Gangs of New York was completed by 2001 but its release was delayed due to theSeptember 11 attacks. The film was theatrically released in the United States on December 20, 2002, and grossed $193.8 million worldwide. It was met with generally positive reviews, and Day-Lewis's performance was highly acclaimed. It received 10 nominations at the75th Academy Awards, includingBest Picture,Best Director for Scorsese andBest Actor for Day-Lewis, but did not win in any category.
In the 1846 slum of theFive Points, two rival gangs, theAnglo-ProtestantConfederation of American Natives, led by William "Bill the Butcher" Cutting, and theIrish Catholic, immigrantDead Rabbits, led by "Priest" Vallon, engage in their final battle to determine which faction will hold power over the territory. Bill kills Vallon and declares the Dead Rabbits outlawed. Having witnessed this, Vallon's young son hides the knife that killed his father before being taken to anorphanage onBlackwell's Island.
Sixteen years later in 1862, Vallon's son, "Amsterdam," returns to the Five Points seeking revenge and retrieves the knife. An old acquaintance, Johnny Sirocco, familiarizes him with the local clans of gangs, all of whom pay tribute to Bill, who remains in control of the territory. Amsterdam is introduced to Bill but keeps his past a secret as he seeks recruitment into the gang. He learns many of his father's former lieutenants - particularly "Happy" Jack Mulraney, who has become a corrupt Irishpoliceman on Bill's payroll, and McGloin - are now in Bill's employ, despite his deepanti-Irish views.
Each year, Bill celebrates the anniversary of his victory over the Dead Rabbits and Amsterdam secretly plans to kill him publicly during this celebration. Amsterdam soon becomes attracted topickpocket andgrifter Jenny Everdeane, with whom Johnny is also infatuated. Amsterdam gains Bill's confidence and becomes hisprotégé, involving him in the dealings of corruptTammany Hall politicianWilliam M. Tweed. Amsterdam saves Bill from an assassination attempt and is tormented by the thought that he may have done so out of honest devotion.
On the evening of the anniversary, Johnny, in a fit of jealousy over Jenny's affection for Amsterdam, reveals Amsterdam's true identity and intentions to Bill. Bill baits Amsterdam with aknife throwing act involving Jenny. As Bill toasts Priest Vallon, Amsterdam throws his knife, but Bill deflects it and wounds Amsterdam with a counter throw. Bill then beats him andburns his cheek with a hot blade before banishing him, believing Amsterdam to not be worthy of death.
Going into hiding, Jenny implores him to escape with her toSan Francisco. Amsterdam, however, returns to the Five Points seeking vengeance and announces his return by hanging a dead rabbit in Paradise Square in front of several Irish gangs that were allied with the Dead Rabbits. Bill sends corrupt Mulraney to investigate, but Amsterdamgarrotes him to death and hangs his body in the square. In retaliation, Bill has Johnny beaten and run through with a pike, leaving it to Amsterdam to end his suffering.
When Amsterdam's gang beats McGloin, Bill and the Natives march on thechurch and are met by Amsterdam and the Dead Rabbits, with new and former members filling its ranks. No violence ensues, but Bill promises to return soon. The incident garners newspaper coverage, and Amsterdam presents Tweed with a plan to defeat Bill's influence: Tweed will back the candidacy of Monk McGinn forsheriff and Amsterdam will secure the Irish vote for Tammany. Monk wins in alandslide viaballot stuffing, and a humiliated Bill murders him with his ownclub. McGinn's death prompts an angry Amsterdam to challenge Bill to a gang battle in Paradise Square, which Bill accepts.
TheCivil War draft riots break out as the gangs are preparing to fight, andUnion army soldiers are deployed to control the rioters. As the rival gangs prepare to fight, cannon fire from ships hits Paradise Square, interrupting their battle shortly before it begins. Many of the gang members are killed by the naval gunfire, soldiers, or rioters. Bill and Amsterdam face off against one another amidst the chaos until Bill is wounded by shrapnel. Finally, Amsterdam uses his father's knife to kill Bill. Bill passes away holding hands with Amsterdam.
Amsterdam buries the knife next to his father in a cemetery inBrooklyn, erecting a makeshift headstone with the name William Cutting over it now alongside the actual tombstone of Priest Vallon. As Amsterdam and Jenny leave, the skyline changes as modern New York City is built over the next century, from theBrooklyn Bridge to theEmpire State Building to theWorld Trade Center, and the cemetery becomes overgrown and forgotten.
Martin Scorsese had grown up inLittle Italy in the borough ofManhattan in New York City in the 1950s. He noticed there were parts of his neighborhood that were much older than the rest, including tombstones from the 1810s inOld St. Patrick's Cathedral,cobblestone streets and small basements located under more recent large buildings; this sparked Scorsese's curiosity about the history of the area: "I gradually realized that the Italian-Americans weren't the first ones there, that other people had been there before us. As I began to understand this, it fascinated me. I kept wondering, how did New York look? What were the people like? How did they walk, eat, work, dress?"[8]
In 1970, Scorsese came acrossHerbert Asbury's bookThe Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld (1927) about the city's nineteenth-century criminal underworld and found it to be a revelation. In the portraits of the city's criminals, Scorsese saw the potential for an American epic about the battle for the modern American democracy.[8] Scorsese immediately contacted his friendJay Cocks, a film critic forTime magazine. "Think of it like a western in outer space," Scorsese had told him. Cocks recalled they had consideredMalcolm McDowell in the lead role and framing the narrative with quotations fromBruce Springsteen, but otherwise they intended to keep the period vernacular authentic.[9]
At the time, Scorsese was a young director without prestige; by the end of the 1970s, with the success of crime films such asMean Streets (1973), about his old neighborhood, andTaxi Driver (1976), he was a rising star. In June 1977, producerAlberto Grimaldi ran a two-page ad inDaily Variety, announcing the film's production with Scorsese set to direct.[10][11] That same year, Scorsese and Cocks wrote the first draft, but Scorsese decided to directRaging Bull (1980) instead.[9]
In 1979, Scorsese acquired the screen rights to Asbury's book; however, it took twenty years to get the production moving forward. Difficulties arose with reproducing the monumental cityscape of nineteenth-century New York with the style and detail Scorsese wanted; almost nothing in New York City looked as it did in that time, and filming elsewhere was not an option.[8] In 1991, Grimaldi and Scorsese resumed development on the project withUniversal Pictures on a budget of $30 million. At one point,Robert De Niro was set to portray Bill the Butcher.[11] In 1997, Universal transferred the rights to the project toDisney, whose then-chairmanJoe Roth turned down the film due to its excessive violence, which was "not appropriate for a Disney-themed movie".[12][1]
Scorsese took the film toWarner Bros., being contractually obligated to make a film for the studio. The film was declined by Warner Bros. as well, and afterward declined similarly by20th Century Fox,Paramount Pictures andMetro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM).[10] In 1999, Scorsese was able to find a partnership withHarvey Weinstein, noted producer and co-chairman ofMiramax Films.[8] As the film had a large budget of nearly $100 million, Weinstein then sold international distribution rights to the project toGraham King'sInitial Entertainment Group for about $65 million to secure the required funds. Shortly after,Touchstone Pictures joined Miramax Films in funding the film, in exchange for a portion of the proceeds from domestic distribution.[10]
In 1999, Cocks was retained by Scorsese for the screenplay adaptation, which underwent nine revised drafts.[13] Weinstein was not pleased with the shooting script and wanted other screenwriters brought in for more rewrites. To placate Weinstein, Scorsese called Cocks into a room and fired him. TellingThe Globe and Mail, Cocks recalled the situation: "You ever been fired? It's terrible. Terrible. Even if it's a job you don't like, it pisses you off, right? Well you can extrapolate from that, exponentially."[14] Due to this, the final shooting script was not fully completed when filming began.Hossein Amini was hired and wrote the last two drafts, but he was uncredited for his work.[15][11]
In order to create the sets that Scorsese envisioned, the production was filmed at the largeCinecittà Studio inRome, Italy.Production designerDante Ferretti recreated over a mile of mid-nineteenth century New York buildings, consisting of a five-block area ofLower Manhattan, including the Five Points slum, a section of theEast River waterfront including two full-sized sailing ships, a thirty-building stretch of lowerBroadway, a patrician mansion, and replicas of Tammany Hall, a church, a saloon, a Chinese theater, and a gambling casino.[8] For the Five Points, Ferretti recreatedGeorge Catlin's 1827painting of the area.[8]
Particular attention was also paid to the speech of characters, as loyalties were often revealed by their accents. The film's voice coach,Tim Monich, resisted using a genericIrish brogue and instead focused on distinctive dialects of Ireland and Great Britain. As DiCaprio's character was born in Ireland but raised in the United States, his accent was designed to be a blend of accents typical of the half-Americanized. To develop the unique, lost accents of the Yankee "Nativists" such as Daniel Day-Lewis's character, Monich studied old poems, ballads, newspaper articles (which sometimes imitated spoken dialect as a form of humor) and theRogue's Lexicon, a book of underworld idioms compiled by New York's police commissioner, so that his men would be able to tell what criminals were talking about. An important piece was an 1892wax cylinder recording ofWalt Whitman reciting four lines of a poem in which he pronounced the word "Earth" as "Uth", and the "a" of "an" nasal and flat, like "ayan". Monich concluded that native nineteenth-century New Yorkers probably sounded something like the proverbialBrooklyncabbie of the mid-20th century.[8]
Principal photography began in New York and Rome on December 18, 2000, and ended on March 30, 2001.[16] Due to the strong personalities and clashing visions of director and producer, the three-year production became a story in and of itself.[8][12][17][18] Scorsese strongly defended his artistic vision on issues of taste and length while Weinstein fought for a streamlined, more commercial version. During the delays, noted actors such asRobert De Niro andWillem Dafoe had to leave the production due to conflicts with their other productions. Costs overshot the original budget by 25 percent, bringing the total cost over $100 million.[12] The increased budget made the film vital to Miramax Films' short-term success.[17][19]
Afterpost-production was nearly completed in 2001, the film was delayed for over a year. The official justification was that after theSeptember 11 attacks, certain elements of the picture may have made audiences uncomfortable; the film's closing shot is a view of modern-day New York City, complete with theWorld Trade Center's towers, despite them having been destroyed by the attacks over a year before the film's release.[20] Scorsese also went on a two-month hiatus during the film's editing.[21] However, this explanation was refuted in Scorsese's own contemporary statements, where he noted that the production was still filmingpick-ups even into October 2002.[17][22] The filmmakers had also considered removing the towers, having the towers dissolved out from the shot to acknowledge their disappearance, or remove the entire sequence altogether. It was ultimately decided to keep the towers unaltered.[23]
Weinstein kept demanding cuts to the film's length, and some of those cuts were eventually made. In December 2001, film critic Jeffrey Wells reviewed a purportedworkprint of the film as it existed in the fall of 2001. Wells reported the work print lacked narration, was about 20 minutes longer, and although it was "different than the [theatrical] version ... scene after scene after scene play[s] exactly the same in both." Despite the similarities, Wells found the work print to be richer and more satisfying than the theatrical version. While Scorsese has stated the theatrical version is hisfinal cut, he reportedly "passed along [the] three-hour-plus [work print] version ofGangs on tape [to friends] and confided, 'Putting aside my contractual obligation to deliver a shorter, two-hour-and-forty-minute version toMiramax, this is the version I'm happiest with,' or words to that effect."[20]
Scorsese considered retiring from filmmaking after the experience of working on the film.[24]
In an interview withRoger Ebert, Scorsese clarified the real issues in the cutting of the film. Ebert notes,
His discussions with Weinstein, he said, were always about finding the length where the picture worked. When that got to the press, it was translated into fights. The movie is currently 168 minutes long, he said, and that is the right length, and that's why there won't be any director's cut — because this is the director's cut.[25]
Robbie Robertson supervised the soundtrack's collection of eclectic pop, folk, and neo-classical tracks. The score is byHoward Shore. The rest of the selections included on the soundtrack album are a mix of contemporary pop and world music compositions and tunes from mid-nineteenth century Ireland.
Scorsese received both praise and criticism for historical depictions in the film. In aPBS interview for theHistory News Network,George Washington University ProfessorTyler Anbinder said that the visuals and discrimination against immigrants in the film were historically accurate, but both the amount of violence depicted and the number of Chinese, particularly female, immigrants were greater in the film than in reality.[26][27][28]
Asbury's book described theBowery Boys,Plug Uglies, True Blue Americans,Shirt Tails, andDead Rabbits, who were named after theirbattle standard, a dead rabbit on a pike.[8] The book also describedWilliam Poole, the inspiration for William "Bill the Butcher" Cutting, a member of the Bowery Boys, abare-knuckle boxer, and a leader of theKnow Nothing political movement. Poole did not come from the Five Points and was assassinated nearly a decade before the Draft Riots. Both the fictional Bill and the real one had butcher shops, but Poole is not known to have killed anyone.[29][30]
Anbinder said that Scorsese's recreation of the visual environment of mid-19th-centuryNew York City and theFive Points "couldn't have been much better".[26] All sets were built completely on the exterior stages of Cinecittà Studios in Rome.[31]
As early as 1839, MayorPhilip Hone said: "This city is infested by gangs of hardened wretches" who "patrol the streets making night hideous and insulting all who are not strong enough to defend themselves."[32] The large gang fight depicted in the film as occurring in 1846 is fictional, though there was one between the Bowery Boys and Dead Rabbits in the Five Points on July 4, 1857, which is not mentioned in the film.[33] Reviewer Vincent DiGirolamo concludes that "Gangs of New York becomes a historical epic with no change over time. The effect is to freeze ethno-cultural rivalries over the course of three decades and portray them as irrational ancestral hatreds unaltered by demographic shifts, economic cycles and political realignments."[27]
In the film, theDraft Riots of July 1863 are depicted as both destructive and violent. Records indicate the riots resulted in more than one hundred deaths, including the lynching of 11 free African-Americans. They were especially targeted by the Irish, in part because of fears of job competition that more freed slaves would cause in the city.[34] The bombardment of the city by Navy ships offshore to quell the riots is wholly fictitious. The film references the infamousTweed Courthouse, as"Boss" Tweed refers to plans for the structure as being "modest" and "economical".[citation needed]
In the film,Chinese Americans were common enough in the city to have their own community and public venues. Although Chinese people migrated to America as early as the 1840s, significant Chinese migration to New York City did not begin until 1869, the time when thetranscontinental railroad was completed. The Chinese theater on Pell St. was not finished until the 1890s.[35] The Old Brewery, the overcrowded tenement shown in the movie in both 1846 and 1862–63, was actually demolished in 1852.[36]
In the film, Priest Vallon recites theSt. Michael Prayer, but in reality this prayer was not composed until 1886.
The original target release date was December 21, 2001, in time for the74th Academy Awards but the production overshot that goal as Scorsese was still filming.[17][22] A twenty-minute clip, billed as an "extended preview", debuted at the 2002Cannes Film Festival and was shown at a star-studded event at thePalais des Festivals et des Congrès with Scorsese, DiCaprio, Diaz and Weinstein in attendance.[22]
Harvey Weinstein then wanted the film to open on December 25, 2002, but a potential conflict with another film starringLeonardo DiCaprio,Catch Me If You Can produced byDreamWorks, caused him to move the opening day to an earlier position. After negotiations between several parties, including the interests of DiCaprio, Weinstein and DreamWorks'Jeffrey Katzenberg, the decision was made on economic grounds: DiCaprio did not want to face a conflict of promoting two movies opening against each other; Katzenberg was able to convince Weinstein that the violence and adult material inGangs of New York would not necessarily attract families on Christmas. Of main concern to all involved was attempting to maximize the film's opening day, an important part of film industry economics.[17]
After three years in production, the film was released on December 20, 2002, a year after its original planned release date.[22] While the film has been released onDVD andBlu-ray, there are no plans to revisit the theatrical cut or prepare a "director's cut" for home video release. "Marty doesn't believe in that", editorThelma Schoonmaker stated. "He believes in showing only the finished film."[20]
Gangs of New York was released on VHS and a 2-disc DVD on July 1, 2003 byBuena Vista Home Entertainment (under the Miramax Home Entertainment label), the film was split on both discs. A Blu-ray version of the film was released July 1, 2008 while a remastered Blu-Ray was released February 2, 2010.[citation needed]
The film made $77,812,000 in Canada and the United States. It also took $23,763,699 in Japan and $16,358,580 in the United Kingdom. Worldwide the film grossed a total of $193,772,504.[6]
Losses by Miramax Films were offset that year by the success ofChicago (2002), the musical, whose domestic box office zoomed to $170 million and which captured aBest Picture Oscar. AlthoughHarvey Weinstein said Miramax Films lost no money onGangs of New York, an internal Disney memo reported that the true bottom line forGangs of New York is that it lost $6 million.[37]
Onreview aggregatorRotten Tomatoes,Gangs of New York has an approval rating of 72% based on 212 reviews, with an average rating of 7.10/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Though flawed, the sprawling, messyGangs of New York is redeemed by impressive production design and Day-Lewis's electrifying performance."[38]Metacritic gave the film a score of 72 out of 100, based on 39 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[39] Audiences polled byCinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.[40]
Roger Ebert praised the film but believed it fell short of Scorsese's best work, while hisAt the Movies co-hostRichard Roeper called it a "masterpiece" and declared it a leading contender forBest Picture.[41] Paul Clinton ofCNN called the film "a grand American epic".[42] InVariety,Todd McCarthy wrote that the film "falls somewhat short of great film status, but is still a richly impressive and densely realized work that bracingly opens the eye and mind to untaught aspects of American history". McCarthy singled out the meticulous attention to historical detail and production design for particular praise.[43]
The February 2020 issue ofNew York Magazine listsGangs of New York as among "The Best Movies That Lost Best Picture at the Oscars".[44]
Some critics were disappointed with the film, with one review on CinemaBlend feeling it was overly violent with few characters worth caring about.[45] Others felt[vague] it tried to tackle too many themes without saying anything unique about them, and that the overall story was weak.[46]
Cameron Diaz's divisive performance as Irish immigrant pickpocket Jenny Everdeane has been cited as an example of poor casting and, along with DiCaprio, one of the worstIrish accents in film.[47]
^"Riots".Virtual New York City. 2001. RetrievedOctober 5, 2016.
^Johnson, Michael (2009). "The New York Draft Riots".Reading the American Past: Selected Historical Documents (4th ed.). Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins. p. 295.ISBN978-0-31245-967-3.
^Auletta, Ken (July 12, 2022).Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence. City of Westminster, London: Penguin Publishing Group. p. 185.ISBN9781984878380.
Lohr, Matt R. (2015). "Irish-American Identity in the Films of Martin Scorsese". In Baker, Aaron (ed.).A Companion to Martin Scorsese. Hoboken, NJ:Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 195–213.ISBN978-1-44433-861-4.
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