BY SALLY ACHARYA
When Nancy Meyers ’71 was a student, she’d gather around the TV in the Anderson Hall lounge to watch Goldie Hawn on Laugh-In. The bubbly blonde comedienne had been their fellow student only a few years before, and while Meyers and her friends had never met AU’s Hollywood star, they were always curious to watch her perform.
A dozen years later, Meyers had an idea for a movie. It wasn’t her first celluloid fantasy. That had come in a dentist’s office at 13, when she was knocked out with anesthesia and dreamed an entire romantic comedy starring Doris Day.
The plot she imagined this time involved a high society woman who decided on a whim to join the Army. She pictured her heroine as a bubbly blonde who seemed frivolous but had a core of inner strength. A Goldie Hawn type.
By that time, Meyers was a 29-year-old in Hollywood who had worked her way up from production assistant on The Price is Right to story editor for legendary producer Ray Stark, the discoverer of Barbra Streisand and a hard-nosed power broker of the old school known for cultivating writers. Hawn was starring in one of his movies, and the women met and got to chatting about their shared connection to AU.
Not long afterwards, Meyers’s idea became Private Benjamin, with Hawn in the starring role. It was Meyers’s big break as a screenwriter and producer and would lead to an even bigger break: a chance at the director’s chair.
She has now written and directed such hit comedies as Something’s Gotta Give (2003), with Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson in love, and What Women Want (2000), with Mel Gibson in pantyhose. The Los Angeles Times tagged her in 2003 as “the most sought-after female director in Hollywood.”
Larry Kirkman, dean of AU’s School of Communication, respects the way Meyers has been able to weave her stories around women who are smart, assertive, and believable. When her audience laughs, it’s the laughter of recognition. “Nancy is above all a great storyteller,” Kirkman says.
In a town where art often seems to imitate comic books, Meyers’s grows instead out of her own life. In 1987, as a career woman juggling work and motherhood, she wrote and produced Baby Boom, in which a career woman played by Diane Keaton (in the first of four films with Meyers) juggled work and motherhood.
Later came Father of the Bride and its sequel. It was a remake of a Spencer Tracy classic, but those who knew Meyers’s family found the atmosphere amusingly familiar. “One of my kids’ friends went to see it and said, ‘It’s like spending two hours at your house,’” Meyers recalls.
As for Something’s Gotta Give, the heroine was a divorced playwright in her fifties whose grown daughter works at a glamorous New York auction house and dates an older man who would never think of dating a woman over 30. As it happens, Meyers is now a divorced writer-director in her fifties with a daughter who works at a glamorous New York magazine and . . .
Well, that’s where the resemblance ends. “I don’t think I’d ever choose a man old enough to be my father. God, I hope I don’t!” laughs Annie Shyer ’02, who, after visiting campus to hear her mother give a talk, enrolled in the School of Communication.
Something’s Gotta Give, for all its comedic leaps of fantasy, has a core of realism that reflects Meyers’s own experiences and her observations about women’s lives. “I think all her movies parallel our family,” says Shyer. “The relationship between Marin [Amanda Peet] and Erica [Keaton] is very similar with me and my mom. We talk on the phone every day. All her movies show parents who adore their kids and kids who adore their parents.”
“The basis of a lot of my movies come from me. I dramatize it in ways that aren’t me, but they have to come from things I understand, or I won’t write it well,” Meyers says.
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