With “Silence” finally seeing the light of day on the big screen in about a month’s time, it’s worth remembering the film is not the only project Martin Scorsese has been developing for years. In the background for quite some time, the filmmaker has been keeping an eye on “Sinatra,” a biopic about Ol’ Blue Eyes. Early on, Phil Alden Robinson (“Field Of Dreams,” “Sneakers“) had penned a draft of the script, and Scorsese had named Al Pacino as his choice to play Sinatra in his older years, with Robert De Niro as Dean Martin. Producer Scott Rudin joined the project a half decade ago, the director said a year later he was considering 3D for the film, and then new writers were being looked at to get the screenplay together. Well, after all the work, it appears “Sinatra” is dead.
Speaking with Vulture, author and screenwriter Michael Chabon revealed that he was working on the musical biopic, but alas, it’s no more.
“I was working on a Frank Sinatra project for a while, and I read Tina Sinatra’s memoir of her father [‘My Father’s Daughter‘]. She called him ‘Daddy.’ It would’ve been so cool. Scorsese was going to direct it, and I wrote the script,” he said.
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As for what happened, Chabon said simply, “The usual.”
Considering we hadn’t heard much about the movie in a while, it’s perhaps not a big shock that everyone has quietly moved on. For Scorsese, his next gig is slated to be “The Irishman” (another lost gestating movie), while Chabon has a show in the works at Netflix.
“We have an eight-episode limited series that we are trying to set up at Netflix, and we finished a pilot. It’s in their lap right now, so we’re waiting to hear what its fate is going to be,” he said. “This is a true-crime, nonfiction piece, which you might have read on ProPublica or heard on ‘This American Life,’ about the woman who was raped in Seattle and then was disbelieved and forced to recant publicly, and then was eventually redeemed when detectives elsewhere popped the guy and figured out he had actually raped her as well. So we’re adapting that.”
Sounds like a provocative project, and one that would easily fit the streaming service’s growing slate of true crime documentaries. Listen to the “This American Life” episode “Anatomy Of Doubt” below.
