These Opposites Were on the Same Page : Movies: Screenwriter Ron Bass and novelist Terry McMillan, by phone and fax, collaborated to write the script to Christmas weekend’s hit ‘Waiting to Exhale.’

They do make an odd couple.

He’s as mild-looking as they come, a smooth, unflappable man in the comfy, anti-style wardrobe of a National Public Radio talk-show host, complete to the beard and horn-rim glasses, the cardigan sweater, the open collar and the well-broken-in shoes.

She’s who she is, dammit, and she doesn’t care who knows about it or what they think. In cowboy boots, black leather jeans, a black velvet blazer and a white lace turtleneck, she’s a woman no man would mess with. Her hair is gathered in a garland of tendrils, but her face isn’t soft or sweet at all; it’s tough, proud, beautiful and not the sort of a face to take anything off anybody. If Tina Turner were a writer instead of a singer, this is what she would look like.

And sitting in a sedate and refined cocktail lounge in a sedate and refined Washington hotel, they look like inadvertent seatmates on the shuttle between D.C. and Boston. Their coupling had to be accidental.

But it wasn’t.

These two--Oscar-winning screenwriter Ron Bass and novelist Terry McMillan--collaborated on the star-studded version of McMillan’s own best-selling novel “Waiting to Exhale.” (It opened Friday and took in more than $14 million, making it the Christmas weekend’s most heavily attended film.)

The production arrived swathed in equal amounts of expectation and controversy. The expectation hails from a brilliant cast, headed by Whitney Houston in her second movie role, and Angela Bassett, who has emerged this year as one of the finest actresses in America.

The controversy originates with McMillan’s novel, which examined the lives of four intelligent middle-class black women, particularly the difficulty they had with the men in their lives. In the book, the male half of the population did not fare well, being consistently portrayed as deceitful, adulterous, dangerous, meretricious, unreliable. They not only cheat on their wives, they also cheat on the women they cheat on their wives with. And, oh yes, they’re pretty lousy in the sack.

The movie that has resulted in no way leavens these charges, particularly in the lovemaking department. In two particularly painful--yet hilarious--sequences, male lovers are shown as pitifully inadequate.

“I feel it’s fair to them,” says the regal McMillan with a shrug. “It’s not an unfair representation of all African American males. It only shows what happens to a few of them.

“I had time to think about what I wrote,” she continues. “I’m pretty sure I wrote what I meant to write. I don’t have to apologize. I didn’t write to shock. I wrote things that I thought would make people think.”

Fair or not, the book certainly struck a deep nerve in feminine consciousness--black and white--which kept “Waiting to Exhale” on bestseller lists for more than a year (and has elevated a re-release of a paperback on the list as well).

Bass is quick to point out that it was director Forest Whitaker who tried to prevent the film from being a pure demonization of men.

“Forest said he didn’t see these guys as unregenerate villains,” he says. “He looked for the humanity in them, and the poignance.”

McMillan turned to Bass on the recommendation of her friend Amy Tan, who had collaborated with him on the film version of “The Joy Luck Club.”

“I figured if he could be Chinese,” McMillan says, “he could be black.”

At first they were looking for a writer “just like Ron Bass.”

“I guess they decided, why not go with the real thing?” Bass says with a laugh.

It was one of those collaborations made possible by fax. Bass, a longtime screenwriter, lives in Los Angeles; McMillan was teaching in North Carolina.

“Fortunately, we’re both morning persons,” she says. “I couldn’t have worked with a night person. And we had similar work habits. It was smooth all the way.

“He wants to work all the time,” she says.

“I hate to leave anything undone,” he says. “If I see something 30 pages back that has to be changed, then I go back and change it and work the changes through.”

“Me, I’m someone who never likes to quit in the middle,” McMillan says. “As a novelist I work in chapters, not pages or scenes. If I start it, I like to finish it. We had a good rhythm.”

Bass outlined the book and the scenes, and set page limits per scene. McMillan wrote it and faxed the pages, and then the two talked it over by phone.

“You have to squeeze a lot of things in. Ron would say, ‘We have to do this in 1.3 pages,’ and I would say, ‘2.5 is all I can give you.’ He’d say, ‘Go back, try again, get it into 1.3.’ It was a real learning experience.”

“My theory,” says Bass, who won his Oscar for “Rain Man,” “is that you learn the book and then you do the story from scratch. It’s not an ‘editorial’ process in the sense that you are editing the book down. You have to understand that where books are about what people think, movies are about how people interact. Inside vs. outside. You’re always looking for the interaction.”

He said that, surprisingly, McMillan had “no ego about the story. She would have changed even more.”

“Writers are usually hesitant to let go,” she says. “But my attitude is that I’ve already had my characters and let them say what I wanted. I don’t have some emotional attachment to these ladies. So if you know a better way, let’s go for it.”

They had little rules.

“We’d never end up the phone calls mad. We’d always patch up our disputes.”