The Word Is Not Enough : Literary adaptations, from ‘Sleepy Hollow’ to our mouse friend ‘Stuart Little,’ lead the way, but there are many other adventures in store too.

In the rest of the world, there are 12 days of Christmas, full of faith, hope and joy. But in Hollywood, every one of the 12 days is a nail-biter, full of anxiety, disappointment--and an occasional giddy burst of triumph.

“At Christmas, you’ve got 12 days to make a statement with your movie,” says Tom Sherak, chairman of the 20th Century Fox domestic film group. “And if you can’t make a statement, you better get out of the kitchen, because if you don’t instantly attract a healthy chunk of the audience, you’ll be out of the theaters by January.”

That’s the spirit of the season in movieland: survival of the fittest. As Universal marketing chief Marc Shmuger puts it: “It’s a time of year when I say a lot of Hail Marys.”

Holiday time in Hollywood runs roughly from mid-November to New Year’s Eve, with the critical 12 days coming around Christmas. This year 13 major films open between Dec. 19 and Dec. 29. It’s an ultra-competitive breeding ground for Oscar hopefuls as well as the year’s biggest adult-oriented commercial hits. Walk the beach in Maui or ski Aspen Mountain over the holidays and you’ll bump into a throng of executives, agents and producers all armed with cell phones, keeping tabs on the latest box-office results.

Last year, it was holiday time when Miramax launched “Shakespeare in Love,” which went on to win the Oscar for best picture. The year before it was “Titanic,” which became the all-time box-office champion. In some years, the season is bountiful. In 1997, “Titanic,” “As Good as It Gets” and “Tomorrow Never Dies” all came out in the same week; all made $100 million-plus at the box office. But the year before it was a barren harvest. “Ghosts of Mississippi,” “One Fine Day,” “My Fellow Americans” and “In Love and War” all came out the same week. All did poorly, bested by a bratty teen animated movie called “Beavis and Butt-head Do America.”

Kid-oriented fare usually opens around Thanksgiving; this year the family feast begins with “Pokemon,” from Warner Bros. on Wednesday, and “Toy Story 2” from Disney/Pixar on Nov. 19. But with Oscar balloting just around the corner, Christmas holiday movies give filmmakers an opportunity to wrestle with Big Topics and actors a chance to tackle Big Roles, with all this heady ambition overflowing in Big Movies, many of them wheezing in past the 2 1/2-hour dare-to-stay-awake mark.

Yet when else could you see Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman, Johnny Depp as Ichabod Crane, Robin Williams as a robot, Alanis Morissette as God, John Cusack as Nelson Rockefeller, Chow Yun-Fat updating Yul Brynner and Robert De Niro as an uptight security guard taking post-stroke singing lessons from--yes, it’s true--a drag queen.

It’s a time for showy roles and serious drama, which is why so many films in this year’s holiday season are adaptations of novels and biographies. “Christmas is the one time of year when you can say, ‘Graham Greene,’ and maybe it’ll mean something to people,” says Columbia Pictures president Amy Pascal. “It’s when we all release our fancy movies. You hope you’ll get an Oscar buzz and make the critics’ Top 10 list. And if people respond to the film, you have something to be proud of--and maybe you can get dressed up and go to the Oscars.”

The long list of literary adaptations includes “Snow Falling on Cedars,” “The Green Mile,” “Angela’s Ashes,” “Girl, Interrupted,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “The Cider House Rules,” “Bicentennial Man,” “End of the Affair,” “Mansfield Park,” “Stuart Little,” “Sleepy Hollow,” “Felicia’s Journey” and “Anywhere but Here.” The range is vast, from recent bestsellers to older classics. After so many letdowns--remember “Beloved” and “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”?--it’s no wonder that devoted readers are as anxious as they are expectant about what Hollywood will do with their favorite books.

In addition, there’s a high-profile crop of biographies, including “The Hurricane,” with Denzel Washington as imprisoned boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter; “Man on the Moon,” with Carrey as the late comic Kaufman; “The Messenger,” with Milla Jovovich as Joan of Arc; “Topsy-Turvy,” Mike Leigh’s portrait of operetta’s Gilbert & Sullivan; and “Cradle Will Rock,” Tim Robbins’ semi-fictional account of a struggle for artistic freedom inDepression-era New York featuring such luminaries as Orson Welles, John Houseman and Diego Rivera.

There are also several box-office-oriented sequels and remakes, including the latest James Bond thriller, “The World Is Not Enough”; “Toy Story 2”; and the Jody Foster-starring “Anna and the King.” Other films of note include “Any Given Sunday,” a new Oliver Stone football film featuring Al Pacino and Dennis Quaid; “Liberty Heights,” the latest Barry Levinson look at his Baltimore childhood; “End of Days,” a millennium thriller starring Arnold Schwarzenegger; and “Magnolia,” the Paul Thomas Anderson-directed drama that features an ensemble cast including Tom Cruise, Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, William H. Macy and Philip Baker Hall.

Of all these entries, which ones have the most heat? An informal sampling of industry insiders prompted the following consensus predictions. For box-office potential: “Toy Story 2,” “The World Is Not Enough” and “Bicentennial Man.” For best picture potential: “The Hurricane,” “Magnolia,” “The Green Mile” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” For sleeper surprises: “Sleepy Hollow,” “Girl, Interrupted” and “Galaxy Quest.”

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Still, this year’s Big Question remains: Why so many literary adaptations? As “Green Mile” writer-director Frank Darabont jokes, “Apparently there wasn’t a screenwriter in town with an original idea.”

There’s another obvious answer: Filmmakers, especially high-profile directors releasing films during Oscar season, value the layered complexity of a novel. Books have a heft that screenplays lack.

“At the risk of sounding banal, when you have a book, it’s all there,” says Anthony Minghella, director of “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” whose last adaptation, “The English Patient,” based on the novel by Michael Ondaatje, won best picture honors for 1996.

“It simply accelerates the process. With a book, you have a great starting point, this rich, extremely undiluted world,” Minghella explains. “If you’re going to spend three or four years on a movie, it has to be something you feel is worth enslaving your life to.”

For writers, stumbling onto the right story simply sparks a burst of imagination. “It’s almost like a chemical reaction,” says Nick Kazan, who adapted “Bicentennial Man” from an Isaac Asimov short story. “I got so excited when Disney sent me the short story that I started writing dialogue. I went into a meeting two days later with 20 pages of scenes and they said, ‘Great, you’ve got the job.’ ”

Not every adaptation venerates the original. Writer-director Patricia Rozema passed on the original script for “Mansfield Park,” a new Jane Austen drama due in December. She eventually wrote an adaptation that is based as much on Austen’s journals and letters as on the original novel.

“It’s not like making a photocopy of a painting,” Rozema says. “When you adapt a book, you’re turning an orange into an airplane. You have to take ownership of the material. If you believe you’re transforming perfection into a movie, it creates an air of reverence that’s completely paralyzing.”

Minghella says that when he was adapting “Ripley,” he literally tossed away the novel--a method he also used with “The English Patient.” “I honestly can’t find my copy anymore,” he says. “If I had the book too close to me, I’d be tempted to copy every characteristic and stay too close to the characters.”

Not everyone wants to put that much distance between the script and its source. “I try to maintain the voice of the book’s author,” says Darabont, whose “Green Mile” is adapted from a Stephen King novel, as was his previous film, “The Shawshank Redemption.”

“Too many adaptations throw out so much of the book that they lose the texture and feel of the book. For me, if you don’t hear Stephen King’s voice in the film, why bother making the movie?”

Still, movies have an entirely different logic than books. In “Snow Falling,” Hicks went with a younger actor for his main character--a lovelorn journalist played by Ethan Hawke--because he felt audiences wouldn’t accept a man in his late 30s still obsessed with his childhood love. “It wouldn’t work on screen,” he says. “We’d all say, ‘For goodness’ sake, get a life!’ ”

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Casting is obviously a crucial element in getting the movie made. For “Ripley,” Minghella went right to the top, wooing Tom Cruise for the Tom Ripley role. After Cruise passed, Matt Damon stepped in. “Angela’s Ashes” producer David Brown says that a host of actors, most notably Mel Gibson and Liam Neeson, sought the film’s alcoholic dad role before it went to Robert Carlyle, best known for “The Full Monty.” “Bicentennial Man” had been stalled until a new script attracted the interest of both Robin Williams and Carrey, with the part eventually going to Williams.

“Girl, Interrupted” director James Mangold always knew the actress he wanted for Susanna, the film’s lead role--Winona Ryder had been attached to the project for six years. But Mangold insisted on having actresses spend hours with him reading for the part of Lisa, a flirtatious sociopath who befriends Susanna when she checks into a New England psychiatric hospital.

“When Angelina Jolie read two early scenes, and then kept going, I was floored,” Mangold recalls. “You’re hypnotized and repulsed by her, all at the same time. It was the first time I really knew the movie would work.”

Minghella has similar feelings about Damon, one of the few actors he believed could help audiences sympathize with a character that is portrayed in the Patricia Highsmith novel as an amoral killer.

In “Snow Falling,” Hicks used Hawke’s screen presence to help convey the main character’s stunted emotional growth. “One of the reasons actors are so compelling is that they hold back as much as they reveal on screen,” Hicks says. “When you see Ethan hold back, it creates a mystery. And since his character is at the center of a mystery himself, it captures the exact template of the character.”

Directors also use music as a way of replacing some of what Minghella calls the “intimate gestures” that help novels establish a private dialogue between author and reader. Darabont says he adapted “The Green Mile,” set in a 1930s Southern prison, while listening to jazz by Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller. One of his favorite songs, Gene Austin’s “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?,” now plays during one of the film’s pivotal scenes.

Music also influenced Minghella’s adaptation of “Ripley.” In Highsmith’s novel, Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law) is a novice painter. In the film, he’s a second-rate jazz saxophonist. The film is now adorned with ‘50s jazz, including a Damon performance of “My Funny Valentine.”

Making “Girl, Interrupted,” Mangold helped familiarize his young cast with the 1960s--both the book and the film’s setting--by making tapes of period songs. One of the selections, Petula Clark’s “Downtown,” ended up serving as the musical counterpoint for a key sequence in the film. “I always saw the film as a ‘Wizard of Oz’ type of fable, so ‘Downtown’ was our ‘Over the Rainbow,’ ” Mangold says. “It has a dreamlike quality of longing that is very much akin to what plays out in the film.”

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Perhaps the most difficult hurdle for literary adaptations is persuading faithful readers that the films have done justice to the original book. An influential arbiter: the book’s author.

“If the author is still alive, the single most terrifying thing is not knowing whether they liked the movie or not,” says Miramax Films executive Mark Gill, who oversaw the studio’s marketing campaign for “The English Patient,” which won a hearty endorsement from author Ondaatje.

Last year, when Disney released “Simon Birch,” many reviews noted that author John Irving had insisted that the title character in the film use a different name from the character in his book “A Prayer for Owen Meany”; regardless of whether that was the only cause, the movie sank like a stone. But Irving is a big supporter of “The Cider House Rules,” perhaps because he adapted the film himself and had director and cast approval.

Universal’s ads for “Snow Falling on Cedars” subliminally send the same message--if you liked the book, you’ll like the movie--by incorporating the forest imagery from the book’s cover with images of the film’s stars. “The people who read the book are our foremost target audience,” says Universal’s Shmuger. “We’re reaching out to them in bookstores, on the Internet. When we went into production, we took ads in book reviews, announcing the movie.”

Film critics also have far more influence reviewing adaptations than other films. “If they say the adaptation suffers, that’s a real blow, because the audience that reads reviews is the audience most likely to be book readers,” Gill says. “On the other hand, literary adaptations have a certain level of prestige. It’s not like what we face with most movies, where the audience automatically assumes that it’s bad.”

Perhaps that’s why Miramax, eager to woo moviegoers who might feel they’ve seen enough Jane Austen films by now, is touting “Mansfield Park” with the ad slogan: “For everyone who loved ‘Emma’ and ‘Sense and Sensibility’ comes the story Jane Austen loved the most.” Does Miramax have any proof to back up this claim? Or is this another Harvey Weinstein marketing whopper?

“Of course we were looking for any way to differentiate the movie,” Gill says. “But it’s true. She liked ‘Mansfield Park’ best. Just ask any Jane Austen scholar.”