and Nicolas Schaller
Martin Scorsese had conceived The Eternal City as an epic of ancient Rome. The surviving color storyboards show scenes teeming with Romans in robes, all to be shot in sprawling CinemaScope. The tableau shots evoke majestic classical compositions, plus a bath scene reminiscent of the one in Spartacus. Marlon Brando and Richard Burton were considered to star. In the end, Scorsese did not secure the necessary funding to make the film—probably because he drew up The Eternal City as an 11-year-old asthmatic in Little Italy.
Paging through the new encyclopedic companion to his work, Martin Scorsese: All the Films, it’s possible to get misty-eyed about the irrepressible Scorsese, seemingly born with movies in his blood. Few living directors can rival this passionate, prolific, and bewilderingly sincere New Yorker as a hero for American cinema and—as the child of an immigrant community—for America generally. The range of his work is vast, spanning the sacred (The Last Temptation of Christ), the profane (Taxi Driver, The Wolf of Wall Street), the mobsters (Goodfellas, The Departed), and all the love (The Age of Innocence), pain (Killers of the Flower Moon), and strangeness (After Hours) in between.
