FIRST OFF . . .

The flap over director Martin Scorsese’s “Last Temptation of Christ” has involved evangelicals, film executives, newspaper publishers and film festival organizers. Now noted Italian film director Franco Zeffirelli has stepped into the fray. Zeffirelli said Tuesday he is removing his latest work, “The Young Toscanini” starring C. Thomas Howell and Elizabeth Taylor, from the Venice Film Festival because officials there have announced they will show Scorsese’s film, too. Calling his American colleague’s film “truly horrible and completely deranged,” Zeffirelli said he had “no intention whatsoever to get mixed up in the scandals, controversies and protests that will mark the next Venice film festival.” (The festival runs Aug. 28-Sept. 9.) Zeffirelli further prophesied that the “Last Temptation” flap in Venice will cost festival director Guglielmo Biraghi--who remains intent on showing the Scorsese film--his job. (“Toscanini” star Taylor, incidentally, is being treated for a back ailment at Santa Monica’s St. John’s Hospital. She is in good condition with a compression fracture of a vertebra, a hospital spokesman said Tuesday.)