LOVE LETTERS FOR THE '90S; WHAT DRIVES EPHRON, RYAN, HANKS IN `MAIL'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Writer

Thank heavens for e-mail. What else could have brought the favorite romantic comedy team of the decade back together again?

``You've Got Mail'' re-unites the ``Sleepless in Seattle'' couple of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, under the supervision of ``Sleepless'' screenwriter-director Nora Ephron and associate producer Delia Ephron.

But it's not a sequel by any means. ``Mail'' is based on the old, Nikolaus Laszlo play ``Parfumerie,'' which inspired Ernst Lubitsch's ultra-charming ``The Shop Around the Corner'' (1940), the Judy Garland musical ``In the Good Old Summertime'' (1949) and the stage production ``She Loves Me.''

Yet the idea of two unconscious romantics being brought together via information age technology - in this case, warring bookstore owners who are unknowingly falling in love with each other over the Internet - echoes the ``Sleepless'' gimmick of a woman being enchanted by the radio voice of a man she's never met.

Plus, the juxtaposition of a new medium like cyberspace against an old one like print gave the Ephron sisters, who wrote ``Mail'' together, a framework on which they could hang the kind of language-based and contemporary culture jokes that made ``Sleepless'' so bright-eyed.

No wonder, then, that Hanks (who has become the world's biggest movie star in the five years since ``Sleepless'' hit) and Ryan (who now hates being typecast in most people's minds as a comic cutie) went for the ``Mail'' despite their natural inclinations to avoid froth.

``This is absolutely rooted in who we are right now,'' Hanks, 42, says. ``This WalMartification of the world, and at the same time this intangible quality that human beings have to fall in love with somebody they don't know, this is part and parcel of our lives right now.

``I wasn't four pages into the script before I was calling Nora and saying, `Let's do this.' To me, it was just absolutely real and right and proper and all that.''

``What I liked was that Nora's managed to make a movie that's romantic and you want them to get together and all that,'' Ryan adds, ``but she's also been able to observe what's happening in our culture right now. She's able to talk about the franchising of America phenomenon. And it's pretty ingenious that they communicate through e-mail; that's very modern, and it hasn't been done before.''

In the film, Ryan's Kathleen Kelly runs a small, lovingly operated children's bookstore called the Shop Around the Corner. When a mammoth Fox & Sons superstore moves into her Upper West Side Manhattan neighborhood, the discount chain outlet threatens to run her independent operation out of business. Kathleen's only consolation through this corporate assault is the sensitive and caring e-mail buddy she recently met in a chat room.

Of course, unbeknownst to her, he's really Joe Fox, hard-driving scion of the bookstore chain empire. He doesn't know his new cyber-sweetie is the despised competition either, but when he finds out it's too late; he's already in love with her online persona.

The idea for an e-mail update of ``Shop Around the Corner'' was actually executive producer Julie Durk's. Her boss, producer Lauren Shuler Donner (``Free Willy,'' ``Dave''), secured the remake rights to the Lubitsch film from its owner, Turner Pictures, then contacted Ephron.

``I was terribly afraid that somebody else would get this idea because love online is happening all over the place,'' producer Shuler Donner says.

Former journalist Ephron was intrigued by the creative possibilities inherent in a communication technology that has emerged so recently, yet has become second nature for millions of people in record time.

``One of the things that is so fascinating to me about e-mail is that the minute you start doing it, you understand what it is,'' says Ephron. ``It's not a phone call, it's not a letter, yet nobody explains that to you. It's as if somebody suddenly gave you a machine and you can speak French. We all know the parameters of it.

``And this thing that they do on it, like most of e-mail, has a very kind of casual feeling. It might not be something important enough to put into a letter or make a phone call about, but you can make it into something that you write that's a whole, amazing thing.''

An amazing thing that basically looks like two people typing. There was definitely a trick to keeping the vital comic rhythm of ``You've Got Mail'' going throughout its many static, laptop-and-voiceover shots.

``I was never too afraid of this because computers just are interesting to watch, I don't know why,'' Ephron says. ``Now, granted, we didn't have all of those charming graphics that they have in movies like `The Net,' and if we had had any two actors less good than these two, I don't know if those scenes would have worked.

``But you look at Tom's face when he writes that letter about how he has a project that needs tweaking; he barely moves and it's riveting. It's just a man sitting at a typewriter, and it's interesting. Words are interesting - but we did keep the scenes short. You don't have any six-minute letters here.''

Web activity is far less intriguing for the film's stars.

``Man, I wish I had time to surf the Web,'' says Hanks, who does tend to stay busy with stuff like ``Saving Private Ryan,'' the long-filming adaptation of Stephen King's ``The Green Mile'' and working on whacked-out award acceptance speeches. ``All I really do is search for those nude pictures I did 20 years ago. Thank God I've yet to find them!''

``I have a computer now, thanks to this movie, but I didn't have one before,'' Ryan reveals. ``I do a lot of e-mailing, but I can't stay in the chat rooms. I can't tell what anyone's talking about.''

She hasn't found those Hanks nudes on the Web either, and Ryan doesn't want to see what she knows has been posted on her.

``Some FBI guy called me up because there's some pornographic composite thing of me out there,'' she reveals. ``There's somebody who does this for joy, sticks celebrities' heads on other bodies. That's why I've never gone to my Web site.''

All the cutting-edge trappings aside, the core appeal of ``You've Got Mail'' was the chance to work again with respected colleagues - or, in the case of Hanks and Ryan, to really work together, since they only shared two scenes in ``Sleepless.''

``As soon as he read it, Tom called Meg and said, `Nora's sending a script to you. I'm doing it and so are you,' '' Shuler Donner notes.

``All I know is it's so easy to work with Tom,'' Ryan says of the two-time Oscar winner. ``One thing that's so great about him is that he could have all of this attendant Elvis stuff, he could come with all these things, and he doesn't. He's just this guy who everybody probably feels they know and probably do know. Even after all this stuff that's happened to him, he's still gracious enough to feel lucky.

``So, it was nice to have more scenes together.''

``Meg is very smart, she does not lie and she does not acquiesce to somebody's personality just to foment a conversation,'' says Hanks, who first worked with Ryan on the unsuccessful, 1990 whimsy ``Joe Versus the Volcano.'' ``So, without it being competitive in any way, shape or form, the level of the game is constantly raised with Meg. Nothing is done halfway; Meg kind of scares me in the way you want to be scared by somebody you're working with and intrigues me in the way you want to be intrigued.'' For Ephron, who has directed ``Mixed Nuts'' and ``Michael'' since her second feature ``Sleepless,'' it was nice to come back to work with that film's stars not feeling scared.

``Tom said that, when you've done it once together, there's a kind of shorthand that obtains,'' she says. ``I think Tom spent a certain amount of `Sleepless' not sure if I knew what I was doing, and he was probably right about that.''

``I think Nora's surrounded herself with people that she really, really respected, and she's learned from them,'' Ryan reckons. ``She just looked like she was having a great time when she was making this. It was harder for her last time, but I think she's found a way to make a movie satisfying on many different levels.

``It's a deceptively simple movie, and this is Nora's real talent,'' Ryan concludes. ``She's able to observe our world in a way that doesn't look like she's doing it. But she is.''

If that's so, it comes back down to the basic reporter's tool that Ephron has been using her whole adult life - whether with a pen, typewriter or a computer keyboard.

``What really interests me, because I'm so much fundamentally a writer as opposed to a director, are words,'' Ephron says. ``And, by the way, most romantic comedies tend to be, secretly, about words, because words wound and words appeal. Words are always what is trafficked in a romantic comedy, because sex is usually not in the room in any real way.

``And this is really a movie about words. Beginning to end.''

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2 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) Sleepless in cyberspace

Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan together again in `You've Got Mail'

Bradford Mar/Daily News (Photo illustration)

(2) The romantic comedy ``You've Got Mail'' pairs Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan for a third time on screen.