A tug of war, with Scorsese as rope

Apparently, winning an Academy Award and scoring your biggest box office hit in four decades of filmmaking with the year’s best picture doesn’t buy you any smoother a ride in Hollywood. Right now, with Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. scrabbling over a suitable co-production arrangement, director Martin Scorsese’s next potential project, “The Wolf of Wall Street,” remains stuck in its cage.

On paper, the movie looks like a great investment: Scorsese once again directing his “Aviator” and “Departed” star Leonardo DiCaprio in an adaptation of the just-published cash-coke-and-corruption memoir “The Wolf of Wall Street” adapted by Emmy-winning “Sopranos” writer-producer Terence Winter. The hitch is that it’s set up not at Paramount, where Scorsese has his directing deal, but at Warner Bros., the studio that released “The Departed.”

“Wall Street,” released last week by Bantam Books, is the autobiography of New York stockbroker Jordan Belfort, a flashy, drug-abusing, hooker-hiring, model-marrying master of the universe sent to jail for securities fraud and money laundering in the ‘90s. It’s a juicy part for DiCaprio, and he and Scorsese are looking to make this their next movie, ideally completing production before any potential talent strike next summer.

But the film’s immediate future remains iffy.

In late March, right after Scorsese finally won his directing Oscar, Warner Bros. and DiCaprio’s Appian Way production shingle beat out Paramount and Brad Pitt’s Plan B in a brief bidding war for the Scorsese-DiCaprio-Winter “Wall Street” package. But in November 2006, as “The Departed” was shooting its way past the $100-million mark for Warner Bros., Scorsese signed a four-year, first-look directing-producing deal with Paramount.

The hook, similar to arrangements Steven Spielberg has made with DreamWorks, was that if Scorsese were to make a film at a competing studio, Paramount had the option to own half of it and co-distribute. The director has personal and professional ties at both studios, so Scorsese and Co. have been trying to massage a preemptive deal between them before the film’s likely greenlight.

But Scorsese may be sending mixed signals by having taken the Paramount deal (which reportedly is enormous) while Warner Bros. was in the midst of its “Departed” Oscar campaign and then turning around to push for his follow-up to be back at Warner Bros.

Warner Bros. and Paramount have other high-profile co-productions, such as “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “Beowulf,” which typically entail Paramount taking domestic distribution and Warner Bros. taking international. But thus far on “Wall Street,” Warner Bros. has offered financial halfsies but no co-distribution, which Paramount has rejected.

Technically, Paramount’s option isn’t triggered until Scorsese’s contracts are signed at Warner Bros. and the film is a go, but in the context of an impending strike, nailing the arrangement down as quickly as possible behooves all parties.

As it is, Scorsese has four other features in development at Paramount, which is also releasing his Rolling Stones documentary, “Shine a Light,” sometime next year. And Warner Bros. has two other potential Scorsese projects, so there’s plenty of the beatific Italian genius to go around. (And Scorsese, apparently finding himself under-committed, last week announced that he’s also going to make a documentary about George Harrison over the next couple of years.)

The smart money’s on everyone eventually deciding that they want to be in the Scorsese business even if it means sharing more than they’d like. If they don’t, and this “Wolf” is released back into the wild, there’s bound to be some howling.

Now playing the role as pitchman

In its 21st year, Ken Rotcop’s twice-annual Pitchmart lands again Saturday at the Smoke House restaurant across from the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank. Like similar events at UCLA and USC, Pitchmart is designed to put aspiring screenwriters face to face with those in the industry -- agents, managers, executives, producers -- who can actually get them money for their creative efforts.

In their resourceful ambition, a few hopefuls from Rotcop’s development workshops have recently beta-tested an innovative new tactic: pitching by proxy. During the April event, a Canadian writer hired an L.A. actress to pitch her idea and a New York City director hired a local actor to pitch hit for him.

This is an impulse most working screenwriters can appreciate, since many find the selling/performance aspects of the job less enjoyable than a colonoscopy. As such, the very idea fires the imagination with scenes of A-list screenwriters hiring actor peers to pitch their original ideas.

For instance, why not send Woody Allen in to pitch your romantic comedy? “In her, her androphobic mania she, uh, pushes him from the moving car, which he, of course, interprets as some great cosmic defenestration. The whole crazy situation, um, it’s -- it’s like that old joke about the Polish psychiatrist ordering lunch meats from the syphilitic shiksa. . . . “

Or Arnold Schwarzenegger to sell your action script: “Listen to vhat I’m telling you: It’s truly fantastic! It’s full of guns, explosions, decapitations and things of this nature. . . . “

The idea sells itself.

Cable shows add gay characters

For television writers, cable isn’t just the loosely supervised playroom off the main network building where you can go to experiment with drugs, sex and violence. It has also become a more inclusive place for gays on-air.

The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation released its 12th annual “Where We Are on TV” study last week, and although the number of portrayals of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people on scripted network series waned for a third straight year, the report found that on mainstream cable networks, the number of LGBT people went from 35 characters last year to 57 this year, including 40 regulars.

From the peak 2005-06 season, when “Will & Grace” helped the total regular LGBT characters on the networks reach 12, this season has declined to just seven featured characters on five broadcast networks. With recurring LGBT characters on “Ugly Betty,” “Brothers & Sisters” and “Desperate Housewives,” ABC is by far the most progressive. (The study looked at diversity as well and, at least for the moment, television seems to reflect the larger political backdrop in that blacks and gays appear to have gotten a slight reprieve at the expense of the newly shunned and demonized Latino community.)

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Scriptland is a weekly feature on the work and professional lives of screenwriters. Please e-mail any tips or comments to fernandez_jay@hotmail.com.