Here’s some late breaking news today: Martin Scorsese is set to direct a biopic about Frank Sinatra, which is being scripted by Phil Alden Robinson (Field of Dreams). That’s about all that’s known so far, as the project is in early stages. Apparently Scorsese, whose past biopics include The Aviator (Howard Hughes) and Raging Bull (Jake La Motta), has been quietly developing this one for a few years and just recently secured both the life and the music rights.

Now it’s up to us bloggers to fill in the rest with speculation about what it will be called, what it will include and, most importantly, who will play the lead. Most writers are guessing that Leonardo DiCaprio will land the part, but I’m hoping Scorsese concentrates on the later years so that Dennis Hopper can reprise his portrayal from the Australian film The Night We Called It a Day. After all, isn’t it about time Scorsese directed Hopper? They were both in the Scorsese-produced Search and Destroy, but that’s just not enough. At least let Hopper play the old Sinatra after DiCaprio (or Robert Pattinson) plays the young version. And obviously Kate Beckinsale gets to reprise her role as Ava Gardner from The Aviator, right?

Also: if the title is anything other than The Chairman of the Board, I’m not going to see it. So what if it’s too close to a movie starring Carrot Top? It’s time to take the name back for Ol’ Blue Eyes!

Okay, let’s see what the rest of the net is saying about this exciting project:
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I’ll never forget the first time I heard the Sinatra standard “My Way”, while sitting in the balcony of an art house in Denver, chain-smoking Benson & Hedges ultra-light menthols, staring nearly hypnotized by the sight of sexy Gary Oldman transforming himself into the swaggering embodiment of punk rock, tearing through both cover song and screen. Sid and Nancy (along with Howard Deutch’s Pretty In Pink which also came out in 1986, and Martha Coolidge’s 1983 Valley Girl) was nothing less than a revelation to this teenager with Aqua-netted hair, Doc Martins and ripped fishnets, because it actually portrayed “my people,” spoke to me in my own musical language.

And my feeling of identification probably was not unlike that experienced by a certain segment of the movie-going public 31 years before Alex Cox paid tribute to the junkie romance of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, who witnessed another tale of fucked-up love, possible homicide, and enduring heroin chic. Heartthrob Frank Sinatra would not sing “My Way” in Otto Preminger’s groundbreaking 1955 The Man With The Golden Arm, but he would play the fictional Frankie Machine, another lean and hungry musician of dubious talent weighed down by both a needy blonde and a monkey on his back.

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There are a number of obvious reasons why the Film Society might choose to show Some Came Running at Wednesday night’s Frankly Celebrating: A Sinatra Salute, their tribute to Frank Sinatra’s career in Hollywood. Vincente Minnelli’s teeming CinemaScope melodrama turns 50 this year, and even if it wasn’t the best of Sinatra’s films (and in my mind, it is), Minnelli’s tendency towards stylistic overstatement provides the perfect contrapuntal showcase for his star’s non-actor naturalism. It also opens up multiple points of conversation, from the rise of the Rat Pack to Sinatra’s own complicated identity as a man’s man who got his start singing love songs to swooning girls.

But maybe most significantly, this story of a man torn between two selves and two classes, between striving for the mature manhood that would comfit his artistic aspirations and slumming in a permanent adolescence of bar brawls and disposable broads, also represents the beginning of the end of Sinatra’s own flirtations with acting artistry, his patience with the concept of cinema as art. In his Who The Hell’s In It chapter on Sinatra, Peter Bogdanovich notes that the star “has rarely been as focused or committed” as he is in Running, and in fact, with the exception of The Manchurian Candidate, Sinatra never seems so invested in actual acting ever again. A clear line can be drawn from the making of Running to what Tom Santopietro, in his just-released Sinatra in Hollywood, refers to as “the start of personality acting as opposed to acting on film as a craft.” Sinatra’s “personality acting,” his general lack of interest in using a film role as much beyond an extender of Frank Sinatra The Brand, would hit its peak with the Rat Pack movies, which ironically celebrate the capricious self-interest and casual misogyny that Some Came Running would seem to function as an object lesson against.

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It hasn’t been terribly uncommon since the late ’60s for musicians to get behind the camera, whether for a straight concert film, a tour documentary or some kind of silly narrative focused on themselves and their bands. Jerry Garcia co-directed The Grateful Dead, Frank Zappa co-directed 200 Motels, The Beatles collectively co-directed The Magical Mystery Tour and separately John, Paul and Ringo has each taken the helm on a film project, some more artsy (John and Yoko’s cinematic collaborations, like Up Your Legs Forever) or less self-focused (Ringo’s Marc Bolan doc, Born to Boogie) than others.

Now it’s a little more common for musicians to become directors of fictional films that aren’t so reflexive. Many don’t even have anything to do with music at all. And many are so awful that it’s safe to say the filmmaker should stick to music making. This week, IFC releases the directorial debut of Madonna (Filth and Wisdom), and Beastie Boy Adam Yauch has a new basketball documentary (Gunnin’ for That #1 Spot) hitting stores, so we’d like to celebrate by looking at some other musicians who turned filmmaker, for better or worse.

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I’m heading out a bit early for the weekend (yes, the Week in Review is on its way), but before I go I want to give a shout out to some of TCM’s Summer Under the Stars programming coming up this weekend. Across Saturday and Sunday, they’re saluting the two greatest male musical stars of all time, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. I’m a sucker for certain of the Astaire/Rogers films (primarily Swing Time, and probably mostly because I think there’s something interesting about the fact that Fred is essentially a gambling cad who spends the entire movie flirting with Ginger but won’t seal the deal because he has a frumpy fiancee at home), but I’m really more into Gene Kelly.

Among the films screening on Sunday that I’d recommend: the Best Picture winning An American in Paris, directed by Vincente Minnelli and scored to Gershwin; It’s Always Fair Weather, which is essentially the Mad Men of mid-century musicals; and Take Me Out to the Ball Game, the last film Busby Berkeley directed without choreographing. Ball Game is more of a curiosity than anything else; rumor has it, Berkeley was too far in the bottle at that point in his career to really take control, and Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s credits for choreography.

The numbers aren’t “good”, exactly, but intriguingly off. Like the one above, where Kelly and Frank Sinatra sing a song where they tell a number of increasingly unlikely brags about making out with girls on the road and then never calling them. The chorus: thanks to Sinatra leading leading her on and leaving the next day, they sing triumphantly, “the sweetest gal at Vassar’s in the cold, cold ground.” Later, Kelly sings about how he “had to go” when he learned that one paramour was “just 11.” Of course, the cads eventually get their comeupance when they meet Esther Williams and Betty Garrett, but the movie’s a little more interesting in these WTF? moments.

• They’re not a trade, but they’ve got the biopic casting news everyone’s talking about: MTV reports that Anna Faris has won the starring role in a film about Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace. The last time I wrote about this project was in March 2005; at that time, Courtney Love was set to star.
• Brad Pitt will replace Matt Damon in The Fighter, a drama about an Irish lightweight boxing champion. Damon, according to Variety, “had too many projects on his dance card to make the film on the schedule Par[amount] wanted.”
• Brett Ratner is going to make a movie about Frank Sinatra’s long-suffering valet, and guess which Rush Hour veteran is set to star? It’s going to be based on a book by William Stadiem, who says of Ratner, “I think he’s channeling Frank sometimes.”
• Magnolia’s recently-announced genre label has made two new acquisitions, both starring martial arts star Marko Zaror: Kiltro and Mirageman.