A look inside Hollywood and the movies. : DEALS : The Play Continues to Be the Thing

Plans are under way for playwright Jon Robin Baitz’s celebrated New York stage hit “The Substance of Fire” to become a movie produced by Sydney Pollack and his company, Mirage Enterprises. The play, currently running at New York’s Lincoln Center and scheduled to play at the Mark Taper Forum next season, will be directed by “Europa Europa” director Agnieszka Holland, according to Mirage President Lindsay Doran. Pollack will serve as executive producer of the film, and Baitz will write the screenplay.

And although Pollack’s company is headquartered at Universal, Doran says “The Substance of Fire” won’t necessarily be set up at that studio. “This was offered to us by Robbie,” she says, “and when projects are a gift, we have to get them set up. It could be at Universal or it could be somewhere else. We have to make the movie in a specialized way, and that may be for a studio and it may not.”

Doran admits that “The Substance of Fire,” the story of a bitter publisher’s struggle to maintain the literary integrity of his rapidly failing company, will take some special handling to work as a movie. “It’s a difficult adaptation,” she says, “but not an impossible one. It’s about things that are interesting, and the characters are so wonderful, that done the right way it will make a good film.”

And while it’s very common these days to replace a play’s original star with a big box-office name for the filmed version, Doran insists that won’t be the case with “The Substance of Fire,” which will star Ron Rifkin, who created the role of the publisher. (It was rumored at one time that Dustin Hoffman was interested in the role.) “Robbie has tremendous loyalty to him and that’s the way he wants to make the movie,” she says. “We have to make the movie that way. Agnieszka understood that from the beginning.”

As for when the film will go into production, Doran says a lot of it has to do with the schedules of Holland and Baitz. Holland is currently directing the film version of the novel “The Secret Garden” for Warner Bros. Baitz had a second play, “The End of the Day,” open at New York’s Playwrights Horizon recently and is involved with several other projects, including the screenplay adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s “Up at the Villa” for director Michael Hoffman (“Soapdish”) and New Regency Pictures and an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’ “Dodsworth,” which was made into a 1936 film for Warner Bros.