It’s been a long time since Martin Scorsese did anything approaching a biopic (that’s not counting his music documentaries, and the less I have to think about how much he really directed/is directing those, the happier I’ll be as a fan of the man). By my count it’s been since Kundun [a number of helpful readers have reminded me that his last biopic was actually The Aviator. D’oh]; before that it was Raging Bull. If Tina Sinatra is to be believed, Marty is interested again in a life story, this time of a blue eyed kid singer from Hoboken: Frank Sinatra.
Tina, who produced The Manchurian Candidate remake and the TV mini-series Sinatra, tells Sun Media that while the contracts are not yet signed, Scorsese has always wanted to tell her dad’s story. But she insists that this version won’t be all about This Thing of Ours. “He never drove the getaway car,” she said, referring to the fact that while her dad did chum around with murderers and criminals, he wasn’t in business with them. “I don’t want him to be driving the getaway car. That
would not be fair. But I trust him [Scorsese] implicitly.”
A lesson Tina Sinatra may soon learn is that Scorsese is like his contemporary Spielberg in one major way: he draws projects to himself, and then never makes them. Besides documentaries about George Harrison and Bob Marley, Scorsese also has a Teddy Roosevelt biopic on his slate, an adaptation of the novel Silence and surely three other things (all with Leonardo DiCaprio) that I’m not remembering.
I do have my fingers crossed that this comes to pass. Scorsese has been ignoring us Italian Americans since Goodfellas, instead making movies about white people. And getting Marty back into another lush period piece – one that I bet would be nicely funded, by the way – is always a dream.