INFOMERCIALITY : The Power of Positive Sleeplessness

TriStar Pictures’ hit film “Sleepless in Seattle” probably seems like a love story or romantic fantasy to most moviegoers. But not to Jeff Arch, the movie’s original screenwriter, who is featured in a current television infomercial for multimillionaire motivational guru Anthony Robbins.

For Arch, “Sleepless” is a metaphor for the inspiration he got from Robbins, whom he credits with giving him the tools to transform his screenwriting career from “almost” to “yes.”

Frustrated for a decade in his ambition to succeed as a writer, Arch himself was sleepless one 4 a.m. in 1989 when he happened to catch a Robbins infomercial featuring actor LeVar Burton and basketball coach Pat Riley.

Robbins, who made firewalking something of a fad in the mid-1980s, heads the La Jolla-based Robbins Research International, a company that grosses $50 million a year from motivational seminars, speaking engagements, audiotapes and books. His show-business fans include actor Martin Sheen and Peter Guber, chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, TriStar’s parent company.

Though Arch was skeptical, Riley’s testimonial impressed him. “I figured if he’s going to stick his neck out--he’s no idiot--that’s OK with me,” Arch said by telephone from his home in Clifton, Va. So Arch picked up the phone and ordered a set of $179 audiotapes. The following January, he traveled to La Jolla for one of Robbins’ seminars. He began writing “Sleepless” the next month and by May had sold it, thereby fulfilling “the destiny that I always thought was available to me.”

“At the risk of sounding like an absolute kook,” he added, “what the movie is really about, to me, is the courage to declare that you can live a destiny instead of a life.” In the film, Meg Ryan plays a Baltimore journalist who believes she is destined to fall in love with a Seattle widower (Tom Hanks) she has never met.

Not incidentally, one of Robbins’ best-selling books is entitled “Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny.”

In “Sleepless” Ryan’s character becomes captivated with the widower after his son connives to get him to reveal his emotions on a radio talk show. “The radio represented the little voice you hear inside,” said Arch. “Unless you’re a psychopath, that voice is always right. . . . That’s the voice that’s going to tell you where to go and how to get there.”

Arch, who bristles when people call Robbins a guru, said that the positive thinking he learned from Robbins and other authors enabled him to take in stride the news that his screenplay was being rewritten. “I looked at getting removed from ‘Sleepless’ as a positive thing . . . as an opportunity to stay in the good graces of everybody by not throwing a fit,” he said.

Producer Gary Foster confirms that Arch reacted calmly when told the screenplay was being taken away from him. “He and I have never had words together that were difficult,” Foster said.

Director Nora Ephron, who shares screenplay credit with Arch and David S. Ward, has no problem with Arch’s interpretation of the meaning of “Sleepless.”

“The movie is a Rorschach anyway,” said Ephron, referring to the inkblot personality test. “People who have lost their mother think the movie’s about that. Widowers think it’s about that. Single women think it’s about that. Jeff is certainly more than entitled to his theories.”