Martin Scorsese makes The Long Play

Even without that shiny golden statuette sitting pretty on his mantelpiece (oh, how long we’ve waited to write that!) Martin Scorsese has just been hoovering up the projects.

And he’s at it again, adding another title to his groaning pile of in-development work: rock ‘n’ roll pic The Long Play, which Paramount has just snapped up in script form.

Writer William Monaghan, who also nabbed a golden baldie for The Departed on Oscar night, will re-write the script. It’s been bubbling for a while at Disney, ever since Rolling Stone Mick Jagger first brought in the concept as a producer.

The Long Play will be a sprawling epic that follows two friends through 40 years in the music industry, spanning from the earliest years of R&B to today’s hip hop. Music journo Rich Cohen wrote the first couple of drafts, but neither he nor replacement scriptwriter Matthew Weiss quite cracked it. And Disney also decided it wasn’t quite the family material they were looking for.

Paramount jumped on the idea when Scorsese indicated that he might be interested in directing the film after Jagger brought him the script during shooting of Scorsese’s Stones documentary. Monaghan’s apparently shoving this to the front of his “To Write” list, which means that any Departed sequel or prequel will have to wait even longer than we thought. And it might even push Long Play to the top of Scorsese’s list also.