When news broke on 13.05.09 that Martin Scorsese, a master statesman of biopics with Raging Bull being the best ever (who wants to argue that?) and The Last Temptation of Christ (yes a biopic of Christ) and The Aviator being stellar efforts, was to undertake a re-telling of the glorious life of Frank Sinatra there was only one actor we all expected to end up with the gig. Leonardo DiCaprio, naturally. He has been Scorsese's 21st century muse and has worked with the actor on four movies straight and just like a by-gone era when everybody expected Robert De Niro to star in the new Scorsese movie, everyone now-a-days expects DiCaprio to follow Marty. And I dare say even Scorsese thought so himself when he first became interested in the project. However Universal, the studio that has acquired Field of Dreams screenwriter Phil Alden Robinson's scriptfor the appropriately titled Sinatra forScorsese to direct are said to be keen on someone else and Scorsese may be easy to sway their way given the caliber of the actor. Nikki Finke say after being so impressed by his period performance as notorious gangster John Dillinger in Public Enemies (released 01.07.09), the studio are hellbent onwanting Johnny Depp to fill the boots of Sinatra. Unlike Sweeny Todd, it has already been well established that this will be a non-singing role as Universal have gone to great efforts to secure the rights to Sinatra's original recordings from his estate and the Warner Music Group and it's those that are to be used. If you squint a little bit and forget who you are looking at, I guess Depp could look a little like a young Sinatra. He certainly has the depth of character to pull it off and although he wouldn't have been my first choice to play Sinatra if you had asked me this time last week, I'm beginning to see the appeal. Sinatra is the perfect Scorsese character. He had an obsessive drive, he was a showman but with a deep rooted insecurity that he sometimes let out in violent mood swings, and was a manic depressive. These are the themes that have forged the entire career of one Martin Scorsese. If the role is indeed to end up with Depp, he obviously would have to wear contacts to get that blue eyed touch. But apart from that, it's all about his performance that will count as to whether we can buy him as one of the top two music figures of the 20th century (the other being Elvis, I guess Johnny Cash would be third). Robinson's script is said to be an "unconventional one" and the 30,000 pages of Kubrick-like research he did on the project has informed his approach, said to be similiar to Todd Haynes' I'm Not There, a biopic of Bob Dylan (where different time periods are told via his artistic mood and creative output) but this time there won't be six guys playing the singer.
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"It'll be almost like a collage," Schulman said. "In the way one of his records captures different rhythms and moods, this will have collective scenes and moments that form the overall story as opposed to a conventional timeline. It's about capturing moments as opposed to trying to tell the entire story in too little time."
Another interesting factor in all this is that Scorsese will get a chance to paint a portrait of Sinatra's close pal Dean Martin, a performer who Scorsese has been developing a biopic for in the last decade with his Goodfellas and Casino scribe Nicholas Pileggi based on the Nick Tosches biography, "Dino: Livin' High in the Dirty Business of Dreams." No doubt the research from that now scrapped project will inform the part of the research here and it will be interesting to see how big a role Scorsese, clearly a Martin fan, devotes to him for Sinatra. Depp for Sinatra... why not?
