Cineasts everywhere will be disappointed by the latest news from Martin Scorsese, surely the world’s greatest living director. Not only has he announced that his sure-to-be-controversial film The Life of Jesus has been postponed, but the more commercial project that he had lined up to shoot back-to-back, his long-awaited biopic of the singer and actor Frank Sinatra, may have also been put out to pasture.
Thankfully, neither picture has been delayed because of ill health on the part of Scorsese, who, at the age of 81, remains a vital figure in cinema. The Life of Jesus is said to be in active development, and Scorsese is seeking independent financing for the film, which is rumored to star his Silence collaborator Andrew Garfield in the lead role.
This is undeniably exciting news. But for many admirers of Scorsese and Sinatra alike, it is disappointing that the more obviously accessible picture that he was working on has been delayed. It was tentatively announced in April, albeit without an official release date or green light.
Nevertheless, well-sourced industry magazines suggested that Scorsese would be working with his usual collaborator Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role, and that Jennifer Lawrence would be cast as Sinatra’s former wife Ava Gardner. (Those with long memories may remember that Gardner also popped up in Scorsese’s Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator, played then by Kate Beckinsale.)
Details are sketchy, but there was no shortage of studios who wished to fund the picture. Apple, who forked out hundreds of millions of dollars for Killers of the Flower Moon, were said to be keen to remain in the Martin Scorsese business. But Sony, who have been trying to build their own stable of respected auteur directors, were also desperate to make a film that would, undoubtedly, be a major awards player if ever it was actually made.
The greatest problem that Scorsese, DiCaprio and Lawrence face is that a biopic of Ol’ Blue Eyes remains one of the major unmade projects in contemporary cinema. Since Sinatra’s death in 1998, his multi-faceted and hugely eventful life and career would seem to be catnip to filmmakers and major stars alike. He was a figure who simultaneously inspired adoration and unease, combining extraordinary talent as both a singer and actor with deeply questionable (and still opaque) links to organized crime and extremely poor treatment of the women in his life.
And then, of course, there was Sinatra’s involvement with the so-called “Rat Pack” of Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Sammy Davis Jr and others. In his lifetime, Sinatra was the acknowledged leader of the Rat Pack, and was given the flattering nickname “the Chairman of the Board”. Subsequently, this sobriquet has become rather more tarnished, not least because of the way in which it has emerged that Davis Jr was the butt of racist jokes and treated contemptuously by his famous so-called friends.
The subject matter is, of course, perfect material for Scorsese, cinema’s preeminent director of films that combine surface glamour, violence and intense examination of masculine relationships under pressure. And he has been trying to make a film about Sinatra and his circle since as far back as 1997, when he first toyed with the idea of a group biopic of the Rat Pack. That incarnation of the picture would have starred Tom Hanks as Dean Martin, who would have been the primary focus of the film, along with a supporting cast that would have included John Travolta as Sinatra and Hugh Grant as the hapless Englishman Peter Lawford. Yet in part because he had just made the Vegas-set Casino, Scorsese let that incarnation of the project fall into abeyance, and it seemed like yet another promising project that had fallen into development hell.
The first serious revival of the picture – now solely focused around Sinatra – came in 2009, when it was announced that Scorsese would direct a picture based on a screenplay by Phil Alden Robinson, creator of Field of Dreams and Sneakers. He apparently secured a coup in recruiting Sinatra’s daughter Tina to be executive producer of the film, which would, theoretically, have allowed him access to Sinatra’s music and image, but there were issues involved from the outset. She favored George Clooney being cast as Sinatra, whereas even back then, Scorsese was keenest on DiCaprio. (Bizarrely, in retrospect, the studio were said to want to cast Johnny Depp in the role.)
He was a figure who simultaneously inspired adoration and unease.
This might have been surmountable, but there was also a tussle for the soul of the project. As one insider put it to the New York Post, “Marty wants it to be hard-hitting and showcase the violent, sexually-charged, hard-drinking Frank, but Tina wants to show the softer side of her dad and let the focus be on the music.” The insider went on to point out, helpfully, that “The 60s were a very swinging time for Frank – he was having sex with a garden variety of bimbos and cementing his Rat Pack status. It’s a really key time to his mythology. And Tina really wants to make sure that a sanitized Frank comes through, and that it’s not overly negative.”
Certainly, Sinatra’s life was one riddled with sleaze and vice. He spent his entire career fighting accusations of everything from cowardice (he did not serve in the Second World War, leading to rumors that he had bribed his way out of service) to mafia links; it was unfortunate, as regards the latter, that he should be photographed in 1947 with his arm round the mobster ‘Lucky’ Luciano’s shoulders, and none other than J Edgar Hoover would say of Sinatra that he possessed “a hoodlum complex”. He may not have been a criminal himself, but he very much enjoyed the company of men who were.
Likewise, the idea of Sinatra as the great romantic is one that has taken its own punitive beating over the years. It is believed that the current film’s screenplay was based, wholly or in part, on James Kaplan’s 2015 biography Sinatra: The Chairman, and that biography unpicked much of the mythos behind its subject. Kaplan wrote that “[It was] best for a woman’s mental health was either to reject him or to understand that any serious relationship with him was a membership in a kind of harem.”
Kaplan continued: “In return, she could expect everything except intimacy: respect, attentiveness, travel, visits to historic recording sessions, lavish gifts, romance, good sex, and always that absolutely electrifying moment at a nightclub or recording session or in a casino showroom when he turned his startling blue eyes toward her and sang to her and her alone.” Yet his rampant womanizing could never conceal his inner loneliness, which lasted throughout his life and career, and made him a fascinatingly contradictory figure.
A sanitized version of Freddie Mercury’s life story in the smash hit Bohemian Rhapsody did not hurt its commercial chances, and so it is tempting to see how Sinatra’s daughter might be tempted to protect her father’s legacy for both personal and financial reasons. However, this ran counter to Scorsese’s intentions. He told the Toronto Sun, “Certain things are very difficult for a family, and I totally understand. But, if they expect me to be doing it, they can’t hold back certain things. The problem is that the man was so complex. Everybody is so complex – but Sinatra in particular.”
His vision of the film gradually crystallized. It would be called, simply, Sinatra, and it would draw on Scorsese’s previous filmography for its inspiration. As he said, “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.”
J. Edgar Hoover would say of Sinatra that he possessed “a hoodlum complex.”
Of course, as Scorsese’s use of CGI to de-age Robert de Niro and Al Pacino in The Irishman proved, it would theoretically be possible to cast DiCaprio, or whoever his preferred star ended up being, and use him throughout, but this would also run the risk of gimmickry; something that The Irishman was accused of, too. He did suggest at one point that his ideal casting for the older Sinatra was his other great muse, de Niro, with Pacino as Martin, but this never came to pass, either.
There were other flurries of news over the years. Scorsese is well known as a director who takes a long time to make his passion projects: Gangs of New York, The Last Temptation of Christ and Silence all went through numerous changes of cast in their long roads to production. Somewhat incredibly, he briefly considered filming the biopic in the then-modish 3D format, but the financial failure of his children’s film Hugo cooled his enthusiasm for that particular gimmick.
Other names were mentioned in the casting, too. Sinatra’s son Frank Jr was consulted on some of these potential stars – including none other than James Marsden – in an interview. Reportedly, he offered little comment, other than wincing when Scorsese’s Departed actor Mark Wahlberg’s name was mentioned. The younger Sinatra said, “I would hope that [Wahlberg] would pass.” When asked why, replied, “Because we need an actor.”
But – if the stars do align – and the film is made, will it be worth the effort? That it will be artistically impeccable is a given; Scorsese has not made a bad film in decades, if ever, and DiCaprio and Lawrence, reuniting after Don’t Look Up, are both class acts. Instead, there are two wider issues. The first is how, exactly, Sinatra is portrayed on-screen. It would be easy to go down the full scandal-and-Mafia route and show him as a near-criminal figure, but then this runs the risk of erasing his remarkable achievements. However, if there is a cuddly Ol’ Blue Eyes on-screen – in order to appease Tina – then it would seem to be a disappointingly vapid portrayal of an American icon. It is a line that would need to be trodden with care and skill, and doubtless this has contributed to the decades the project has spent in development hell.
More worryingly, the other question is whether there is a viable audience out there for a big-budget film about a man who will mean very little to the Gen Z types who are still propping up cinemas. Scorsese’s films with DiCaprio have all been commercially successful – although Killers of the Flower Moon only received a token cinematic release before going to streaming – but a biopic of a long-dead singer, which will almost certainly be aimed at a discerning adult audience and probably have a three-hour plus running time, is not the stuff of box office stampedes.
Still, for all this, anyone who loves Sinatra, Scorsese or cinema in general will be hoping that the film’s many difficulties can eventually be ironed out and that finally Sinatra, in whatever form it takes, will be made. And if it does, it will be testament to its bloody-minded, tenacious director, whose mild-mannered exterior cannot conceal a determination to see his projects through to the end practically unmatched in contemporary Hollywood.
To adapt his subject’s signature song, whatever happens: Scorsese’s sure to do it his way.
Alexander Larman is the books editor at The Spectator World
