Richard Price says it's like playing "speed chess."

That's how you take a novel -- 546 pages hardcover, 736 pages paperback-- and turn it into a 128-page "singing telegram," his witty way of saying screenplay. "So much stuff has to go," he says, and he had to jettison it or drastically compress it and make it coherent.

Price wrote the 1998 novel "Freedomland," about racial tensions ignited by a reported carjacking and child abduction, and later adapted it for the screen. The movie, starring Julianne Moore, Samuel L. Jackson, Ron Eldard and (in a small role) Edie Falco, opens in theaters Friday.

"The ideal arrangement is to have written a novel, have somebody else write the screenplay and then go to the premiere. It's impossible for somebody who wrote the book or the screenplay to sit in the movie just like somebody who bought a movie ticket. There's so much psychic luggage you bring into the theater with you."

The writer gets distracted by every little thing, each of which triggers a chain reaction of memories, Price says, by phone from New York.

"Even if the movie is better than your screenplay deserved, it still is a shock. You're comparing it to every tiny little thing that was playing in the movie theater of your forehead when you were writing."

When "Freedomland" was published, The New York Times hailed it as Price's most powerful, "a novel that in wrestling with what Tom Wolfe calls the 'rude beast' of millennial America, holds up a dark mirror to our times."

A few years earlier, that mirror had reflected the face of a South Carolina mother named Susan Smith. She claimed a black man took her car and two young sons, only to later admit she sent them to a watery death in a lake.

Price remembers that case well. "When Susan Smith did this thing on TV, Willard Scott was crying so hard he couldn't deliver the weather report."

In "Freedomland," when the white Brenda Martin says a black man took her car and her son, "It's something that rings every acculturated alarm bell and you're going to go with that, for the first adrenaline rush." The audience has to ask if Brenda is a legitimate crime victim or Northern variation of Smith.

Moore, nominated for Oscars for her leading or supporting roles in "Far From Heaven," "The Hours," "The End of the Affair" and "Boogie Nights," had long been interested in "Freedomland." The script was ready in 2000 but it took years and Joe Roth, who formed Revolution Studios, to get it made.

"Joe Roth found out it was available, he wanted to direct it, he had the means, he had the studio. He said, 'I want to do it and it's done.' I think if it wasn't for him, it would probably still be sitting somewhere," Price says.

Roth was attracted to the story's theme about the persistence of racism. "When something goes wrong, our prejudices against others quickly rise to the surface -- and that's been true throughout history," he says in the movie's press notes. He also was drawn to the inherent mystery about what happened to Brenda and her 4-year-old son.

Moore, however, isn't the actress who immediately comes to mind when reading Price's description in the novel: "Her hair was shoulder-length and lank, her face pale and thin. She had no lips to speak of, but her eyes ... a startling electric gray, like a husky's, so light and wide as to suggest trance or blindness."

Mention that Moore, an actress who once made People magazine's most beautiful list, doesn't exactly match that profile and Price points to the Ken Kesey novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and its movie adaptation.

"The character Jack Nicholson played was a physical giant, and then here's little beady-eyed Jack Nicholson and everybody was aghast at this casting gaffe," Price says. Now, of course, Nicholson is the face of Randle Patrick McMurphy.

In the end, though, a film needs only to be true to the spirit of the book without being in awe of the material. Respect the text, as in the film adaptation of "Catch-22," too much and you end up with something stilted, a book on screen rather than a movie, he says.

Price, 56, is no stranger to books or the screen. A native of the Bronx, he published his first novel, "The Wanderers," in 1974 and his later books include "Bloodbrothers," "Clockers" and "Samaritan."

He was nominated for an Academy Award for his first screenplay, the adaptation of "The Color of Money," and his movie credits also include 2000's "Shaft," "Ransom," "Sea of Love," "Clockers," "Mad Dog and Glory," "Night and the City" and "Kiss of Death."

"Basically, you write about the things that are close to your heart. For me, it's always urban environments and some sort of clash between polarized communities."

He is working on a novel about New York's Lower East Side and the culture clash between the influx of young people from all over America and the Hispanic and Chinese housing projects and tenements. "It's two completely different cultures that are occupying the same space."

Price is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and he was happy to see the Best Picture nominees depart from the usual blockbuster budget and formula.

"I wish Hollywood would just learn their lesson and stop it, throwing all its money into these bull---- special effects. The bigger the budget, the blander the movie, because the less you can risk alienating everybody, so you got to give people what they've seen before," he says.

"As a result, you get these dead, dull $200 million movies."