The eighties and nineties are arguably two decades where some of the most influential romantic comedies were made. It is no wonder that Sleepless In Seattle is on many lists of all time favorite romcoms. Screenwriter Jeff Arch who wrote Sleepless spoke to Creative Screenwriting Magazine about the genesis of his screenplay.

Arch cast his mind back. “I was in a tough place. I was a young dad. I sold my business and gave myself one year to write three screenplays. Sleepless was the second one.” The screenwriter noted that great movies have great endings so he started writing his script from there. He subverted the traditional template of romantic comedies and settled on the idea of two strangers who don’t meet until the end of the film at sunset at the top of the Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day. This premise perfectly capture the essence of the film – two people who were unaware of each other but perfect for each other.

Sleepless In Seattle centers around recent widower Sam Baldwin (Tom Hanks) and recently-engaged reporter Annie Reed (Meg Ryan) who were both vulnerable and ready to marry the wrong people. Arch wanted the audience to say, “Please don’t do that because there’s someone better waiting for you and you just don’t know about it.” This formed the bedrock of Jeff Arch’s story.

The next key element of the story was the radio psychologist. Sam reluctantly gets on a phone call and Annie hears him. Annie unravels and travels across the country to meet this stranger. There wasn’t significant internet access at the time, so Annie did her detective work on a database that was generally only accessible to police and journalists.

Jeff Arch

Step one of a regular romantic comedy is to get the couple to meet – at a party, at work, at a grocery store, a car crash, or some other messy situation. Arch took great care with his “meet cute” moment. “It was a romantic comedy that got right in a way that others got wrong.” The writer recalls the studio executives balked at his idea of how and when the couple would meet. They didn’t share Arch’s vision. “Nobody would watch it,” they insisted. Jeff Arch persisted with his vision knowing that he was onto a winner if he did it right. “I had an inner certainty about Sam and Annie that I’ve never had before and never had since.”

As the Seattle stars aligned, producer Gary Foster, who had a deal with Tristar Pictures at the time, shared Arch’s creative vision. “He did the thing that hasn’t been done before.”

Then co-writers Nora Ephron and David S. Ward came on board to contour the story. It was Tom Hanks who had a bigger impact by making the story really personal. “He shaped Sam’s character and his dialogue was based on the situations on the page.” Hanks situations such as the radio conversations, losing his son Jonah (Ross Malinger), and telling his sister that he met someone and made them Sam’s. Much of the dialogue in the film was his. “I don’t know if Nora Ephron directed Tom Hanks or if he directed himself. The character had to come from him.”

Needless to say, there were personal moments in the film for Jeff Arch too. The moment when Sam and Jonah were reunited in the elevator is one of those. Sam says, “You’re my family. You’re all I have. Have I screwed things up? Have I been a bad father?” Jeff was a young father when he wrote Sleepless In Seattle.”That’s the part where I cried. I was imbued with a sense of young fatherhood and destiny. How do raise my two kids? What do you tell them when they grow up?” Waking up and finding your child gone is the biggest mistake you can make as a parent.

This was also the plot device that prompted Sam to get on a plane and fly to New York to eventually meet his beloved. He didn’t deliberately fly there to meet Annie. Jonah did. “I wouldn’t know that panic if I wasn’t a dad.” Jeff Arch didn’t intentionally set out to write a movie about fatherhood. He wanted to send a Valentine to the world. Sleepless In Seattle wasn’t just a love story. “The best stories happen when you don’t know exactly what you’re writing about until you finish writing it.” The issue of vulnerability in men hadn’t really been explored in romantic comedies before.

Nora Ephron brought another perspective to the film. She was more focused on the situation of females dating in the nineties. Arch avoided these tropes which quickly become outdated. “I wrote this as forties film where the sexual tension was implied,” he said. Ephron expanded the romance element of Sleepless In Seattle.

Nora Ephron

Arch commented that Sam gets taller as the story progresses. “He was hunched at the start of the film in the throes of grief and depression and he straightens up as the story moves forward.” Sam’s posture was a reflection of his emotional state at each point in time.

Meg Ryan was equally perfect. “She was off-center and quirky, but not to the point of being weird. She’s the classic pretty girl… magnetic, but not like you’re going to get zapped by the wire if you get too close.”

It’s All In The Title

Sleepless In Seattle may come across as an innocuous title. Like all memorable titles it was carefully considered. It could have defaulted to one about Sam’s grief or Annie’s obsession with a man she’s never met. Jeff Arch reads the newspaper nearly every morning. He is particularly attracted to the “Dear Abby” advice column section where people write in their problems and get a solution from Abby. The people who wrote in used a catchy moniker rather than their real names, such as “Down In Detroit” and “Hopeless In Houston.” “The title ‘Sleepless In Seattle’ just came to me the first night I started to write,” stated Arch.

Sleepless is remarkably enduring and rightfully exists as a movie that is as relevant today as it in 1993. “There’s a tone of yearning that runs all the way through it,” he added. “Not yearning for material things, but yearning for emotional fulfillment. Yearning for hope. That’s what was going on inside of me at the time.”

In some cases, it’s better to believe the fairytale and that is exactly what Sleepless In Seattle explored.. “We want that sense of being heard, seen, and knowing that there’s someone out there for us.” This sentiment is timeless.

We asked Arch if he considered remaking his classic film for the modern age. “Classics should remain where they are.” Anyone can find out anything about anybody these days, so the surprise of discovery is gone. “There has to be a wall between the pre and post internet world.”

Writing The Perfect Romcom

The eighties and nineties were filled with classics like Pretty Woman, You’ve Got Mail, When Harry Met Sally and Mrs. Doubtfire. After a string of hits, our screens were flooded with a deluge of paint by numbers movies which maligned the genre. “They took the premise, the ‘meet cute’, and the issue that keeps the couple apart for fifty pages. Then there’s a breakup and makeup where there’s a montage filled with the good times they shared followed by an apology and a trip to the airport.”

Following a successful formula doesn’t always yield the best results. “Many movies got by on charm, but didn’t hold up. They became generic.” The romantic comedy genre didn’t recover until the end of the decade with films like Love Actually, Notting Hill, and Four Weddings And A Funeral. They had witty dialogue and could express the unresolved sexual tension that could previously only be implied.

Despite its ebbs and flows, Jeff Arch is hopeful about the future of romcoms. There will always be a place for them on our screens. He cites The Map Of Tiny Perfect Things as a current example. “It’s a gentle, quiet love story.”

Jeff Arch has a special element for writing the perfect romantic comedy. “The two main characters can’t be looking for love.” Some writers mistakenly believe that a good romcom involves the main characters actively looking for love in all the wrong places. That is a dating movie. “You don’t find love by looking for it. You find love because you are training for the marathon.” A marathon can be working 24/7 to get that promotion, tied up with family matters, or suffering grief. “Love is the complication to your life, not life being the complication to your love.”

Don’t go looking for love. Let love find you.

Not only is love a major inconvenience, but the main characters should actively declare that they don’t want it. But love will always find a way. “Love is the interruption. It can’t be the goal.” The intrusion of love forces the couple to figure out their priorities.