If you were crossing your fingers and toes for a Goodfellas/Casino reunion between Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi on Pileggi’s latest film Scarpa, I have bad news: Brad Furman (The Lincoln Lawyer) just got put at the helm of the upcoming mob movie.
Not that Scorsese was ever really in the running for the film – he’s been kind of busy lately – but it would have been fun to see what he did with the story of mob enforcer Gregory Scarpa, a man affectionately known as the Grim Reaper. Furman is a good addition, though; The Lincoln Lawyer helped along with the revamping of Matthew McConaughey’s career, so it will be interesting to see what the director does with Pileggi’s script.
Scarpa will tell the story of the titular enforcer for the Colombo crime family – a man so nasty that his own daughter compared living with him to living with a serial killer. He eventually became an informant for the FBI, but not before killing at least 50 people in the line of duty, as it were. He was eventually indicted on multiple murder counts and died in prison.
The lead in Scarpa belongs to Sylvester Stallone, who’s obviously sick and tired of playing versions of himself in The Expendables franchise and almost every other movie he’s made in the past ten years. He’ll be taking on a part that means he has to act like a cold-blooded psychopath with a penchant for murdering people, so this will be an interesting one. The film is being produced by Irwin Winkler, the man behind the Rocky films in addition to holding a producing credit on Goodfellas and The Wolf of Wall Street; so this really is all connected, in a slightly roundabout way.
Cameras will start rolling on Scarpa before the start of next year, if everything goes to plan, so stay tuned for more info.