LOS ANGELES – Although Dean Martin’s daughter hangs on to hopes that her biography about her father will be made into a movie, director Martin Scorsese, who was helming the project, says as far as he’s concerned the project is dead.

“We really tried, but the story of Dean Martin is very difficult, very difficult,” Scorsese tells Zap2it.com.

“It’s because ultimately he pulls back in life,” the director says about Martin, who was part of the Rat Pack along with Frank Sinatra, Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis Jr. and others in the 1950s. “He pulled back and seemed to be passive, and that was part of what was appreciated about him from Sinatra and everyone else.”

“Frank Sinatra would see someone in a bar that had written something about him that he didn’t like and Dean would say, ‘Leave him alone. Don’t give him the satisfaction. Let it be.’ No, he was going to get up and hit him,” Scorsese says. “It’s an interesting dynamic. But can you make a film and say what the man is about? I don’t think that you can ever make a fiction or even a documentary.”

At one point, Scorsese says he had convinced Tom Hanks to play the part of the Rat Pack ringleader who caroused and partied in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

Scorsese, who has a passion for Hollywood history, says he worked on a script with Irwin Winkler and Paul Schrader about Martin’s life during his swinging “Ocean’s Eleven” days. Ultimately, he gave up.

“Look, we really couldn’t get a handle on what to do. I actually thought the strongest story there, beyond the Rat Pack thing, before that was his relationship with Jerry Lewis, his creative relationship and how that worked out,” Scorsese explains. “That’s really the story I think and it’s the story of creative collaboration whether you’re writers or painters or composers, musicians, filmmakers, comedians. This is it, it’s like a marriage. This is the story of two people and how they worked together over the years.”

Meanwhile, Deana Martin, who penned “Memories Are Made of This: Dean Martin Through His Daughter’s Eye,” says she hopes the “Gangs of New York” director will revive the Dino project. She’s nixed the idea of George Clooney playing Martin, but thinks Johnny Depp could pull it off.



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