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Monday, December 14, 1998 2:12:00 PM EST

• Hanks, Ryan really get e-mail
• Kidman's Broadway debut packs house
• Godzilla isn't dead
• MTV apologizes to teen boy
• Maya Angelou knows her culture

Tom Hanks in "You've Got Mail"

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, the stars of "You've Got Mail" (which opens nationwide on Friday), say they often go cyber when they want to communicate with friends and loved ones. "I didn't think I'd have time, and I didn't understand the concept of e-mail," Hanks admitted at the Thursday premiere of the film in New York. "I truly thought the 20th century had peaked in the invention of the plain paper fax machine. (E-mail) is the greatest thing in the world."

Hanks and Ryan play a couple of lonely hearts whose lives turn upside down when they fall in love on line. "The e-mail relationships that I have are kind of fantastic, because I think you get to fill in your relationships a little bit if you actually get the time to sit down and compose a note to someone," says Ryan.

Kidman

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Nicole Kidman made her Broadway debut on Sunday night in the highly acclaimed and sexually charged play "The Blue Room." The opening night crowd was packed with celebrities like Kidman's husband Tom Cruise, Rosie O'Donnell, Vanessa Williams, Teri Hatcher, Carol Burnett, directors Spike Lee and Joel Schumacher and designer Diane von Furstenberg.

"I need some alcohol," Kidman joked at the post-performance party, according to the New York Post. Cruise said his wife's much-talked-about nude scene (audiences see her backside for 14 seconds) doesn't bother him because it's "tastefully done." He also said he takes an objective approach when watching the show. "I've seen the play many times, but I get so caught up in the characters that I forget that it's my wife up there," he said.

The latest, U.S.-designed vision of "Godzilla" bombed at the box office

TOKYO (CNN) -- Some monsters just won't die, even when they flop on the big screen. Godzilla, that giant dinosaur that was seen ravaging New York this summer in the ultra-expensive Hollywood version of the Japanese cult classic, will return to the movies, this time with Japan's Toho Company.

Three years after killing off its own Godzilla in a battle with another monster, the studio says it will start work on "Godzilla Millennium" in April. The Godzilla films, which began in 1955 with an actor in a rubbery suit clumsily ravaging a miniature Tokyo skyline, became cult classics. The recent Hollywood version used computer graphics to depict the creature.

"The shape of the American version of Godzilla was so different from the Japanese version that there was a clamor among fans and company officials to create a Godzilla unique to Japan," a Toho spokesman said.

HAMILTON, New Jersey (CNN) -- A teen-age boy who won a nationwide contest to interview a rap group on MTV, but instead went through a "horrible" experience, has won an apology from the 24-hour music network. MTV apologized to Bradley Jenkins and agreed to redo a segment that his family claims portrays them as destitute and unhappy.

"When you look at the tape, it looks like my life is really bad and my family is really broken," said Jenkins, who was chosen to interview the hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest. "It was supposed to be a really positive experience for me and it turned out to be really horrible."

The network boiled down 20 hours of film into a 12-minute segment that showed a down-and-out family and a teen lifted from despair by the group's positive message. Bradley's father, Walter Jenkins, said he and his wife were so upset by the segment that they missed several days of work. They also said worried relatives from as far away as Oklahoma started calling the family to ask if anything was wrong.

For the record, Bradley plays varsity football, baseball and basketball at Steinert High School, and is a member of Future Business Leaders of America. His grades are in the A and B range, and he sometimes performs as an actor in Princeton's McCarter Theatre.

Angelou

LOS ANGELES (CNN) -- Poet Maya Angelou says the film she directed, "Down In the Delta," rubbed some people working on the project the wrong way. The film was written by white southerner Myron Goble. "One of the actors said to me, 'I don't like this white boy because he doesn't know our culture,'" Angelou, who is black, told the Los Angeles Times for a story published Sunday. "I said, 'Don't worry about it -- I know our culture.'"

Angelou said she worked so well with Georgia-born Goble that she wants him to write her next film, an adaptation of James Baldwin's play "The Amen Corner." Angelou has directed short features and documentaries for TV, but this is her first time at the helm of a big-screen film. "Down in the Delta," due out on December 25, stars Alfre Woodard as a Chicago mother who rediscovers her roots in the South.

Reuters Limited contributed to this report.