavner, Fisher and Dan Aykroyd. “She has such a strong point of view,” says Roth, “that I had a sense just from talking to her that she could handle directing.”

Ironically, character actress Kavner, who’s currently the voice of Marge Simpson on TV’s “The Simpsons,” was being considered for a smaller role in the film--the one now played by Fisher--while Ephron mulled over a list of five potential “big box-office” actresses the studio had come up with that included Bette Midler and Cher. After Midler turned down the role, Ephron went to see Roth. “I told him I really wanted to make the movie, but I couldn’t make it with someone who wasn’t right,” she says.

Much to Ephron’s surprise, Roth said she should make the film with someone who was more of an unknown and Ephron suggested Kavner, well-known for her Emmy-winning role as Brenda Morgenstern on TV’s “Rhoda” and her regular appearances on “The Tracey Ullman Show.” Roth agreed on the spot and the deal was done.

In addition to the usual preparation any director does before starting a movie, Ephron added one more wrinkle: “I went to see every director I knew that I could con into reading the script and got them to tell me what the problems were and where I should cut.” Her list of advisers included former collaborators Nichols and Rob Reiner, both of whom prepared Ephron for the rigors of directing. “They told me it was going to be so hard, but I didn’t find it that way.”

Obviously not. According to most, Ephron, who shot the film in nine weeks in Toronto, Manhattan and Las Vegas, ran the set like a veteran director. “She had everything so well-planned out,” says Kavner, “that she had time to sit around and do crossword puzzles.”

Obst says Ephron was made for the job. “Nora will tell you what to order for dinner,” she says, “so she certainly had no problem telling the costume designer why a character should be wearing a dress instead of a pants suit.”

Still, Ephron found the experience educational. “Three weeks into the movie, I had learned more probably since I was 2 years old and began to acquire language,” she says. “I wanted to go back and do the whole first three weeks over because I couldn’t believe what I had found out. Three weeks later, I wanted to take the whole first six weeks out and throw them away and start over.”

Ironically, while Ephron was making a movie about the pull between raising a family and career, she was experiencing the same thing with her own children, whom she saw only during weekends when they visited the location with her third husband, author-screenwriter Nick Pileggi (“GoodFellas”). “It was an odd thing,” she says. “Instead of writing something that had already happened to me, I had written about something that was about to happen to me.”

And like the screenwriters-turned-directors before her, Ephron feels it was her writing career that prepared her for her directorial debut. “There are three things about directing a movie,” she says. “One is, you better have a pretty good script. The second is, you better not screw up the casting, because you can’t survive that. The third thing is knowing where the shot is. And if you write the movie, believe me, you know where the shot is.”