By Sarah Sluis
Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro plan to team up for the gangster flick I Heard You Paint Houses. In
mob parlance, a "house painter" is someone who carries out mob hits, splattering the walls with blood and "painting" them. Thanks to Amazon's "Search inside this book," you can read the first few pages. Written in the first person, the style has the roguish bravado of a Scorsese narration voiced by De Niro. If I were Steve Zaillian, who will pen the screenplay, I would lift straight from the book.
Former prosecutor Charles Brandt wrote the book based on the tape-recorded confessions of Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran, who claimed to have killed Jimmy Hoffa, the mobster/teamster who disappeared shortly after being pardoned by President Nixon (go figure). It's ripe material, if familiar, but in the hands of Scorsese I cannot think of a better project. If he holds true to the source material, we will have a cocky, glamorized gangster in the style of Goodfellas and Casino, not The Departed.
Scorsese has over eleven development credits in IMDB right now, so I cannot say I expect to see this film soon (please do your Teddy Roosevelt movie next, you can beat Spielberg and his Abraham Lincoln film!), but I will be eagerly anticipating the shimmery gunpowder and stylistic swagger that characterizes a Scorsese gangster film.
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