TWO Hollywood legends, director Martin Scorsese and tough-guy actor Robert De Niro, have snagged more than $2 million from Harmony Books to write a joint memoir of their shared film history.
The untitled book, due out in fall 2005, will chronicle a cinematic friendship that began in the early 1970s with the premiere of “Mean Streets.” They’ve since gone on to make seven other movies together: “Taxi Driver” (1976); “New York, New York” (1977); “Raging Bull” (1980); “The King of Comedy” (1983); “Goodfellas” (1990); “Cape Fear” (1991); and “Casino” (1995).
“The two of them have really transformed the modern cinema and left an indelible mark – and they have this great enduring personal and professional friendship,” said Shaye Areheart, publisher of Harmony – a unit of the Crown Publishing Group at Random House Inc., which snapped up the deal with a preemptive bid earlier this week.
The book will detail the pair’s shared triumphs and professional disappointments, and describe how the two helped each other when their fathers died.
Areheart said she first heard about the project from Alan Nevins, at Beverly Hills-based management agency The Firm. “De Niro always said he would never do a memoir, but this he sparked to,” said Nevins. “It’s a little bit of a different kind of book. It’s not a tell-all. It will only talk about things they’ve done together.”
De Niro and Scorsese never knew each other until “Mean Streets,” but after they started working together they learned they had grown up within blocks of one another in the same lower Manhattan neighborhood.
Today, Areheart says, Scorsese insists that he and De Niro “can finish each others’ sentences and understand things that are not said.”
“It’s like a professional marriage, and the offspring are the movies,” Scorsese told Areheart.
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Sleepy publisher Rodale, in Emmaus, Pa., looks like it is finally getting some at-bats in the big leagues.
Rodale’s explosive Pete Rose autobiography, which had a 500,000-copy first printing, looks like it will become the company’s first No. 1 nonfiction bestseller in history. (Its bestselling “South Beach Diet” has been a No. 1, but on the How To/Advice list.)
The Rose book – “My Prison Without Bars,” written with Rick Hill – was embargoed until yesterday in bookstores.
But Alysse Minkoff, a columnist who works out of her home in Brentwood, Calif., actually managed to obtain the book and post a review to ESPN.com on Tuesday – beating the rest of the world by a full 48 hours. This jumped the gun on Sports Illustrated, which on Wednesday published an exclusive excerpt in which Rose admitted for the first time that he had bet on baseball.
Minkoff, who writes the “A Broad Perspective” column for ESPN.com, said she found a bookstore that would let her have two copies of the book on Monday. She said she stayed up all night reading it, and posted a rave review on Tuesday while she shipped the second copy to her bosses at ESPN headquarters in Bristol, Conn.
“It was a gripping read,” she said. “The characters were very vivid.”
So who sold her the book? “I’ll take that with me to the grave,” she said. “Technically, they did not sell it to me until Thursday. I gave them my credit card number and they did not bill it until it officially went on sale.”
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Meanwhile, Rodale flagship Men’s Health has just signed bestselling author and CBS communications director Gil Schwartz to pen a monthly advice column. Unlike Schwartz’s books and his back-page Fortune column, which are written under the pen name Stanley Bing, he will use his real name for Men’s Health.
“It’s a men-at-work column,” said Schwartz. “Unlike most of the readers of Men’s Health, I don’t have any abs, but they’ve told me they will supply me with some.”
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People managing editor Martha Nelson is gaining one insider but losing another. She’s just signed Zorianna Kit – a reporter for the Hollywood Reporter and a regular on the syndicated show “Access Hollywood” – to take over writing The Insider, the weekly’s view of the personalities and deals in the film industry.
“We did the deal over the holidays,” said Nelson.
Kit will replace Tom Cuneff, who is returning to the general news beat as a Los Angeles-based correspondent.
While Nelson is gaining a new Hollywood scribe, she’s also losing fashion columnist Steven Cojocaru, who has been penning the “Behind the Seams” column. He’s going to pitch a daytime talk show on the fashion world called, ironically enough, “Insider.”
Nelson said she’ll keep the column going while she searches for a permanent replacement both inside and outside the magazine.
* Please send e-mail to:kkelly@nypost.com