Super-producer Scott Rudin to inject new life in Martin Scorsese’s Sinatra biopic?

In case you thought SINATRA, Martin Scorsese’s biopic of the famed crooner, was nothing more than a pipe dream, you may have to think again.

According to Deadline, Hollywood titan Scott Rudin (Oscar nominated for both THE SOCIAL NETWORK and TRUE GRIT) has joined Mandalay’s Peter Guber and Cathy Schulman as a producer behind Scorsese’s gestating project in an effort to kickstart the film’s development. And believe it when I say that Rudin is a man in the business of making movies, not seeing them languish in development hell. He’s currently behind David Fincher’s THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, Sacha Baron Cohen’s THE DICTATOR, and the Paul Greengrass-directed Martin Luther King Jr. assassination drama MEMPHIS.

Scorsese has already wrapped filming on HUGO CABRET and will next be turning his attention to SILENCE, a passion project the director’s been keen on making for about a decade now. That one’s pretty much locked as his next, but what project will the legendary filmmaker be taking on after that?

Deadline says that THE WOLF OF WALL STREET with Leonardo DiCaprio would most likely follow, but Scorsese’s OG cohort Robert De Niro tells MTV otherwise: “I think there’s one other movie he’s going to do called Silence, it’s a movie he’s always been wanting to do, and he just finished Hugo Cabret, and then we’ll do our film.” That film, of course, is THE IRISHMAN, the project most people want to see because it involves gangsters as well as the first collaboration between Scorsese and De Niro since 1995’s CASINO. It’s assumed that SINATRA would likely follow this film.

Now, what can we possibly expect from SINATRA? Scorsese said the following in an interview last year with ShortList.com:

“…in structure I’d like it to be more like GoodFellas. But like The Aviator, it only deals with certain times in his life. We can’t go through the greatest hits of Sinatra’s life. We tried this already. Just can’t do it. So the other way to go is to have three or four different Sinatras. Younger. Older. Middle-aged. Very old. You cut back and forth in time – and you do it through the music. See what I’m saying? So that’s what we’re trying for. It’s very tricky.”

Shortly after that interview, Marty made mention that he envisioned Al Pacino as Frank and Bobby D. as Dean Martin. Now there’s a collaboration I’m itching to see.