When the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Empire Falls comes to the small screen on HBO Saturday and Sunday nights, author Richard Russo won't be complaining about the screenwriter botching his book. He wrote the screenplay, streamlining his rich, complex novel about the intertwined lives of the residents of a New England town from almost 500 pages to about 120 pages of script. Even given the luxury of a two-night miniseries of about 3{ hours, almost twice the length of a theatrical movie, Russo says, "You leave out about three-quarters of it." Yet the movie captures the book's sprawling story about several generations of working people and their wealthy employers in a Maine mill town, bringing Russo's funny, touching characters to vivid life. Every avid reader has seen pallid movies that don't live up to the books they're drawn from, he says. "When you're feeling disappointed in a movie that's based on a novel you really love, when you're noticing that certain of your favorite things aren't there, that usually means what is there isn't quite as compelling as it could be." Russo, 55, has seen another of his novels successfully make the transition to a movie: Nobody's Fool, a 1994 theatrical release directed by Robert Benton and starring Paul Newman. How did Russo get lucky twice, when so many authors see their fiction mangled by Hollywood? "Good directors and good actors, that's the easy answer to that one," he says. For Empire Falls, shot on location in Maine, Russo says, "We have a very skilled and wonderful storyteller in Fred Schepisi," the director, whose resume includes Last Orders and Six Degrees of Separation. "He has a marvelous sense of place. We all felt that one of the characters in this story was the place itself." As for the human characters, the movie's stellar cast includes Ed Harris, Joanne Woodward, Helen Hunt, Robin Wright Penn and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. "And when you've got Paul Newman walking on in the first scene," Russo says, "you can't lose." Newman is one of the executive producers and was instrumental in bringing the project to HBO. He plays Max Roby, the father of the main character. Max is a con man and a drunk, a roistering boy in an old man's body, and Newman plays him with gusto. He played a similar character, Sully Sullivan, in Nobody's Fool, and Russo says those characters are one reason he and Newman have collaborated so successfully. "The roles he seems to be most fond of, the ones where he has done his most extraordinary work, have been the ones where he's played the rogue male," Russo says, in movies such as Hud, Harper, The Sting The Color of Money. "He brings such incredible charm to those roles. And every one of my novels, except maybe Straight Man, has one of those great rogue males." Newman, who is 80, had said that Nobody's Fool would be his swan song, Russo says. "He had been saying the same thing about this. Now he's saying, "Maybe I've got one more movie in me.' " Russo's road to getting Empire Falls on the screen was also smoothed by his work on half a dozen other screenplays, including Nobody's Fool (which he co-wrote for the screen with Benton); Twilight, which also starred Newman; several TV movies; and the upcoming Ice Harvest, starring John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton. The intensely collaborative nature of filmmaking is a stark contrast to the solitary work of writing fiction. "I find that they complement each other," Russo says. "After screenwriting, I love the solitude when I get back to novel writing. Then when I've been working on a novel for a while, and, as my wife would tell you, I'm in danger of indulging in antisocial tendencies, it's really wonderful to work with other people." Russo says his strategy for writing changes dramatically when he works on a screenplay. "As a novelist, I'm so expansive, so digressive, everything you can't afford to be when you're writing a screenplay. "As a novelist my impulse is to get it all in. As a screenwriter, it's to take it all out and get an outline that works." After many drafts of the Empire Falls screenplay, the first version he presented to Schepisi was "as stripped down as any version I'd written. I wanted clarity, economy, grace." Schepisi read it and asked to see the one he had written just before. "He told me, "Your last draft was much better, much sloppier. This is a movie that needs to be sloppy. It's about community.' " The keystone of that community is Miles Roby, played by Ed Harris. Miles has borne many disappointments _ a failed marriage, unrequited love, a career abandoned to care for his dying mother _ yet he has such quiet strength and compassion that he becomes the moral center of the struggling town. "I hope people realize how good Ed is in it," Russo says. "He's surrounded by nut cases, and in their outrageousness, they have all these wonderful lines. "Ed's performance is all the more stunning because even surrounded by all that lunacy I think he commands the camera." But the character closest to Russo's heart is Tick, Miles' teenage daughter, played by 17-year-old Danielle Panabaker. To create Tick, a girl who has inherited both her father's sensitive intelligence and her mother's wisecracking toughness, Russo used aspects of his two daughters, who were teenagers while he was writing the novel. He says, "I took it for granted that we would never find anyone to play Tick who would satisfy me. I was ready to cut my losses after all the love I had invested in that character. "Then Danielle comes on and just does it. She doesn't resemble either of my daughters physically, but she just captures how those girls are, their grace, their intelligence, their kindness, their smarts." With the Empire Falls movie finished, Russo is back in novel-writing mode, working on his next book. "I'm about 500 pages into it. I'm working on it exclusively now, no screenwriting until I get this done." He expects to complete the book this summer, and, "depending on what my editor says," to see it in bookstores in about a year and a half. But he's not talking about its story or characters, or even its title. "I try not to talk about a novel I'm writing. I have enough problems with them." Colette Bancroft can be reached at (727) 893-8435 or bancroftsptimes.com.