by Nick Marini, social media manager
Martin Scorsese is largely responsible for my love of movies. “The Departed” got the ball rolling for me back in 2006. It was a movie that showed me what they could really do for an audience, and I’ve never looked at them the same since. If anyone were to ask me, about three days out of the week my favorite movie is “Taxi Driver.” Every time he publicly announces a forthcoming project my anticipation boils over. We’re still coming off of the high from “The Wolf of Wall Street” and he has heavy screen time in the new Roger Ebert biopic “Life Itself,” but it appears that’s just the tip of the iceberg for old Marty’s slate of projects. Let’s take a look at what else he has coming up.
– A Frank Sinatra biopic. We’ve heard about this in the past, but he told Swide.com just a few months ago that the “project is still going strong.” It has bounced around a few writers and everyone from Johnny Depp and George Clooney to Leo have been mentioned in the portrayal of Ol’ Blue Eyes. If you know anything about the life of Frank Sinatra, you have to be excited for this. The man was, apart from the musical icon, a drunken mob-tied mystery of bad-ass machismo, which are all trademark elements for almost every Scorsese picture. Plus, Scorsese has more than enough experience covering the greatest musicians of the 20th century. Count works on The Band (“The Last Waltz”), The Rolling Stones (“Shine A Light”), Bob Dylan (“No Direction Home”), an expansive history of blues music (“Scorsese Presents: The Blues”), George Harrison (“Living In A Material World”) and Elvis Presley (“Elvis On Tour”). One of the greatest directors of all time covers some of the greatest music of all time (classicalists, let me have this one…) yet again. No word on a release date.
– The aforementioned music documentaries leads me to our next installment of forthcoming Scorsese work: a semi-documentary cable TV series chronicling the cocaine-fueled escapades of 1970s rock stars. Mick Jagger is working with him on this, and apparently so are Ray Romano and Olivia Wilde, among others. Hopefully the pilot will air some time this year. Let all of that sink in. Reread those music doc credentials if you have to. This all makes sense, considering the often-overwhelming use of rock music in a majority of his movies.
– It’s like picking presents from under the tree. Next up, staying in the vein of cable presentations: a made-for-HBO biopic about the one and only Bill Clinton. According to the Huffington Post, Martin Scorsese may make a fictional biopic on BILL CLINTON, who himself could offer insight into his time as our 42nd president. This is possibly the least concrete work on the list, but it’s been in talks for a few years now. Don’t lose hope yet.
– That’s not all. “The Irishman” has been noted as recently as this year in The New York Post to be well on it’s way. This, another mobster picture and like “Goodfellas” based on a novel (which was based on a true story), will star De Niro as a non-Italian working under the legendary Jimmy Hoffa (played by Al Pacino), and Joe Pesci as the family don Russell Buffalino. Sounds like he might be getting the old gang back together to do another mobster movie.
– He’s busy for an old man. Additionally, he’s set to start filming “The Silence” in Taiwan in just a few months, according to The Wrap. It follows the story of two 17th-century Jesuit priests attempting to travel through Japan to spread their faith. Along the way, they hit some unexpected violence against them because of that religion. Violence and religion; neither are new themes for Scorsese.
Apart from all of this he’s billed as an “executive producer” for a number of other upcoming films, domestic and foreign, along with occasionally directing “Boardwalk Empire” episodes. Now, don’t get me wrong, “executive producer” can mean anything and everything from creative instruction to only funding or managing a film, or even simply sticking his name on there for marketing reasons. We may never know but the latter is probably most likely for this type of thing. Either way when they come I’m sure you’ll hear about them. I hope everything I mentioned actually gets made, but it looks more than likely to happen as more news surfaces. Until then, I’m excited to watch how Scorsese will prolong his already monumental influence on the medium.
Photo Courtesy of Alex Oliveira, Creative Commons
