Choire Sicha has made a salient observation about the over-abundance of coverage of Nora Ephron and her film Julie & Julia in the NYTimes over at The Awl: "The Times is basically live-blogging from inside Nora Ephron's living room. But none of that quite accounts for what's going on." As Nikke Finke points out, "At last count, 15 mentions of Nora Ephron in The New York Times online and in the paper in just the past 30 days." As Sicha goes on to explain Ephron's allure:
"Nora Ephron is perhaps the most masterful social butterfly of her age group. At least in part, that is because she is delightful, and witty, and actually somewhat powerful, at least as much as any person working in the arts can be. (That is to say: she knows a lot of rich people!) She is available to reporters large and small (she once responded to an email of mine for a story, having no idea who I was, even though she was out of the country), which is an insanely charming attribute. And she represents an important and rare bridge between New York and Los Angeles, between publishing and film, a bridge that has narrowed in recent years... Nora Ephron possesses a strange sort of magic here in New York, in this odd period after the reigns of Pat Buckley and Mrs. Astor and before, I guess, the doyenneships of Tinsley Mortimer and, uh, whoever. Her friends are extremely fancy. And, unlike most of the women in various points in time at the top of what I guess you could call cultural society, she actually makes and does something. In a town where there's actually not that much going on—really! It's pretty bleak here!—it's easy to pay attention to a charming, fun whirlwind."
But we're left wondering when this love affair will finally end. Much as the mediafest that surrounded the 2005 publication of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, we are already sick of all things Ephron and just about all things Julia Child. And the movie has yet to open to the general public. Please, give it a rest, people.
