Mick Gatto subject of new Sopranos-style series

The life and times of colourful Melbourne identity Mick Gatto are set to be reimagined for the screen in a Sopranos-style series by actor and director Steve Bastoni.

Melbourne gangland crime figure Mick Gatto at an interview on his autobiography book I, Mick Gatto.

The life and times of cigar-chomping Mick Gatto is to be reimagined in a Sopranos-like TV drama series.

Actor and director Steve Bastoni bought the rights to Gatto’s 2009 best-selling autobiography, I, Mick Gatto – written with award-winning writer Tom Noble – some months ago and is taking up a movie or small screen option.

Bastoni tells Page 13 he wants to explore Gatto’s life, from growing up as an Italian migrant in South Melbourne, and times with the Carlton Crew to present day family man and, er, professional mediator.

Bastoni says he and long-time collaborator and friend Frank Lotito (currently in post production as director of the latest Wog Boys Forever movie) are working on bringing Gatto’s multifaceted life to the big screen.

“Frank and I are big Scorcese fans, think Raging Bull or Goodfellas, which focus on the Italo-American experience and migrants who came over sticking together.

“Australia had a similar experience, the Italo-Australian migrant. What does a kid do here with limited opportunities. There was a lot of racism back then, we got called WOG a lot.

A new TV series about the life and times of Mick Gatto is in the works.

The show is expected to be in the style of The Sopranos.

“How does one navigate their path, especially someone with ambition and get up and go. You are not going to uni, so how does one carve a career out for oneself.”

Bastoni says he would like to interview Gatto to “fill in the blanks” from where the 2009 autobiography finished.

Discussions have been underway with Eddie McGuire’s production company JAM TV, although the project is still in its infancy.

“Mick has been portrayed one dimensionally in the past and we want to explore his personality a lot further and go into his childhood growing up,” Bastoni says.

“There is a chapter in the book, The Devil of South Melbourne, touching on his early days as a teenager growing up there.

“It is quite entertaining and almost like a black comedy and we are looking to explore that.

Actor and director Steve Bastoni has bought the rights to I, Mick Gatto. Picture: Eugene Hyland

“We want to steer away and do something very different, a lot deeper, and make something more dimensional.

“There was the time an African gang tried to swindle the Carlton Crew with a disappearing money act. It was quite ingenious how they were scammed and it left Mick scratching his head and tipping his hat to those guys, they were that good.

“There are great stories and it will appeal to the larrikin Aussie humour, a laconic gallows humour of sorts,” he laughed.

The Italian born actor says he has an affiliation with Gatto’s story having grown up and in around Carlton himself.

Bastoni says he will play the role of the present-day Gatto, with casting for “a couple of Micks” in the pipeline, a young and teenage Gatto.

“I have a familiarity with that world, although it’s not a world I’ve ever been involved in.”

Bastoni appeared as Lebanese crook Louis Bayeh in the Underbelly series and later as Detective senior sergeant Charles Bezzina in the Fat Tony and Co spin off.

The first Underbelly series in 2008 was famously centred around the 1995 to 2004 gangland war in Melbourne, including a turbulent period in Gatto’s life after he shot Andrew Benji Veniamin at the back of a Carlton restaurant and was later acquitted of murder.

Page 13 asked Big Mick about his potential involvement in the movie or TV series but, as usual, he was tight-lipped.

“Nothing to do with me love. I’ve got no control over it. I don’t want no part of it, let them do whatever they like.”

Bastoni is currently focused on his role as founder and director of Victoria’s largest outdoor film festival, the Peninsula Film Festival from March 11.