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Mick Jagger is a rock god, and with the help of Martin Scorsese he may become a film legend too. PHOTO: AFP

US director Martin Scorsese, newly minted with a long-awaited Oscar for The Departed, will team up with Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger to make a rock film, industry press reported this week.

Scorsese will develop with screenwriter William Monahan, who won the best adapted screenplay Oscar Sunday for The Departed, a film titled The Long Play, which Jagger will finance through his film production firm, Variety reported.

The Long Play follows the lives of two friends in the rock world from the 1960s until today, said the film industry publication, which often gets exclusives from major studios.

Scorsese and Jagger have worked together before as the filmmaker recently directed a Rolling Stones documentary after doing the same with folk rock legend Bob Dylan in 2005.

After being snubbed on five previous occasions, Scorsese finally won the best director Oscar Sunday for the Boston mafia thriller The Departed, which also snatched the best picture and best film editing Academy Awards.

In other moviemaking news, US filmmaker J.J. Abrams, the creator of hit TV series Lost and Alias, has been picked to direct the 11th installment of the Star Trek film franchise, Paramount Pictures announced this week.

Abrams, who directed the action flick Mission: Impossible III starring Tom Cruise, will start filming the latest Star Trek adventure in the third quarter of this year. The sci-fi film is due out in late next years, the studio said.

Down Under, Australia's porn industry began a court challenge to the country's film ratings yesterday in a test case that family groups said could lead to explicit sex movies being sold openly in shops and petrol stations.

Pornographic movies can only be sold legally in two Australian territories, including the capital Canberra, and generated an estimated A$500 million (US$393 million) last year, mainly through mail orders.

While it is legal to own or watch sexually-explicit movies at home anywhere in Australia, sales are banned in the country's six states.

Australia's censors rate films from G, which are open to anyone, to R for violent or disturbing films suitable only for adults, and X for sexually-explicit films with heavily restricted distribution.

Now pornography company AdultShop.com Limited has asked the Federal Court to overturn the X category used by censors, arguing community tastes had changed since standards were drafted in 1984.

"The Office of Film and Literature Classification is required to take into account current community standards in relation to explicit erotic films," AdultShop Chief Executive Officer Malcolm Day said.

AdultShop operates 28 retail stores throughout Australia and New Zealand and is valued at around A$9 million. The company sold A$42 million worth of adult products last year.

Day denied the court action was aimed at boosting business, although he described the company's current worth as "dismal", blaming state restrictions.

Meanwhile, BitTorrent Inc, makers of a technology often used to trade pirated copies of Hollywood movies, as well as pornography, is launching a Web site that will sell downloads of films and TV shows licensed from the studios.

The BitTorrent Entertainment Network was set to launch Monday with films from Warner Bros, Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Lionsgate and episodes of TV shows such as 24 and Punk'd. The service is squarely aimed at young men and boys who regularly use BitTorrent to trade pirated versions of the same films.

The San Francisco-based company is betting that at least one-third of the 135 million people who have downloaded the BitTorrent software will be willing to pay for high-quality legitimate content rather than take their chances with pirated fare.

"The vast majority of our audience just loves digital content,'' Ashwin Navin, president and co-founder of BitTorrent, said. "Now we have to program for that audience ... that makes the studios money.''
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