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Tom Hanks in a remake of The Shop Around the Corner, the 1940 romantic comedy starring Jimmy Stewart? It's a no-brainer. Meg Ryan as his leading lady? Another no-brainer. But how to update the film's plot, which tracks the burgeoning romance between two real-life acquaintances who are also unwittting pen pals? Hmm. That's a bit harder. Move the two lovers underwater? Transplant them to war-torn Kosovo? Endow one of them with superpowers?

If these seem like good ideas to you, then you may have a future in Hollywood--as a traffic cop. When it came time to reupholster The Shop Around the Corner as the upcoming You've Got Mail, it took the crack skills of an expert to find new juice in the hoary old story. Enter producer Lauren Shuler-Donner, who has also produced such high-concept hits as Mr. Mom (hey, kids, it's a gender-role switcheroo!), Dave (the president's staff hires a double for him, high jinks ensue), and Free Willy (killer whale teaches boy meaning of love).

"Julie Durk, who is our executive producer, saw the original Jimmy Stewart film," says Shuler-Donner, "and she mentioned to me that she felt it was a good candidate for a remake. The two characters are pen pals in the original, so I thought, 'What about e-mail?' Boom! We sold it based on that idea."

In the film, Ryan plays New York children's bookstore owner Kathleen Kelly, whose livelihood is threatened when a Foxbooks megastore moves in across the street. Hanks is Joe Fox, the scion of the Foxbooks firm. Though Joe and Kathleen have a Hatfield-McCoy relationship during the day, they are quickly becoming the best of friends via instant messaging and e-mail, although neither knows the real identity of the other. "Love letters are a classic device, but people stopped writing letters for a long time," says Shuler-Donner. "E-mail is helping to change that."

The film reunites Hanks and Ryan with Sleepless in Seattle director and coscreenwriter Nora Ephron, and it has a strong supporting cast that includes indie empress Parker Posey (Henry Fool) and TV talk-show émigré Greg Kinnear (As Good as It Gets). David Chappelle, Dabney Coleman, Michael Palin, Jean Stapleton, and Steve Zahn round out the cast's comedy vets.

Hollywood has been dabbling in in-boxes since the mid-'90s. But such early e-mail-themed films as Disclosure and Copycat cast the Net as a sinister, faceless place, and associated e-mail with either brilliant scientists or creepy psychopaths. It wasn't until last year's blockbuster My Best Friend's Wedding that e-mail figured prominently in a romantic comedy. Now, with always-more-Mr.-Nice-Guy Hanks and the eternally cute Ryan logging on and checking their messages, e-mail may have finally hit the mainstream. "There has definitely been a change in the overall attitude toward e-mail in the years since I thought of this idea," says Shuler-Donner. "It's much more accepted now, to the point where I don't feel that I have to defend it as a valid medium. It is a valid medium. Anyone who resists it is being ignorant. It's like resisting the automobile."

With so many people going e-postal in You've Got Mail, some lucky e-mail interface will get marquee billing. But it won't be Netscape Mail, Yahoo! Mail, or Excite Mail. In Ephron's script, all of the instant messaging and e-mail happens within the confines of pay-service giant America Online. AOL's e-mail, as any user knows, is somewhat restricted. Users can only store a limited number of messages online. The service has difficulty sending attachments across platforms. And it's unlikely that Ephron will come clean about the busy signals and dropped connections that can madden actual AOL users. Still, Shuler-Donner insists that AOL, with almost half of all America's Net users, is the people's choice. "Nora felt specifically that this is an American movie," says Shuler-Donner. "It's about New York. So we felt America Online would be a good match." The partnership has a financial rationale, too--as a main character in the film, AOL will no doubt promote the film enthusiastically. And though Warner Bros. has already snagged www.youvegotmail.com as the URL for the film's official Web site, there's no word on whether the AOL Keyword you'vegotmail, currently reserved for the service's gallery of celebrity e-mail voices, will be reassigned to promotional duty.

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