Sleepless in Seattle

Nora Ephron directed and co-wrote the film with David S. Ward and Jeff Arch, from Arch's story. Tom Hanks plays Sam Baldwin, an architect who moves to Seattle with his eight-year-old son Jonah after his wife's death. On Christmas Eve, Jonah calls a nationally syndicated radio talk show and coaxes his reluctant father onto the air to talk about missing her. In Baltimore, reporter Annie Reed (Meg Ryan), engaged to the dependable Walter (Bill Pullman), hears the call and can't shake it. Taking her cue from An Affair to Remember, she writes to Sam proposing they meet at the top of the Empire State Building on Valentine's Day.

Released June 25, 1993, it opened to about $17 million and finished with $227.9 million worldwide on a budget reported at $21–25 million, earning an A CinemaScore and two Academy Award nominations, for Best Original Screenplay and Best Original Song. It was the top rental film of 1994 in the United States. The soundtrack, produced by Marc Shaiman for Epic Soundtrax, reached number one on the Billboard 200 and went four-times platinum on the strength of standards by Jimmy Durante and Nat King Cole plus Celine Dion and Clive Griffin's "When I Fall in Love."

The production shot in July and August 1992 across Seattle, Chicago, Baltimore and New York. Sam's houseboat was inspired by an episode of This Old House, and most of the Empire State Building observatory scenes were actually filmed in Hangar 27 at Seattle's Sand Point naval base; the crew got only six hours at the real building. Arch had built the script around the 1957 film An Affair to Remember, and Rita Wilson's tearful monologue about it became the signature scene of that running motif. The hit established Ephron as the decade's defining romantic-comedy filmmaker.