Martin Scorsese’s schedule has been uncertain of late. When we talked to Rodrigo Prieto in November he revealed they were supposed to be at work on a new project––not Home or Life of Jesus, which had both generated much heat in the last year, but Sinatra, a project many thought dead. Par for the course, then, if he goes back to the well. Per Deadline, Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio are looking to reunite for The Devil in the White City, an adaptation of Erik Larson’s non-fiction sensation with which they were involved some ten years ago and which is being revived at 20th Century Studios.
But for a filmmaker who stressed there’s no time left, this is a curiously soft prospect: no script yet exists, despite decade-old word that Billy Ray would be adapting. Assuming the project happens at all, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of Scorsese’s aforementioned projects moves forward first, or he just takes a producing credit while someone else (let’s say… Ridley Scott) takes the reigns. (And how that squares with desires to no longer make a “big movie” requiring many extras: your guess is as good as mine.) But word of new Scorsese is better than some nascent fears he’d see an early retirement.
Here’s a publisher-approved synopsis of the book, foretelling why Scorsese and DiCaprio have been invested in it for this long:
Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America’s rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair’s brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country’s most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his “World’s Fair Hotel” just west of the fairgrounds—a torture palace complete with dissection table, gas chamber, and 3,000-degree crematorium.
Burnham overcame tremendous obstacles and tragedies as he organized the talents of Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles McKim, Louis Sullivan, and others to transform swampy Jackson Park into the White City, while Holmes used the attraction of the great fair and his own satanic charms to lure scores of young women to their deaths. What makes the story all the more chilling is that Holmes really lived, walking the grounds of that dream city by the lake.
The Devil in the White City draws the reader into the enchantment of the Guilded Age, made all the more appealing by a supporting cast of real-life characters, including Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and others. Erik Larson’s gifts as a storyteller are magnificently displayed in this rich narrative of the master builder, the killer, and the great fair that obsessed them both.