Fresh off their wins at the Academy Awards last night, Martin Scorsese and William Monahan have reteamed to jam on The Long Play – a movie that spans forty years of popular music history.
The movie started with Mick Jagger’s Jagged Pictures, based on an idea by the pillow-lipped street fightin’ man himself. The Long Play (for the kids in the audience, that’s LP – aka what we used to call record albums in the days before CDs. Or maybe they still call them LPs now, who knows) would follow two friends in the music industry beginning in the origins of R&B through modern hip hop. Scorsese dug the idea and they brought on Rolling Stone writer Rich Cohen to do tons and tons of research and slave over a couple of drafts… before getting a bullet in his brain, figuratively speaking.
The film was set up at Disney, but that studio has a new family friendly blockbuster only mandate, so it has jumped ship to Paramount, which has a first look deal with Scorsese.
Forget all the talk about a sequel or prequel to The Departed – The Long Play is Monahan’s next job. That probably means that it’s Scorsese’s next film after Silence, about Christian missionaries in Japan.
This is stellar news. All props to Craig Brewer, who I interviewed recently, as a guy who is great with music, but nobody beats Scorsese. The guy is the master of the needle drop, and setting him loose in the history of modern music… holy shit, just think of the three disc soundtrack.