Martin Scorsese gathers gangsters: De Niro, Pesci and Pacino

They may all be getting on in years, but who wouldn’t want another mobster movie with stars from GOODFELLAS and THE GODFATHER movies?

Filmmaker Martin Scorsese spreads his interests around, but always seems to gravitate back to getting his gangster on (see HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” for evidence). Now he and frequent collaborator Robert De Niro want to bring the families together for THE IRISHMAN, a mob drama based on Charles Brandt’s book “I Heard You Paint Houses,” and Deadline says that Al Pacino and Joe Pesci want to join in.

The book blurb: “I heard you paint houses” are the first words Jimmy Hoffa ever spoke to Frank “the Irishman” Sheeran. To paint a house is to kill a man. The paint is the blood that splatters on the walls and floors. In the course of nearly five years of recorded interviews Frank Sheeran confessed to Charles Brandt that he handled more than twenty-five hits for the mob, and for his friend Hoffa. Sheeran learned to kill in the U.S. Army, where he saw an astonishing 411 days of active combat duty in Italy during World War II. After returning home he became a hustler and hit man, working for legendary crime boss Russell Bufalino. Eventually he would rise to a position of such prominence that in a RICO suit then-U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani would name him as one of only two non-Italians on a list of 26 top mob figures. When Bufalino ordered Sheeran to kill Hoffa, he did the deed, knowing that if he had refused he would have been killed himself.

De Niro has been talking about the project for a while, including the possibility of making two movies. But we’ve been waiting for the Scorsese/De Niro duo to reunite for years — their previous attempt at a mob-themed crime thriller, FRANKIE MACHINE, never got to the starting line. We’ll see if they can get there this time.