Jennifer joins the New York Mafia
JENNIFER LAWRENCE has been devouring all the information she can find about mobster life in postwar New York during the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies.
The Oscar-winning actress is preparing to portray Arlyne Brickman, a minor Mafia player, in Mob Girl, which is based on Teresa Carpenter’s bestseller subtitled A Woman’s Life In The Underworld.
‘Arlyne was a Jewish racketeer’s daughter who had a taste for Italian men,’ said Paolo Sorrentino, who will shoot the film in and around New York later this year.
He explained how Brickman, who much to her mother’s horror began entertaining men in the back seat of cars when she was 12, learned many secrets over the years. ‘She didn’t know how to be herself,’ Sorrentino told me over cocktails at an Oscar party in the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel, hosted by Charles Finch and Chanel.
Sorrentino noted that Brickman modelled herself on Virginia Hill, Bugsy Siegel’s flame- haired girlfriend. (Annette Bening played Hill in Warren Beatty’s 1991 film Bugsy.) But in the late-Sixties and Seventies, Brickman turned FBI informant.
The director has been beefing up the screenplay amid discussions with Lawrence.
Next year he will return to the Arenella district of Naples, where he was born, to shoot a picture for Netflix based on his own adolescence. It will tell how, after his parents were killed in a car accident, he was befriended by a local filmmaker.
‘He wasn’t a famous man but he helped me a lot,’ Sorrentino said. ‘First I need to find an actor of 17 or 18 to play me!’