Welcome in! Wipe your feet. I'm Lou Alday, I've sold houses in Sacramento for twenty-two years, and if you've ever driven around East Sacramento with me looking at three-bedroom bungalows, you've already heard what I'm about to tell you: Tom Hanks went to college right here in my town. He did theater at Sacramento State in the seventies, before anybody knew who he was. I point out the campus to every client I drive past it with. Some are interested. Some just want to see the kitchen. I tell them anyway.

I have seen every one of his movies in a theater since Splash in 1984. Twenty-three of them, and I can tell you where I saw every one and who I was with. My husband Mike has seen about nineteen. He fell asleep in the other four, and I've decided that counts against him, not the movies.

So here is my listing, done the way I know how: a walk-through. Then go see the full rated listings, where every film gets a score on my SOLD-sign scale.

The Front Porch
Bosom Buddies, 1980 to 1982
Everybody's first look was the porch. Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari as two young ad men who dress up as women so they can afford an apartment in a hotel that only rents to ladies. It only ran two seasons on ABC, but you could tell. You could always tell. A little later he turned up on Family Ties as Elyse's brother, and if you saw it you remember it.

The Living Room
Splash to Big, 1984 to 1988
This is where everybody likes to sit. Splash with Daryl Hannah as the mermaid, the first time a lot of us saw him on a big screen. Then a run of comedies, some good and some I'll be gentle about on the listings page. As a professional I have to mention The Money Pit, a whole movie about a house falling apart around a young couple. I've shown that house. Everybody in my business has. And then Big, which got him his first Oscar nomination, and the scene with the giant piano in the toy store, which I don't think anybody has ever watched without smiling.

The Basement
1989 to 1990
Every house has one. I'm not going to dwell. The Bonfire of the Vanities is down here with the furnace. I saw it on opening weekend in 1990 and so did about eleven other people. Even good houses have a few soft spots in the floor.

The Master Suite
1992 to 1994
This is the room that sells the house. He won Best Actor for Philadelphia in March 1994, playing a lawyer fired by his firm because he has AIDS, and then won it again the next March for Forrest Gump. Two years running. The only other man to do that was Spencer Tracy, back in the thirties. The same year as Philadelphia he made Sleepless in Seattle, which is the movie I make my clients' wives watch. And before both of them, A League of Their Own, where he plays a washed-up manager of a women's baseball team, and everybody remembers one line from it that I am not going to type because you are already saying it.

The Family Room
1995 to 1996
Apollo 13, as Jim Lovell, and if you didn't hold your breath when they came back through the atmosphere you weren't watching. Toy Story the same year, as the voice of Woody, in the first movie made completely on computers. My grandson can do Woody's whole speech about being the favorite toy, and he's four. Then That Thing You Do!, which he wrote and directed himself, about a little band from Erie, Pennsylvania, that has one hit in 1964. It's the happiest movie I own.

The Study
1998
Saving Private Ryan. I saw it with Mike, whose father landed in Normandy and never talked about it. We sat in the car in the parking lot for a long time afterward without starting the engine. He was nominated again for it, and lost, and that's fine. Some rooms aren't for showing. Then he did a whole miniseries on HBO about the moon landings, From the Earth to the Moon, that he put together and helped direct, and I learned more from it than from my whole high school.

The Kitchen
1998
Everybody ends up in the kitchen. You've Got Mail, with Meg Ryan for the third time, last Christmas. Two people who fall in love over AOL without knowing who the other one is. I saw it right after I got my first e-mail account, and I went home and checked my mailbox about forty times. Nobody had written. Write me. You'll make my week.

The Foundation
since 1988
He married Rita Wilson in 1988. She'd been a guest on Bosom Buddies and they made Volunteers together, and she's in Sleepless in Seattle as his sister, crying about an old movie in the best two minutes of the picture. They've been married eleven years. In my line of work you see a lot of couples under stress, buying and selling, and I always say you can tell a good foundation. That's all I'll say about anybody's marriage on a web page.