‘THE CONSPIRACY’: FROM THE MAFIA . . . TO THE VATICAN

Imagine that the newly elected president of one of the world’s largest corporations is about to announce wholesale changes in company policy, unaware that those changes will affect profitable relationships with both the international banking underworld and the Mafia.

Imagine that the night before he makes his big move, an assassin slips him an undetectable potion that prompts a fatal heart attack, and that after a new boss is elected, it’s business as usual.

Imagine that all this really happened in 1978, just this way, except that the chief executive was Pope John Paul I, and that corporate headquarters was the Vatican.

Now, try to imagine someone wanting to turn this hot potato into a movie.

“This is not an anti-church film,” insists producer Richard Martin, who sends “The Conspiracy” into production next month in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia. “We don’t go into religion or philosophy. It’s just a good dramatic story.”

“What do we think of taking someone’s death and exploiting it commercially?” asks screenwriter-executive producer Bill Bairn, anticipating a question. “That’s difficult to answer up front. I think it’s a story that deserves telling, but I guess the best defense is the people who are doing it.”

It is a good list.

Michael Anderson, an Oscar nominee for “Around the World in 80 Days,” will direct a cast that includes Paul Scofield, as John Paul, Robert Mitchum as a corrupt Vatican archbishop and Christopher Walken, as the investigative journalist who, in unraveling the financial scandal, becomes embroiled in the assassination plot.

Bairn, who also has eight years invested in a script about a Sicilian underworld leader, says the reporter is the only fictional character in “The Conspiracy,” created as a dramatic thread to weave the documented elements together. All others are based on real people and will use the real names.

Martin and Bairn say their year’s research in Italy turned up fresh evidence supporting earlier theories (five

books have been written on the subject, the most recent “In God’s Name”) that the charismatic John Paul, after only 34 days in the papacy, was murdered.

“The circumstantial evidence is so strong that it’s hard not to take it seriously,” Martin says.

The detail behind the conspiracy theory is a snarl of dollar signs and death certificates, of complicated events that theorists say link the Vatican bank with large-scale counterfeiting schemes, with American-based organized crime and with

the killings of one key witness and of two police investigators.

Bairn says John Paul provided motives for his murder with his plans to liberalize the Catholic church, and to revamp the Vatican bank. The most likely suspects, he says, were the corrupt Vatican officials the Pope was going to officially oust the next day, their Mafia partners, and P2, a powerful right-wing extremist group determined to prevent changes in church policy.

“The Conspiracy” will apparently advance the theory that all three were involved.

Martin says he was discouraged from trying to shoot the film in Italy (“I was advised . . . that it would be a little dangerous,” he says), but found entire areas of Dubrovnik built in the same architectural style of the Vatican.

Cheaper labor costs, and a co-production deal made with Yugoslavia’s Inex Films, are reducing the original $12-million budget to $8.1 million, Martin says.

Production designer Herbert Westbrook (“A Passage to India”) will be responsible for turning Dubrovnik into Rome. Jack Cardiff (“Rambo”) is the cinematographer.

“The Conspiracy” is the first of three films that Martin’s Cinema Arts Corp. plans to produce with money put up by a group of 80 investors, most of them doctors and lawyers.

Martin, a former documentary film maker, says he is negotiating for distribution rights on “The Conspiracy,” which will be ready for release as early as next spring.

Around Easter.

MARKET MOVE: The growing American Film Market is moving up on the calendar, and out of its hotel next year.

The ’86 market, the sixth since the independent film companies organized to sell their products to international buyers in the United States, will be held in February instead of March, to put more time between itself and other markets held in May (Cannes) and October (Milan).

The changes were announced at a Thursday press conference at the Hyatt on Sunset hotel, which is losing the American Film Market to the more spacious Beverly Hilton.

Other announcements: Norman Katz has been named chairman of the board of the American Film Market Assn.; Jonas Rosenfield, former vice president and executive director, assumes the paying position of president; Tim Kittleson, in addition to continuing as director of the market, will serve as executive director of the market association.

IMPERFECT TIMING: Rolling Stone has egg on its cover this week.

The weekly magazine’s “Summer Double Issue” cover uses a photograph of John Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis, stars of the summer movie dud “Perfect,” to promote its two lead stories--Neal Karlen’s profile of Curtis and a cheerful batch of “Perfect” diary notes written by Travolta himself.

Rolling Stone has chased its own tail with “Perfect.” The magazine ran the Aaron Latham health-club story that was eventually adapted--by Latham--into a screenplay about a Rolling Stone reporter getting his health-club story. The magazine was prominently featured in the movie, and its editor and publisher Jann Wenner agreed to play himself (under a different name).

Now, three weeks into its disappointing release, “Perfect” gets the kind of push from Rolling Stone that most magazines might have given it a month ago. Are they throwing out a life jacket?

“We wanted it in the summer issue,” says a spokesperson for Wenner, explaining that the special issue’s earlier deadlines would have prevented pulling the story, even if the editors had wanted to. “It was a risk.”

Wenner must find it easy reading anyway. Travolta’s story, which includes the breathless revelations that the Rolling Stone office has no macrame wall hangings, has this to say about Wenner’s screen test for “Perfect”: “When I saw the screen test, it was one of the best I’d ever seen. . . . I’ve never seen a beast like this on celluloid before.”