By Sarah Sluis
Marty, meet Ol' Blue Eyes. Today, Universal announced that Martin Scorsese will helm a biopic of Frank Sinatra. Phil Alden Robinson, best known for writing and directing Field of Dreams, will pen the script. It took Universal and Mandalay over two years just to get the life and music rights to Sinatra's work, so one hopes the project will move quickly now that they're done with the legalities. Already, people are asking who will play Sinatra. Leonardo DiCaprio seems like the front runner, given his working relationship with Scorsese and slight build, but I've also seen Johnny Depp and Ewan McGregor being thrown around as possibilities.
The best part about this project is how naturally Frank Sinatra's life fits in with Scorsese's interests as a director. There's the mob and crime connections, which Scorsese's explored in Goodfellas, The Departed, and Casino. Sinatra spent a lot of time in New York (he was born in Hoboken, NJ), which Scorsese loves as a subject (Gangs of New York, The Age of Innocence, New York, New York, After Hours, Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, to name a few, all make New York an unswappable part of the story), Then there's Las Vegas, which Scorsese profiled in Casino. Sinatra spent years singing there and the filming of the original Ocean's 11 in the city is cited as the time the perennially hung-over group of performers became the "Rat Pack."
Music features prominently in Scorsese's films. He's never done a biopic of a musician, but he's helmed documentaries of the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and he's in post-production on a documentary on George Harrison. His soundtracks always have thoughtfully placed songs, which have inspired directors like Wes Anderson to make their musical choices even more prominent and front-and-center.
Of course, the capper to all this is the superb work he's done on his "one man" biopics. Raging Bull is one of the best films ever made, and The Aviator had the difficult task of portraying the enigmatic life of Howard Hughes, then showing him interact with starlets who were famous in another right, like Katharine Hepburn and Ava Gardner. He's incredibly detail-oriented when it comes to historical portrayals, even reflecting them stylistically: The Aviator matched its color processing with the Technicolor technology at the time, switching from two-strip to three-strip as the characters progressed through time.
As a final-cut director (according to Variety), Scorsese should be able to include the less savory parts of Sinatra's life, even with the presence of daughter Nancy Sinatra as an executive producer. Wikipedia, for example, turns up evidence that Sinatra might have had ties to the mob, struggled with mental issues and was possibly bipolar, and had a tumultuous, love-hate relationship with Ava Gardner, which apparently began while he was still married to his first wife. These biographical details, in my mind, aren't damaging, but signs of humanity. Scorsese has always been attracted to morally ambiguous characters, but he gives them souls, making us understand the struggles and thought processes of mobsters, worn-out boxers, and psychopathic taxi drivers. There's no question in my mind that he will be able to do similar justice to Frank Sinatra.
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