Billy Ray to Pen Martin Scorsese's SINATRA Film

According to Deadline.com, writer Billy Ray will pen the script for Universal Pictures' Sinatra, a film about the life of performer Frank Sinatra. The movie will be directed by Martin Scorsese and produced by Scott Rudin, Peter Guber and Cathy Schulman, Sikelia and Tina Sinatra.

Read the original report here.

Guber and Schulman gained the life and music rights from Frank Sinatra Enterprises and brought the idea to the studio with Phil Alden Robinson originally picked as writer. Sinatra began his singing career during the swing era and was eventually signed to Columbia Records in 1943. Also an actor, Sinatra won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in From Here to Eternity. His other film credits include The Man with the Golden Arm, The Manchurian Candidate and the movie-musicals High Society, Pal Joey, Guys and Dolls and On the Town.

Ray also wrote the script for The Hunger Games and is working on a remake of The Secret in Their Eyes with J.J. Abrams, The Thin Man, Pan and has just finished Captain Phillips, starring Tom Hanks. Ray began writing for TV and movies in the '90s with Color of Night. He has also scripted Volcano and Hart's War, as well as Earth 2, The Shooter, Legalese, Shattered Glass (both writer and director), Suspect Zero, Flightplan, Breach (both writer and director), State of Play and 24.

Scorsese is currently working with Leonardo DiCaprio on The Wolf Of Wall Street. He has been developing an adaptation of the novel Silence by Shusaku Endo, The Irishman with Robert De Niro and an adaptation of the book I Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt.