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The Baltimore Sun
January 1, 2003
Scheme team
Screenwriter Jay Cocks and director Martin Scorsese thought big when
they
hatched their ideas for 'Gangs of New York.'
By Michael Sragow, Sun Movie Critic
NEW YORK - The most exciting aspect of Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New
York
is its vision of mid-19th century New York as a crucible, not a melting
pot,
for recent Irish immigrants and Manhattan "natives." It sets a fierce
tone
from the start, when Irish clad in red-striped pants and Nativists in
blue
sashes and stovepipe hats face off, then battle for control of the
neighborhood known as Five Points.
Broad and original as this vision is, it's also a double-barreled
throwback.
First, to the history recalled in Herbert Asbury's 1928 book of the
same
name. Second, to American moviemaking circa 1968 - a time when
fearless,
talented moviemakers revised Westerns and gangster films and introduced
new
elements of ambiguity and social criticism, often in inventive,
confrontational styles.
Jay Cocks, the author of the screen story for Gangs of New York and the
first of three credited screenwriters, was present at the birth of that
vision - only to be fired when it was about to be realized. Even so, he
remains a champion of the film.
As the movie critic who brought the American film renaissance of the
late
'60s into the pages of Time magazine, he helped propel the careers of
moviemakers like Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma. But he also
supported
veteran directors who seized on Hollywood's brief period of creative
openness to do their best, most personal work, notably, Sam Peckinpah.
"There are always a few directors whose movies speak directly to you,"
says
Cocks. "I couldn't have had less in common with this guy, Sam - he
scared
me. But my son is named Sam, and that can't be entirely a coincidence."
It was at a screening of Peckinpah's 1969 masterpiece, The Wild Bunch,
a
Western-cum-historical epic about an outlaw gang's last stand in
Mexico,
that Cocks and Scorsese began to hatch their scheme for Gangs of New
York -
even though they hadn't yet read the book. "I remember the experience
of
seeing The Wild Bunch with Marty," Cocks said recently. "Four of us
were
there: me and Marty up front in the Warner Bros. screening room,
[critics]
Judith Crist and Rex Reed in the back laughing and making fun and going
'Isn't that disgusting?' For Marty and me, it's not too much to say
that it
was a communion at the end of that movie. We turned to each other and
knew
that we'd been in the presence of something that we couldn't touch. But
that
wouldn't keep us from trying!"
Scorsese told Peckinpah biographer David Weddle that he and Cocks were
"totally stunned, overwhelmed. ... The exhilaration had to do with the
way
[Peckinpah] used film and the way he used the images with a number of
different cameras going at different speeds. You really get a wonderful
choreographed effect, it's like dance or like poetry."
Seven months later, Cocks was in his Manhattan apartment when he got a
Happy
New Year call from Scorsese. "He was staying out in the suburbs with
some
friends. Not being an outdoor type, he was the only guy left in the
house.
So he took a book off the shelf, and it was Gangs of New York. And I
was
looking at the same book on my shelf! It wasn't a cult item; no one was
writing New Yorker pieces about Herbert Asbury then. It just had a
great
title. When we opened it up, we were stunned by it. Asbury had picked
up on
a lot of the stuff Marty had heard on a street-corner, folkloric level
down
in Little Italy; I grew up in the Bronx, and had heard more distant
rumblings of the same things."
Cocks and Scorsese shared an immediate "instinctual feeling" that this
book
was prime - and fresh - movie material: "All of a sudden you're in this
world, and you go, 'Holy smoke! Where is everybody else? They don't
know
about this? It hasn't been done before?' "
Well, not except for D.W. Griffith's silent short Musketeers of Pig
Alley
(1912) and Raoul Walsh's 1933 feature, The Bowery. "We felt as if we'd
hit
the mother lode and there were no other prospectors around!" Cocks
says.
What they needed was a story to go with this treasure. Cocks' initial
idea
was: "OK, Marty, let's put the end of The Wild Bunch at the beginning
of the
movie."
Peckinpah's gang goes on a homicidal/suicidal frenzy to avenge the
death of
one of their own at the hands of a Mexican warlord. Doing a similar
scene at
the start of Gangs of New York meant Cocks and Scorsese would risk
comparisons to the greatest action scene in modern movies and face the
obstacle of equaling or topping it at the end of their own film. "But,"
says
Cocks, "at least we'd set ourselves a good challenge!"
A New Yorker whose longest times away from the city have been the four
years
in the early '60s he spent at Kenyon College in central Ohio and nine
months
in Los Angeles preparing the first draft of this movie, Cocks found
Gangs of
New York to be as much a dream for him as it was for Scorsese. The
writer
drew on three main sources of inspiration: "Sam Peckinpah in The Wild
Bunch.
Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. And Bruce Springsteen and the E
Street Band."
His script began with an epigraph from Springsteen - "You can waste
your
summer praying in vain for a savior to rise from these streets" - and
ended
with another Springsteen quote - "Lost but not forgotten from the dark
heart
of a dream." For Cocks, those thoughts still dominate the opening and
closing action, though Scorsese dropped the epigraph (he thought
viewers
should catch the drift themselves) and the finished film now ends with
a
song by Bono of the Irish rock band U2.
The process of conceiving the script, for Cocks, "was a lot like the
way a
song is written - God knows a very lengthy song." He snatches a page
off a
legal pad and says, "The first thing I wrote, I grabbed a piece of
paper
like that, and I scrawled, 'The blood always stays on the blade.' I
hadn't
even started the research; I had no idea of what that meant. But the
whole
thing started to come out of that exact line."
Once he and Scorsese agreed "to put the end of The Wild Bunch at the
beginning of the movie," Cocks required a personal trauma to motivate
the
character of Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio), their Irish would-be
savior rising from the streets.
"What do you do for a traumatic event in a civilization that is this
savage?
Marty and I come from very close families; the worst thing I could
imagine
was not to have a mother and to be orphaned and in some way be a
collaborator in the death of your father. So once 'the blood always
stays on
the blade' was written, and we had this primal thing of losing your
father
and somehow feeling you were collaborating in his killing, that gave us
our
three pivotal characters: a son, a father and a killer."
Liam Neeson plays Amsterdam's father, Priest Vallon, and Cocks says, "I
think it's fantastic the way Liam, who's in the film for maybe 10
minutes,
gets his innings in. His ghost has to hover over the movie, and he is
in the
back of your mind the way he is in Amsterdam's the whole time."
Daniel Day-Lewis plays the Nativist boss and killer, Bill the Butcher,
and
Cocks is in awe of Day-Lewis' intensity in the part.
"Can you imagine Daniel and Sam Peckinpah?" he asks. "I don't know if
either
could have survived, because once Daniel's in, he's in for it all and
then
some."
Staging prize fights on rafts, robbing corpses and selling them to
medical
students - Cocks planned these and many other unsavory activities for
the
hero, Amsterdam. (The raft episode owes part of its flavor to another
Peckinpah film, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.) Cocks and Scorsese
insisted
that the movie retain a sooty integrity and a scale commensurate with
their
ambition to reclaim a lost chapter of urban legend.
"I loved the idea of the fire at P.T. Barnum's Museum, and a jungle
animal
running down the street," says Cocks. "That apparently drove [Miramax
chief]
Harvey Weinstein crazy - 'What do you need that elephant for? You don't
need
that thing!'"
But the moviemakers also realized they couldn't simply string along
some
thrilling set pieces. Amsterdam works his way into Bill's good graces
and
forges a familial bond with him. The team knew that for the drama to
have
any credibility, by the middle of the movie Bill would need to see
through
Amsterdam and force a confrontation. "We didn't have what is wretchedly
called, in current screenwriting jargon, the 'tent-pole scene' until
the
early '90s," Cocks says, "When Marty looked at me and said 'You know,
I've
been thinking about Chinese acrobats and knives.'" Bill the Butcher is
a
virtuoso with knives.
Scorsese envisioned his crucial showdown with Amsterdam as part of a
theatrical exhibition of Bill's expertise in a garish Chinese nightclub
out
of Josef Von Sternberg's The Shanghai Gesture. (The sequence allows
Scorsese
to pay homage to such great Italian theater/film directors as Luchino
Visconti: it's like Visconti's operatic Senso for the underclass.)
When the movie was finally set up at Miramax in the late 1990s, Cocks
was
the first to go. "It was Harvey Weinstein who fired me," says Cocks. A
succession of screenwriters followed, some credited, like Steve
Zaillian
(Schindler's List) and Kenneth Lonergan (You Can Count On Me), others
not,
like Hossein Amini (The Wings of the Dove).
"But you've got to recognize that through the entire 30-year process
there
was one guy who was on top of everything all the time, and that was
Marty.
This became a necessary step for him to take and as painful as it was
for us
both, he and I handled it between us. Kids, don't try this at home. It
took
some effort and understanding on both our parts. But the friendship:
Unchanged. I mean, Marty is my son's godfather; everyone needs a
Sicilian
godfather. "
In the end, Cocks hopes that a project that started in the '70s still
"has
that '70s feeling of 'let's go for it!': the feeling that you could at
least
try to do anything, and maybe if you were lucky enough you could not
only
rattle the doorknob, you could kick down the door.
"That's what Sam Peckinpah did, and he paid an incredible price for it,
self-inflicted though much of it was. Marty's personal velocity is very
different, but he's very much like Sam. He doesn't give an inch and he
doesn't make nice. And in this time when writing about movies is like
sports
reporting - 'How much did your movie make this Saturday?' It's like
asking
your batting average - here's a guy who does not play that game. He's a
guy
who says to the audience, 'I think I'll open the door for you a crack.
But
you've got to walk through it; you've got to come to me.' "
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