By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
My blue haven: The New Yorker ♥ Nora Ephron
The June 5 New Yorker has some lines to read between as Bewitched auteur Nora Ephron becomes the fulcrum of the issue. First, the 65-year-old scribe-turned-helmer reminisces about her price-stabilized apartment while bragging on her income, and subtly dropping in the name of her mate, Nick Pileggi, 
who co-wrote Goodfellas for Scorsese. “When you give up your apartment in New York and move to another city, New York becomes the worst version of itself,” Ephron writes in gentle, only slightly condescending cliché. “Most people who don’t live in New York have no idea that New Yorkers have exactly the same sense of neighborhood that supposedly exists in small-town America.” Coy references to ex-husband Carl Bernstein are followed by mentions of “The man I was seeing, whom I eventually married, managed to tip his way to a lease on a top-floor apartment… My husband, Nick, and I were married there… It was a symbol of family.” The Sony (and Ephron) family are part of a fluff-and-fold profile of Sony chairman and CEO Sir Howard Stringer by Mark Singer. The 63-year-old Stringer, writes Singer, “seems a virtuoso of stealth ambition”—no reference to the failed movie Stealth, surely—and gets modest amounts of revelation from him: “They’d put five movies on [a] list [of 60 great Sony products] and I said, ‘I know two of those movies are going to be awful. So for God’s sake, don’t put ads in the paper saying, ‘Here are sixty great Sony products.’ It’s asking too much.” Singer offers up Bewitched as one of Sony Pictures’ “major disappointments” of 2005, kindly failing to cite Ephron as its director, but also offers testimony to Stringer’s acumen from… Nora Ephron‘s husband: “To this day, I still think of Howard as a journalist, the writer Nicholas Pileggi, who befriended Stringer more than 30 years ago… said. ‘Howard gets the overview. He can drop statistics and he knows the minutiae, but he gets the overview.”
