Chuck Palahniuk said yesterday in his “Plot Spoiler” email that he would discuss the novel Heartburn, by Nora Ephron, today. It’s already on his fiction list, which I’ve shared before, and so it’s on my to-read list, but Amy Hempel jumped up after I finished the Tom Spanbauer Faraway Places, mainly because Palahniuk gushed so much over Hempel that I figured she was a gap in my reading. (Long story short, Spanbauer’s 2nd book, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon actually got here first and I am deep in it, so I can’t even consider taking a leap at the Hempel collection of short stories, much less the Ephron.) Anyway….
Last night I watched the movie version of “Heartburn”,¹ starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson.²
There’s a scene early on when–Spoiler alert, although it’s in the previews–Rachel reveals to Mark that she is pregnant, and they start singing all the songs they can think about regarding babies. Mark starts singing “Soliloquy” (My Boy Bill) from the movie “Carousel”.³ Here’s the funny part — Ephron’s parents wrote the screenplay for that movie (not the song).
“Heartburn” did get me thinking, How many movies did Streep and Nicholson work on together? In my head canon, it’s dozens. But, thanks to the IMDB collaboration search, which I’ve told you about before, I could see that it actually was… two. Just two. “Heartburn” and “Ironweed”.
Really, they should do another, if only to sweep the Oscars.
¹ I later found out, reading the comments to the post, that Palahniuk does not recommend the movie. Ah, poop. Well, when you’re awkward and dumb (like me), you take what you can get.
² Nicholson plays a fictionalized version of Ephron’s actual second husband, Carl Bernstein. This makes Bernstein the only person portrayed by both Jack Nicholson and Dustin Hoffman (in “All the President’s Men”). Woodward only got Robert Redford.
³ Who sang it better? Here is Gordon MacRae from Carousel, 1953. (Maybe Palahniuk prefers Gordon MacRae.)