The five greatest Martin Scorsese movies that never happened
Martin Scorsese has made some great movies and masterpieces, from Taxi Driver and The Age of Innocence to Goodfellas and Raging Bull, showing a knack for nuanced character studies bursting with life, and his exquisite attention to detail makes these worlds feel utterly immersive.
But he can’t make every idea that comes into his mind, which is why he has a large collection of unrealised projects sitting in a notebook somewhere, sadly never making it past the early stages of production, if they even got that far.
From biopics to, less interesting, movies about the construction of a long railroad, Scorsese hasn’t ever had a shortage of ideas to work from. There’s no way that he would ever be able to make every movie he has ever shown interest in directing; there are just too many!
With that being said, this list will primarily ignore the greatest potential Scorsese projects that were then made by someone else, like The Doors, Scarface, Little Shop of Horrors, and The Godfather Part II. All of these could’ve had Scorsese at the helm, but they still turned out to be successful in their own right, so there’s no point dwelling on what might’ve been if he’d directed them instead.
Rather, here are five ideas that sounded like they could’ve been great Scorsese movies, but for reasons mainly out of the director’s control, they just weren’t meant to be.
Five greatest Martin Scorsese movies that never happened:
‘Furious Love’
Movies about the iconic love story between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton are hard to come by, unless you’re interested in watching a made-for-TV movie starring Lindsay Lohan. Back in 2011, just two years before the release of another made-for-TV movie about the couple, this time starring Helena Bonham-Carter and Dominic West, Scorsese expressed interest in adapting Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger’s book about the pair, Furious Love.
Paramount Pictures was in charge of the production, and while it didn’t get as far as casting anyone, the movie did have Scorsese attached as the director. For some mysterious reason, it never came to be, which is a shame, because Taylor and Burton’s story deserves so much more than just a made-for-TV movie; they were true Hollywood icons, after all.
‘Dirty Boulevard’
In Lou Reed’s song ‘Dirty Blvd’, from the 1989 album New York, the singer uses his rich storytelling skills to paint a picture of his beloved city, one filled with plenty of decay. “Pedro lives out of the Wilshire Hotel / He looks out a window without glass / And the walls are made of cardboard, newspapers on his feet / And his father beats him because he’s too tired to beg,” he sings as the song opens.
This rich narrative pulled Scorsese, who was interested in making a movie called Dirty Boulevard, influenced by Reed’s ideas within the song, but it never came to fruition. Scorsese has long made great New York movies, to the point where it’s the first place we think of when the director comes to mind, and this could’ve been a really fantastic original story. Ultimately, it didn’t work out, with screenwriter Reinaldo Povod penning a script before sadly passing away shortly after.
‘The Long Play’
Scorsese has always fared well with music-themed projects, having found himself deeply connected to blues and rock and roll as a young boy. He has used the music of The Rolling Stones rather frequently in his work, as well as directing their 2008 concert film Shine a Light, but in 2007, he planned to helm a project that Mick Jagger had conjured up called The Long Play, which was set to be a decades-spanning journey through a friendship heavily influenced by the changing musical landscape, with William Monahan even hired to write.
It seemed like The Long Play was heading somewhere, but in the end, the state of the industry amid the financial crisis during the late 2000s proved unsuitable. Instead, the pair developed their ideas into the TV show Vinyl, which aired on HBO in 2016, but an epic musical drama condensed into the length of a Scorsese film surely would’ve been something spectacular. While Vinyl was a well-received show, it sounds like The Long Play had the potential to become something so much bigger.
‘LaBrava’
Elmore Leonard is responsible for writing many stories that went on to become great movies, like 3:10 to Yuma, Get Shorty, and Jackie Brown, but there was a time when his novel LaBrava almost got the silver screen treatment, too. Dustin Hoffman was set to star in the lead (after much deliberation), with Scorsese agreeing to direct, yet the film struggled to find a studio to support it, and in the end, it was accepted by an indie company called Cannon Films.
Scorsese wasn’t keen on the idea of working for a company he’d never worked with before, let alone heard of, so he backed out of the project. It failed to come to life, even with other directors subsequently attached to direct it, like Hal Ashby. But Leonard’s novel about blackmail, old Hollywood infatuations, and photography, all explored through the character of Joe LaBrava, a former secret service agent, sounded right up Scorsese’s street.
‘The Old Blue Eyes’
For a while, Scorsese was working on an idea for a movie centred around Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, but he struggled to settle on an angle he was truly happy with. As a result, the idea morphed into a biopic about Sinatra, but still, Scorsese couldn’t find a way to do the story justice. Various actors were attached to the project, like Tom Hanks, Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, and John Travolta, but nothing was working behind the scenes.
The Old Blue Eyes was recently said to be going back into development, with DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence in the lead, but yet again, the movie has failed to come to light. Perhaps one day the filmmaker will finally get his act together and make an epic biopic about the singer, because if anyone can do it justice, it’s surely Scorsese. Who else could give the movie the scope and detail it would deserve?
