Martin Scorsese is back on to reunite with Leonardo DiCaprio for a fifth time, and will collaborate on the drama The Wolf of Wall Street. A little over a year ago, we reported that the two were set to make the film and have it be Scorsese's follow up to Hugo, but Scorsese dropped off the project in May.  Now Deadline reports that Scorsese is back on board, and shooting is set to begin in August in New York. The story is based on "Jordan Belfort's memoir of his days as a hard partying, drug addicted stockbroker who was indicted in 1998 for security fraud and money laundering and served a 22-month federal prison stretch." Boardwalk Empire creator Terrence Winter wrote the script, and he'll polish it up before the movie goes into production.
Hit the jump for more.
Obviously, the story hits the zeitgeist of Wall Street's continued cultured of excess, and how it has continued unchecked. I eagerly await comments from morons who decry that Scorsese and DiCaprio are rich and therefore hypocrites because rich people can't criticize other rich people for being rich. This argument misses the point, which is that there's nothing wrong with being rich; there's something wrong with getting rich by swindling others and reveling in such behavior.
Scorsese's move to The Wolf of Wall Street continues to make Silence the red-headed step-child of the Oscar-winning director's slate. Silence, which is about the persecution of Jesuit priests in 17th century Japan, has long been on the director's wish list of movies, and in December we reported that it looked like the project was finally a go. But for whatever reason—possibly financing, casting, and/or needing more time to work on the screenplay, just to name a few—Silence has been once again been pushed to the back-burner.
Here's the synopsis for Jordan Belfort's The Wolf of Wall Street:
By day he made thousands of dollars a minute. By night he spent it as fast as he could, on drugs, sex, and international globe-trotting. From the binge that sank a 170-foot motor yacht, crashed a Gulfstream jet, and ran up a $700,000 hotel tab, to the wife and kids who waited for him at home, and the fast-talking, hard-partying young stockbrokers who called him king and did his bidding, here, in his own inimitable words, is the story of the ill-fated genius they called…
In the 1990s Jordan Belfort, former kingpin of the notorious investment firm Stratton Oakmont, became one of the most infamous names in American finance: a brilliant, conniving stock-chopper who led his merry mob on a wild ride out of the canyons of Wall Street and into a massive office on Long Island. Now, in this astounding and hilarious tell-all autobiography, Belfort narrates a story of greed, power, and excess no one could invent.
Reputedly the prototype for the film Boiler Room, Stratton Oakmont turned microcap investing into a wickedly lucrative game as Belfort’s hyped-up, coked-out brokers browbeat clients into stock buys that were guaranteed to earn obscene profits–for the house. But an insatiable appetite for debauchery, questionable tactics, and a fateful partnership with a breakout shoe designer named Steve Madden would land Belfort on both sides of the law and into a harrowing darkness all his own.
From the stormy relationship Belfort shared with his model-wife as they ran a madcap household that included two young children, a full-time staff of twenty-two, a pair of bodyguards, and hidden cameras everywhere—even as the SEC and FBI zeroed in on them—to the unbridled hedonism of his office life, here is the extraordinary story of an ordinary guy who went from hustling Italian ices at sixteen to making hundreds of millions. Until it all came crashing down…