Between them, best buds Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese have announced a total of 1,738,456 projects, both individual and joint plans, since they last worked together on The Departed. None of those have actually started shooting yet, which means that you should avoid getting too excited by today's news of another potential collaboration, on The Wolf of Wall Street.
The film is based on an as-yet-to-be-published tell-all autobiography by Jordan Belfort, a Long Island penny stock broker who served 20 months in prison for refusing to cooperate with a massive securities fraud case involving corruption on Wall Street and in the corporate world, as well as mob infiltration, back in the 1990s.
The film would, like The Departed, be a two-hander between Belfort's character and the FBI agent who tries to recruit him as an informant (no word on which DiCaprio would play, although we'd rather like to see him as the FBI guy for a change). The Sopranos' Terence Winter is already attached to adapt the book, due out in September, into script form.
Instant reaction? Has potential. The two-hander thing will have to be carefully done so we don't end up with either a Departed clone or a Catch Me If You Can wannabe, but the combination of big business corruption and the Mob would seem tailor-made for the environmentally-conscious DiCaprio and the director of Goodfellas.
It was certainly the combination of these two that helped Paramount, Scorsese's Sikelia Productions and DiCaprio's Appian Way production company win a small bidding war for the book, but that doesn't mean that either is signed on yet. After all, DiCaprio is just gearing up for a stroll down Revolutionary Road with Kate Winslet (insert 'sinking ship' joke here) and Sam Mendes.
No one knows yet what Scorsese's planning, although given that his name is attached to (at a conservative estimate) 79% of the films currently being developed in Hollywood (and 13% of Bollywood films as well, probably) it's probably fair to say that he's not short of work to occupy an idle moment.