Tommy Ramone, the last of the original members of the influential rock band The Ramones, died this summer. His death seems only to have added fuel to a Ramones revival that had started burning a few years back. Now there’s a report that Martin Scorsese is getting on The Ramones revival train–he’ll direct a movie about the band aimed at a 2016 release. It’s not a documentary either, but a dramatized version of the band’s story. The Ramones are sort of the quintessential New York band for a lot of people, and Scorsese is a New Yorker through and through, despite the Hollywood addresses.
An aficionado of psychos and gangsters (and sometimes both at once) Martin Scorsese also knows music and concert films. He made The Last Waltz, which is considered the seminal modern concert movie–and he’s done the Stones, too. Maybe it’s because rock stars–like gangsters and Mean Streets misfits–fit perfectly with what interests the Oscar-winning director. Scorsese likes outsiders and freaks, the angry and the dispossessed, as well as the powerful and cutthroat. (Mick Jagger is alternately all of these things, of course.) The Ramones and Scorsese suit each other’s styles.
