Frank Sinatra's life was nothing if not epic, so it's perhaps fitting that Martin Scorsese's attempt to bring the story of ol' blue eyes to the big screen is also turning into something of a saga. Besides Al Pacino, George Clooney and Leonard DiCaprio are also under consideration. 

Frank Sinatra's life was nothing if not epic, so it's perhaps fitting that Martin Scorsese's attempt to bring the story of ol' blue eyes to the big screen is also turning into something of a saga. The Oscar-winning film-maker admitted in March that he was struggling to coalesce the great Italian American icon's life into a coherent screenplay but, according to reports, he has at least settled on his first choice to play the lead in his elder years: Al Pacino. Moreover, Robert De Niro would play Sinatra's fellow Rat Packer, Dean Martin.
In an interview with Indian daily newspaper The Hindu, the director said he had "yet to spot" the actor who might bring back Sinatra alive on screen, but added: "My choice is Al Pacino, and Robert De Niro as Dean Martin."
In March, Scorsese told shortlist.com that he was still working on the screenplay for his film, but had decided that it should focus on several periods of his subject's life, suggesting that Sinatra might be played by more than one actor.
He said: "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."
The biopic has been the subject of rampant speculation in the press, with a New York Post report in August last year suggesting that Scorsese was at odds with Sinatra's daughter, who is signed on the project as an executive producer. Tina Sinatra was said to favour a sanitised retelling of her father's life, with George Clooney in the lead, while Scorsese reportedly planned a warts and all version with regular collaborator Leonardo DiCaprio as Sinatra.
A source reportedly told the newspaper: "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."
Sinatra's alleged mob links would presumably be at the centre of a fuller take on the singer's life. The FBI kept him under surveillance for almost five decades due to supposed contact with mafia figures such as Carlo Gambino, Sam Giancana and Lucky Luciano, as well as his friendship with John F Kennedy. Many suspected that Sinatra, who died in 1998, was the inspiration for the character Johnny Fontane in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, a singer who complains to Marlon Brando's ageing patriarch, Don Vito Corleone, that a Hollywood producer is holding back his budding movie career. In one of the film's most famous scenes, the unfortunate producer later wakes up with a horse's head on the pillow next to him.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/may/
25/scorsese-pacino-as-sinatra
 
 

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