The actors who play them can relate--although don't expect to find them lurking in any "special interests" chat rooms at three in the morning. "I am not interested in that at all," Ryan says. "I don't want to talk to anybody I don't know." Hanks is only slightly more gregarious: "I logged into this 2001: A Space Odyssey chat room when I first got my computer," he recalls, "but nobody else was in there." Even Ephron tried a chat room once but found the experience depressing. "The spelling was so horrendous," she says, "I had to leave immediately."
On the other hand, Mail is also a throwback, an old-style love story resuscitating a fossilized Hollywood formula. In fact, the film is loosely based on The Shop Around the Corner, the 1940 Ernst Lubitsch creaker in which Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan played bickering salesclerks who were unaware that each was the other's beloved pen pal. "I was watching Shop Around the Corner one day and it hit me--update it with e-mail," says executive producer Julie Durk, who pitched the idea to Lauren Shuler Donner, her boss at Shuler Donner/Donner Productions and the power player behind Bulworth, Dave, and Volcano. Donner took it to Amy Pascal, then head of Turner Pictures, which owned the rights to the old movie (before Turner merged with Time Warner), and Pascal relayed the pitch to Ephron. Next thing you know, Hanks and Ryan are discussing telescope lubrication on the Upper West Side.
Actually, it wasn't quite that easy. For one thing, Hanks, 42, was tired of being compared to Jimmy Stewart and wasn't wild about the idea of stepping into one of his old roles. "But I decided to disregard that concern," he says. "I mean, you'll never see me remake Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or It's a Wonderful Life. But Shop Around the Corner is very different. This is a very young Jimmy Stewart. This is Jimmy Stewart before Jimmy Stewart was Jimmy Stewart."
Ryan, 37, had doubts too--although none of them had anything to do with Margaret Sullavan. "I really loved the script and wanted to work with Tom and Nora again," she says. "But people were starting to get the idea that all I could do was romantic comedies. I've done something like 30 movies and only seven have been romantic comedies. But I was getting locked into that. It was starting to get irritating."
Both actors could have easily passed on Mail--"We'd never slam ourselves into a movie just to cash in on something," Hanks says--but both could also see that a Sleepless reunion made a lot of sense. For Ryan, locking into an eighth romantic comedy was plain good business; with the surprise success of this year's romantic drama City of Angels and good advance buzz on Mail, Ryan's per-picture asking price is now $15 million (on a par with Jodie Foster's, just behind Julia Roberts'). Her next two pictures are also Ephron projects: Hanging Up, a comedy-drama Diane Keaton will be directing from an Ephron script, and Higgins and Beech, a Korean War love story Ephron has cowritten and will direct.
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