Did Nora Ephron Broker the AOL-Time Warner Deal?
Is Nora Ephron responsible for AOL's proposed acquisition of Time Warner? Ephron
co-authored and directed the 1998 movie, You've Got
Mail , a somewhat flatfooted update of the charming 1940 Ernst Lubitsch
movie The Shop Around the Corner (which was also the source material for
the even more charming 1963 Broadway musical She Loves Me ). You've
Got Mail updated the earlier film's epistolary plot (two shopkeepers hate
each other by day, each not knowing the other is the correspondent to whom
he/she sends anonymous love letters by night) for the Internet age; in the new
version, the two swapped messages via AOL. This was made clear not only by the
film's title and logo but also by a scene in which Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan used
AOL instant messaging while lying on their respective beds to discuss why guys revere
the Godfather movies.
As it happens, You've Got Mail was made by ... Warner Bros.! In
retrospect, then, it may have been not merely a romantic comedy with a little
product placement tossed in; it may have been an attempt to soften the
ground for AOL's latest acquisition. Although the film doesn't portray
AOL-the-corporation in any particular light, it does portray Tom Hanks,
scion of another giant communications empire (in this case a
Borders/Barnes & Noble-type book superstore chain) as being sweet and
misunderstood, even though he puts Meg Ryan's independent bookstore out of
business! Also, think about how Meg Ryan's leftist-writer boyfriend, played
by Greg Kinnear, is portrayed in the film. The Kinnear character (an apparent
amalgam of New York
Observer columnist Ron Rosenbaum and Nation publisher and
editorial director Victor Navasky) is shown to be an amusingly vain and
pretentious technophobe. This is significant, because in the film it is Kinnear
who gets to articulate the case against concentration of corporate power.
And he's a buffoon! You'd no sooner entrust the U.S. economy to him than
you'd entrust Meg Ryan to him! (Chatterbox pauses here to emphasize that he
doesn't consider either Rosenbaum or Navasky to be vain or pretentious, though
Rosenbaum is a bit of a technophobe; see his
Slate
dispatches, "The Last
Luddite Gets Wired," which Rosenbaum was too much of a Luddite ever to
complete. In real life, Meg Ryan would be lucky to have either gentleman for a
boyfriend, though Navasky is already married.) When Ryan and Hanks finally
smooch at the film's end, you can think of it as a consummated romance; or, you
can think of it as ... a merger!
Chatterbox is well aware that he is engaging in just the sort of paranoid
logic that the Kinnear character would indulge in. Still, if the merger does go
through, Chatterbox urges the Justice Department take the precaution of
stipulating that AOL Time Warner not be permitted to film any sequels to
You've Got Mail . Or, if such sequels are permitted, the characters
should be compelled to switch over to another Internet service provider, like
Erols or MindSpring. (Mindful of his
own corporate parent's delicate position vis-à-vis the Justice
Department these days, Chatterbox won't suggest MSN.)
