“That’s your problem,” she says to Annie as she herself plops down in front of the television screen, full with Deborah Kerr’s grainy, elegant profile. Annie, too, watches the film with her editor and close friend Becky (Rosie O’Donnell), who gets one of the film’s most revealing lines. Her husband Greg (Victor Garber), Sam and Jonah all regard her, visibly bemused, as she descends helplessly into tears. The joke is not lost entirely on Rita Wilson, as Sam’s well-meaning if occasionally overbearing friend Suzy, who clumsily attempts to explain the film’s genius. Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr appear at intervals to lend their ancestral language, literally (at one point Annie repeats Kerr’s classic line: “All I could say was ‘hello’,”) and generically. It easily ranks alongside the very film it so expressly devotes itself to: 1957’s An Affair to Remember, which unites the female characters across the film as the apex of romance. The film’s lingering impact is hard to overstate. When the truth is, all it is is a character piece.” In another interview, this time with the American Film Institute, Ephron said: “You know, it was one of those things where the studio sometimes say to you … ‘it just needs character’. Rewatching the film now is to be reminded of the gaping absences that have haunted the American theatrical landscape for well over a decade now: namely, star power and charisma, the kind that films of past eras – certainly romances – so urgently relied upon. For much has been lost in the 30 years since Sleepless in Seattle was first released. Then, what began as a two-week assignment and easy money for Ephron birthed one of the highest grossing films of 1993, an enduring, but almost certain relic of American cinema. Her directorial debut This is My Life (1992) had been far less successful than these preceding efforts perhaps, but her pen remained unmatched. By then, Ephron was the distinguished, Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Silkwood, Heartburn – adapted from her novel of the same name, a loose portrait of her marriage to the Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein – and the zenith of her oeuvre, When Harry Met Sally. She was the fourth writer recruited to burnish a script (originally written by Jeff Arch) that the studio clearly had little faith in. In a 1993 interview with the Baltimore Sun (for which Annie, winkingly, is a reporter in the film), Ephron revealed that during production she was “obsessed with the word ‘timeless’”.
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