Martin Scorsese is in direct competition with Steven Spielberg to be the Guy From the 70s Who Has the Most Projects Percolating At Any One Time. But where Spielberg flirts with and then eventually spurns most of these projects, Marty has been just accumulating them.
The latest is The Wolf of Wall Street, an autobiography by Jordan Belfort, some dickcheese stockbroker* who spent 20 months in prison rather than cooperate in a huge 90s security fraud case. The case revealed massive corruption on Wall Street (shocking!) and corporate banking (what the heck?! How could these people be bad? They just need deregulation) that involved the mob (Italians involved in big crime? Nostalgic!).
Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way company will co-produce the film at Warner Bros, and Marty’s favorite leading man would play Belfort. The adaptation of the autobiography, which is coming out in September, will be written by Terence Winter, a Sopranos writer who is also partially to blame for 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’. Variety reports that The Wolf of Wall Street is similar to DiCaprio’s Spielberg movie, Catch Me If You Can, as the story focuses on the relationship between Belfort and the FBI agent who was trying to turn him into a snitch.
Scorsese should decide what order in which to work on his many projects soon. If I had my guess, I would say that his next film will be Silence, about Jesuit missionaries in Japan. But after that it’s a toss up. Could it be Wolf? Could it be the prequel/sequel to The Departed? Could it be the rock n’ roll epic The Long Play? Could it be The Invention of Hugo Cabret? Or could it be the adaptation Last Duel: A True Story of Crime? Here’s my advice – if you have a script, get it in front of Scorsese. Maybe he’ll just jump right on it.
*While I hate them, these guys rival only Hollywood producers in their ability to acquire truly amazing coke.