Nothing's Gotta Give

American Magazine | Summer 2005

http://www.american.edu/weekly/summer05_meyers.html

Nothing's Gotta Give
Nancy Meyers ’71 balances motherhood and Hollywood
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.

It’s no coincidence that the daughter in the Father of the Bride movies (1991 and 1995) is named Annie, or that the twins played by Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap (1998) are Annie and Hallie. Those are the names of Meyers’s own daughters. She learned she was pregnant with Annie, now 24, on the first day of shooting Private Benjamin, and from that point on a key focus in her life would be the effort to balance motherhood and movies.

Fortunately for Meyers, whose Baby Boom script had her heroine getting fired over her baby’s antics, her real-life balancing act was more manageable. “The writer’s life is a great life for a mother. You’re home, you can pick your kids up at school and take a break,” says Meyers from her Provençal-style home, where she writes in a bright, airy study overlooking an olive garden. She worked for many years with her husband, screenwriter and producer Charles Shyer, with whom she shared a 1980 Oscar nomination.

“She’d spend two years at home writing a script, so I’d come home from school and she’d make me a grilled cheese and we’d sit and talk,” recalls Shyer. “I had a working mom who was at home, which was really lucky.”

When it was time to shoot the movie, Annie and her younger sister Hallie, now 17, came to the set. That was Meyers’s way around one of the obstacles that discourage women from directing. “It’s extraordinarily time consuming. You’re gone from 6 a.m. to 9 at night. The life of a screenwriter or producer is more conducive to having a family,” Meyers says.

So when the script was finished and she couldn’t be home with her children, she’d simply bring them to the set. “I always made kid-friendly movies, so it wasn’t like they couldn’t see what we were doing,” she says.

Recalls Shyer, “I had my own mini–director’s chair with my own name on it. I’d be picked up straight out of school, go to the set, and have the grips and A.D.s [assistant directors] help with my spelling. I was like the team mascot.”

She even ended up in front of the cameras, holding a dog in one scene or dancing at a wedding in another. Annie Shyer’s official film résumé describes her as Towel Girl in The Parent Trap, Flower Girl in the Father of the Bride films, and Little Girl in Vermont in Baby Boom. Hallie has a similar résumé.

“I didn’t love doing it,” confesses Shyer. “I was embarrassed. I just wanted to go back to playing hopscotch. I was like, ‘Can I go get another cup of lemonade now?’”

But the opportunity to observe her mother at work was priceless. Meyers has a favorite quote from Noel Coward: “Work is more fun than fun.”

“She’s incredibly smart and driven and focused,” Shyer says, “and she has a work ethic like no one I’ve ever seen.”

She never seems to get tired, her daughter says. “I don’t think that gene exists in her body. She’ll keep going until it’s good enough. But as her kid, I never felt pressure. I think she leads by example. She only expects the best from herself. I admire that in her.”

To Kirkman, that’s the ethos that both Meyers and the characters she creates bring to the screen. It’s an ethos that SOC values. “Nancy and her leading ladies represent the traits we encourage in our students—they are smart, inventive, and assertive,” Kirkman says.

Meyers admits that she did always have a striking level of self-confidence. “I remember my third-grade teacher wrote on my report card, ‘Nancy is very bossy.’ I think being a director was an extension of who I was naturally,” she says. “But I also had to grow into it.”

AU had its own part in helping her grow. When her old friends saw Private Benjamin, they might have spotted a few ways that the young screenwriter was poking fun at herself. When she first arrived at AU, she had more than a little in common with her comic heroine, Judy Benjamin. “I was a rich girl from Philadelphia—nothing against my upbringing, but I had a lot to learn from life,” Meyers says frankly.

That was 1967. A few years later, she had quit her sorority and was picketing and manning barricades. “I sort of tuned into the world. Being in Washington in the 1960s, it was such a turbulent time. The yippies came, we had tear gas thrown at us. When Kent State happened, I remember watching the news and thinking, ‘Oh my God, a girl died doing exactly what we were doing.’”

But it wouldn’t be through social protest that she’d find a way to express her observations about the world. Nor would it be through journalism, which she picked as her major at AU largely because it was the closest match to her interests she could find at the time. It would be through humor.

“She’s incredibly sharp,” Shyer says. “She’s probably the sharpest person I’ve ever known. And she’s very funny. We’d be watching TV and she’d put the TV on mute and she’d do the voices, and I’d be three years old and cracking up. It’s not so much that she’s a comic—it’s her perceptions and way of describing things. It’s the way she can pick up on things, and the way she can retell a story.”

Kirkman views her as an inspiration and role model for SOC students in many ways, from the characters she creates to her own career success. Meyers is now joining the growing number of SOC alumni in feature films who are connecting with current students, including director Barry Levinson, producer Barry Josephson, Dreamworks president Adam Goodman, and Paramount distribution head Clark Woods. Meyers will be guest lecturing by videoconference and plans to do a session with students in AU’s Summer in LA program.

For all her success, she has continued to find both balance and inspiration close to home. Says Meyers, whose next movie is set for release around Christmas 2006, “Family has always been the most important thing in my life. It’s really not a contest.”