The Year of the Rat (Pack)

“Which Way to the Rat Pack?” is the name of a new dinner show at the Casino Royale in Las Vegas, but the title would work just as well in deconstructing the buzz surrounding two movies in the works about the merry band of superstars that included Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop and Peter Lawford.

Both Warner Bros. and HBO Pictures, the two film companies with Rat Pack movies in the works, aren’t commenting on the record on their projects. But there has been plenty of buzz about them in Hollywood already:

HBO’s Rat Pack film, set to go into production early this year, will feature Ray Liotta as Sinatra, with Kario Salem, who wrote HBO’s recent “Don King,” doing the screenplay and Rob Cohen, who wrote and directed “Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story,” directing.

The Warner Bros. film, meanwhile, will reportedly be based in part on Nick Tosches’ 1992 Dean Martin biography, “Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams.” The high-powered team of screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi and director Martin Scorsese, who previously teamed on the films “GoodFellas” and “Casino,” are heading the project.

Warner Bros. won’t comment on casting, but Pileggi, who declined to be interviewed, recently mused to Variety columnist Army Archerd that his A-list Rat Pack cast would include Tom Hanks as Martin, John Travolta as Sinatra, Hugh Grant as Lawford, Adam Sandler as Bishop and Jim Carrey as Jerry Lewis.

Beyond all the speculation about casting, however, other weightier questions remain: How do you do a film about the Rat Pack without lapsing into caricature? Of what cultural use is a film about the Rat Pack, beyond the spectacle of today’s movie stars playing legends of yesterday? Is accuracy important? If it is, who owns the memory of a group whose legacy lives on in tales that often lean toward the apocryphal?

“Everybody who was there has a different story about what went down,” sighs Paul Brownstein, the producer of “The Rat Pack Captured,” a forgotten 1965 closed-circuit broadcast of Sinatra, Davis and Martin performing at a Sinatra-organized benefit in St. Louis for Dismas House, a halfway house for ex-convicts. The video was shown at the Museum of Television & Radio in Beverly Hills last spring as part of a special exhibit and is now part of its permanent archive. Liotta, prepping for his role as Sinatra, spent some time at the museum recently.

At least one surviving Rat Pack member, comedian Bishop, 79, doesn’t hold out high hopes for the films.

“There is nothing they can put on film that would capture the Rat Pack,” Bishop says flatly.

“Playing me is easy--you just give [the actor] three or four clever lines. But I just don’t know how as an actor you can capture the attitude of a Dean Martin.”

To Bishop, credited with writing much of the material for the group’s legendary shows at the Sands Hotel in Vegas, the Rat Pack was all about spontaneity and having fun--a-one-time-only brotherhood of stars who in the late 1950s and early ‘60s made films together (“Oceans Eleven” in 1960 and “Sergeants 3” in 1962), made the Sands a second home, and embodied the essence of cool at the height of a martini-soaked era in show business.

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At the heart of the group was Sinatra, an event unto himself; swirling around him were Martin, Bishop, Davis and Lawford. Shirley MacLaine and Jerry Lewis were also on the scene at various times.

Onstage, the group affected a boozy camaraderie--alternately singing and wisecracking, always exuding the self-assuredness that came with their stardom.

The close-knit relationship of these megastars is precisely what made the Rat Pack so singular, says Brownstein; done right, a film could provide a valuable cultural reference point for generations to come.

“When Frank, Dean and Sammy were on a stage, you had the top three performers in the world together. We just don’t have stars like that today, who command that kind of attention simply for performing. You can get the attention by getting arrested or going to jail, or going into the hospital, but not for performing.”

Indeed, a Rat Pack wouldn’t be possible in today’s era of micro-managed celebrities and Rose Bowl-sized concert spectaculars, says George Schlatter, the veteran director-producer and longtime friend of Sinatra.

“Today, I don’t think an agent or manager or lawyer would let three megastars get that close just because they were having a good time,” says Schlatter, who produced several Sinatra birthday specials. “It was much more laid-back then. They became such a part of the folklore of Vegas. Here you had three guys who were not only great singers, but they could act, they could dance, they could make you laugh. I mean, between shows, Dean and Frank would go into the casino and deal. It was just a magical time.”

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Mort Viner, Martin’s longtime agent and intimate, says the Rat Pack will play only an episodic role in the Scorsese film, which will cover everything from Martin’s Steubenville, Ohio, roots to his teaming with Lewis to his hosting his variety show for NBC in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

“People I guess are confused,” Viner says of comparisons to the HBO Pictures project. “They think anything that’s about Dean Martin is going to be about the Rat Pack. But this [film] is about Dean Martin on his own, as a single performer. Scorsese’s a fan. He’s genuinely appreciative of Dean and his work.”

The two films come amid a resurgence in interest not only in the Rat Pack but in the style of their era.

Four books on Sinatra published last year, including Bill Zehme’s “The Way You Wear Your Hat: Frank Sinatra and the Lost Art of Living,” have added to the Rat Pack pantheon. In addition, Patricia Lawford-Stewart, Lawford’s widow and President Kennedy’s sister, is working with an English producer on a documentary about her late husband.

Last year’s low-budget film “Swingers,” a surprise success at the box office, worked in part because the film humorously aped a look and attitude that has roots in the Rat Pack era.

In Las Vegas, meanwhile, in the shadows of the since-demolished Sands, a comic named Steve Caito last summer debuted his dinner show “Which Way to the Rat Pack?” at the small Casino Royale.

Caito says the show, which features song, dance and comedy in “the spirit of the old Rat Pack days,” has just been given a year’s extension. While insisting the show is not about impersonations, the stage does feature Rat Pack memorabilia bought at auction, including the telephone from Sinatra’s room at the Sands, Caito says.

But to Schlatter, playing Sinatra or any of his Rat Pack compatriots in a film or on a stage is a daunting proposition.

“They had the same problem casting ‘Jesus Christ Superstar,’ ” he says. “Except he never played Vegas.”