Writer-director-journalist Nora Ephron remembers Charles Simms, a journalism teacher who once assigned her class to write a lead for a story. Simms gave them a long paragraph about the entire faculty traveling to Sacramento that Thursday for a conference. Everyone, Ephron recalled, created a lead that listed all the names Simms had written and mentioned the conference. "He looked at what we had written and tore them into tiny bits," Ephron wrote. "And he said, 'The lead to the story is: There will be no school Thursday!'... I fell in love with the idea that underneath, if you sifted through enough facts, you could get to the point, and you had to get to the point."
