ALL TRI-STAR RUMORS LEAD TO SAGANSKY

Rumors in Hollywood often take on a life of their own, but this week’s fact--or fiction--downright refused to die.

Despite vehement denials, Tri-Star Chairman Victor Kaufman was said by numerous sources to have decided on a previously unheralded NBC programming executive, Jeff Sagansky, as Tri-Star’s new production chief.

Kaufman is scheduled to return to his New York base today after a week of interviewing candidates for the production job. He insists that he will make no decision until he reaches New York and is said to have made the same declaration privately within the studio.

Sagansky said Thursday that there was “no offer” from Tri-Star, adding that reports to the contrary were causing “extreme anxiety to the people I’m in business with here.” But he declined to comment on whether he was discussing the position with Tri-Star.

Sagansky, a 32-year-old senior vice president of series programming, is regarded within the television community as a bright, articulate and affable executive. But he is virtually unknown in film circles--the most popular line on the studio circuit this week was that “someone-ski” from NBC was headed to Tri-Star--and has comparatively few of the creative relationships considered vital to running a studio.

Actually, the open job at Tri-Star is something less than running a studio. Film making at the year-old studio was previously guided by President Gary Hendler, who resigned last month. Kaufman subsequently announced that rather than hire a new president, he would appoint a production chief who would report directly to New York and operate on a par with marketing and distribution chief David Matalon.

That definition, coupled with Tri-Star’s history of production woes under Hendler, took the sizzle out of the job for some potential candidates. Among the rumored targets of Tri-Star’s affection were producers Brian Grazer (“Splash”) and Aaron Russo (“Teachers”), International Creative Management agent James Wiatt, Warner Bros. executives Mark Rosenberg and Mark Canton, 20th Century Fox’s Larry Mark and Universal Pictures’ Sean Daniel.

FACT, NOT RUMOR: Jack Brodsky, 20th Century Fox’s chief of advertising, publicity and promotion, is resigning to co-produce “Jewel of the Nile,” the sequel to “Romancing the Stone.” Brodsky’s exit could set the stage for broad changes in the Fox marketing division of the sort recently witnessed in the company’s production ranks.

Embassy Pictures executive vice president David Weitzner, an oft-rumored candidate to head Fox’s marketing arm, remains under contract at Embassy until October. Fox said that Brodsky’s successor would be named “shortly.”

ACADEMY FLAP: The mailing of Oscar nomination ballots Saturday will raise eyebrows over at least one entry: Stevie Wonder’s mega-hit “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” a best-song competitor from “The Woman in Red.”

Oscar rules state that best-song nominees must be written specifically for the nominated film. Wonder, in a question-and-answer interview about his work on the film, told the New York Daily News: “I wrote ‘I Just Called’ seven years ago.”

The executive committee of the Oscar music branch considered the issue and asked Wonder for a formal response. He replied through Motown Records attorney Johanan Vigoda that while the music may have been conceived some time ago, the full song and lyrics arose only when he got a look at the film. Vigoda explained in a phone interview that the images (which were described to the blind singer) provided the “impetus to take a thought and make it a concrete song.”

Wonder’s reply put an end to the issue as far as the music branch is concerned. Committee chairman Arthur Hamilton acknowledged that the question of when a song comes into being “is a difficult area and one in which the academy tries to be as compassionate as possible.”

The ruling hasn’t pleased all of Wonder’s potential competitors in the unusually crowded best-song category, which includes the hit theme songs to “Purple Rain,” “Ghostbusters” and “Footloose.” “The academy is setting a terrible precedent for people to take anything out of their trunk and say they wrote it for a movie,” grumbled one interested party.

The rival songwriters themselves are more understanding. “If a song in the back of someone’s head comes to fruition for a movie, then bravo,” said “Footloose” author Dean Pitchford. “Just writing a song is hard enough.”

TUFF TURF TOOTSIE: As alert cineastes may have noticed, the name of “Tuff Turf” screenwriter Jette Rinck sounds suspiciously like James Dean’s “Giant” character, Jet Rinck.

Rinck, it turns out, is the legally adopted name of one Ina May, a Northern California writer who found it difficult to open doors in Hollywood with her slightly Southern and very feminine-sounding name.

“A friend told me that it’s all in the name, and you can’t let them know you’re a woman,” she recalls.

May chose Rinck--her mother had always teased her about being a female James Dean--and placed it on a recently rejected screenplay. She resubmitted the script to the same film company and quickly had her first sale.

“Tuff Turf,” about a rich New York kid transplanted to the mean streets of Los Angeles, is Rinck’s first produced script. The New World cheapie was written in 3 1/2 weeks and filmed in four, says Rinck, who regards the resulting film as something of a miracle. Shooting unfortunately coincided with the Olympics, when city filming was prohibited, which explains why the turf in the title is represented on screen by distinctly unseedy Reseda.

The former Ina May, meanwhile, has completed a “Capra-esque” musical called “The Magic Man” for Walt Disney Pictures and reports that Jette Rinck’s career is flourishing.