A look inside Hollywood and the movies : REMAKING A REMAKE : ‘Affair’ Keeps Being Remembered

Accidentally or otherwise, writer-director Nora Ephron has done Warren Beatty and Annette Bening a favor with her new comedy “Sleepless in Seattle.”

References to Leo McCarey’s 1957 tear-jerker “An Affair to Remember” in “Sleepless” will almost certainly boost awareness of Beatty and Bening’s “Love Affair,” scheduled to start shooting in July. “Love Affair” is a based on both the Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr romance and the movie that inspired it, McCarey’s 1939 “Love Affair” with Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne.

Both movies involve a middle-aged playboy and a younger woman who fall in love aboard an ocean liner even though they’re engaged to other people.

The modern “Love Affair” will be directed by Glenn Gordon Caron (TV’s “Moonlighting,” the movie “Clean and Sober”) from a script by Robert Towne (“Chinatown,” “Tequila Sunrise”).

The Grant-Kerr version “is a running character” in “Sleepless,” says Ephron. Meg Ryan, a frustrated single woman who becomes stuck on widower Tom Hanks after hearing him on a radio call-in show, is romantically dazed by the movie, to the extent of arranging a fateful meeting with Hanks at the Empire State Building, a key locale in “An Affair to Remember.”

Several video clips of the film are seen in “Sleepless.” The “Remember” motif “was the idea of the screenwriter, Jeff Arch,” says Ephron. “His mother was always a big fan.”

Among connoisseurs of the weepie, “An Affair to Remember” is considered in the same exalted company as “Love Story” and “Back Street”--which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a movie classic. Many of the principals involved in both “Love Affair” and “Sleepless” freely admit that “An Affair to Remember” falls somewhere short of that.

As Towne remarks: “If someone sat me down in front of a TV and showed me ‘An Affair to Remember’ cold and then said, do you want to remake this? I would say, ‘You’re out of your mind.’ ”

“I’ve always had an enormous fondness for it, which isn’t the same as saying it’s great,” Ephron says. The movie’s tear-stained reputation “really boils down to the last 10 minutes. It’s a guaranteed wipeout. I think that Grant is so amazing in that scene, so extraordinary. Kerr’s expression is just devastating.”

The 1939 “Love Affair” “is so much better,” Towne declares. “It’s a movie of great sophistication and charm. Don’t even talk about the ’57 version . . . it’s a joke, that movie.”

Ephron showed the Grant-Kerr version to Hanks during rehearsals, she recalls. “Tom was sitting there going, ‘Oh, God! This film is not to be believed!’ ”

“The thing that’s so moving about the movie is the thing that’s dopey about it--the self-negating masochism of the heroine,” Ephron observes. “It’s a ‘50s movie with a very ‘30s sensibility. It’ll be fascinating to see how they handle it in the new film.”

Indeed. Is the story of “Love Affair” and “An Affair to Remember” indelibly antiquated and irrelevant or does it carry the seeds of a strong romantic drama for the ‘90s, with the same kind of date-movie hooks that launched “Indecent Proposal”?

“A good love story is timeless,” says Caron. “There aren’t a lot of them around. The bones on this one are solid. The thought was, let’s give this another whack. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.”

Ephron says that one problem in updating the story is the transatlantic crossing, “which people don’t do anymore.” (“They didn’t even take cruises back in the ‘50s,” exclaims Towne. “Even as a kid, I knew that.”) A modern-day equivalent, says Ephron, is “rehab. That’s my sister Delia’s idea--they should meet at the Betty Ford Clinic.”

One of the more interesting angles about Beatty and Bening playing the title roles are the real-life parallels. A producer claims that Towne’s script was fueled by Beatty’s stories about how he and Bening met and fell in love while making “Bugsy,” stories that reflect the playboy-woos-standoffish-beauty scheme of the “Love Affair” screenplay.

“I think it’s wonderfully astute casting,” says Caron.

The stories behind “Love Affair” and the Beatty-Bening romance are “pretty much the same--that’s true,” says Towne. “I agree, it’ll be interesting. I think it’s fair game for an actor to use his persona in the service of an illusion. That doesn’t mean what we’ll see is a piece of autobiography. It’s still an illusion in the end.”