I don’t think I’d be remiss in saying When Harry Met Sally... is one of the best rom-coms of all time. It manages to accomplish this with a neat and tidy happy ending and one of the most classic wooing lines of all time: “I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.” Billy Crystal’s iconic comment has endured for decades, but if you were to ask Rob Reiner, he’d tell you that wasn’t his proposed ending to his and Nora Ephron's movie, at all.
How When Harry Met Sally Originally Ended
As it turns out, When Harry Met Sally very nearly had a bittersweet ending in which Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan’s characters did not end up together. Rob Reiner recently spoke to CNN’s Chris Wallace about putting together the 1989 classic film, and while he's opened up about When Harry Met Sally's original closing scene in previous interviews, he explained how Nora Ephron had originally crafted the ending of the film.
Harry and Sally didn’t get together. Because I had been married for ten years, I had been single for ten years and I couldn’t figure out how I was ever going to be with anybody, and that gave birth to When Harry Met Sally. And I hadn’t met anybody, and so it was gonna be the two of them seeing each other after years, talking, and then walking away from each other.
Prior to the filming of the rom-com, Rob Reiner had been married from 1971-1981 to fellow director Penny Marshall; Reiner had adopted her daughter Tracy during the course of their marriage. After they split, he mentioned he’d been alone for quite some time and the dating pool looked bleak.
His interview with Chris Wallace gets into the original wrapping up point, but information has been bandied about regarding the early meetings of Rob Reiner, script writer Nora Ephron and producer Andy Scheinman too. It was the director and producer sharing stories about their own personal lives that led Ephron to the first draft of the script and that original ending. Real-life experiences helped craft some of When Harry Met Sally’s other famous sequences too, as Reiner mentioned in an interview with AV Club.
It was totally based on us, yeah. I mean, it started with me. Before she came aboard, I was thinking about how I’d been single—I’d been married for 10 years and I’d been single for 10 years. And during that time when I was single, I kept being in and out of different relationships, and they didn’t go so good. And I kept getting confused. How do you make friendships? If you have sex, does that ruin the friendship? All those questions that are brought up in the film, I said, ‘This has got to be the basis for something here.’ So I went to Nora and I told her about it, and she said, ‘I like that idea,’ and so she interviewed me. She was like a reporter, and I told her all these stories of different things that I had been through. And she wrote this stuff down, and she injected her own experiences. One day, we were eating lunch, and she’s ordering, ‘This is on the side, this that,’ and I said, ‘This has to be in a movie!’ I mean, it was crazy the way you’re ordering this food. So we put that in as a character trait for Sally.
The Katz's deli scene and Sally being a crazy orderer who likes everything just so is one of the most memorable traits of any rom-com character to date, and again, this was a moment crafted from a real-life interaction. Given how Reiner's love life was going at the time, it's no wonder he wanted a bittersweet ending for Harry and Sally -- after all women and men can never really "be friends."
Mostly the quote above makes it clear the movie came together at a rapid clip and that real-life moments impacted where the characters were going. So, what happened to change their minds about the ending? Apparently, this was Reiner’s idea and you can thank his current wife Michele Singer for changing his attitude.
Why Rob Reiner Flipped The Script And Changed The Ending
In general, Nora Ephron has said in the past that Harry and Sally were based on herself and Rob Reiner, and the characters allowed them to explore their opposite personalities and takes on life onscreen. Harry is "neurotic" like Rob and Sally is "single-minded" like her, as she reported in 2014. Billy Crystal has said some of Harry and Sally's best banter came from him and Reiner, as well. With that in mind, the ending could have gone either way.
Cutting back to 2024, whilst Reiner was talking about the movie, he mentioned his decades-long marriage to Michele Singer and how he met her while the film was still in production. Prior to that he'd felt a bit more jaded about relationships, but after meeting Michele, he was more inclined to feel optimistic about men and women.
I met my wife Michelle, who I have been married to now 35 years, I met her while making the film. And I changed the ending.
It’s as simple as that. Reiner was happier in his personal life and he wanted Harry to have that happy ending, so he made it happen on the fly. The end result was a movie that made just shy of $100 million during its domestic theatrical run and has endured in the pop culture lexicon in the years since.
When Harry Met Sally also features a slew of vignettes from other couples who have been married. While we know those moments were real-life stories recreated by actors on the big screen, those scenes are among the most poignant in the film, and it makes me wonder if they were a late add after Rob met Michelle, as well.
I suppose that's a story for another day...
