New York Post AT LAST, MARTY'S GANG'S ALL HERE By CAROLE WATSON December 8, 2002 -- IN 1977, after hitting fame with "Taxi Driver," Martin Scorsese bought a full-page ad in Variety, the Hollywood trade daily, announcing his next project: "Gangs of New York." The ad, it appears, was about 25 years premature - the movie is scheduled for release Dec. 20. But the ad led to a buzz around "Gangs" which eventually stirred the interest of a 16-year-old actor named Leonardo DiCaprio, who, when he got wind of the project, was intrigued. "I'd heard this story of a young Irish immigrant in the 1800s who's placed in the center of the biggest urban riot in the New World," says DiCaprio in the new book, "Gangs of New York: Making the Movie." DiCaprio had just launched his career with a yearlong stint in the TV sitcom "Growing Pains." Still, he says, "I was determined to do this project." Based on a 1928 book by Herbert J. Asbury, "Gangs" chronicles the seedy underworld in a 1860s New York roamed by wild animals, where rival Irish immigrants and "Native American" gangs with names like Dead Rabbits and Plug Uglies feuded amid prostitution and shocking poverty in the Five Points slum. And it described the infamous July 1863 draft riots, when a 70,000-strong mob almost razed the Big Apple, leaving 2,000 dead and every policeman in the city wounded. The role DiCaprio coveted was that of the central character, Irish immigrant gang leader Amsterdam Vallon, out to avenge the death of his father at the hands of the Anglo-American gang enforcer "Bill the Butcher." "This was a critical moment in America's history, and the stories haunted me over the years," Scorsese says in the upcoming book. But backers were put off, not only by the formidable expense of creating an 1860s Manhattan from scratch, but by the storyline's bloodthirsty violence. It was only in 1998 that DiCaprio, by now a megastar in his own right after "Titanic," joined up with Scorsese, and things got moving again. Well, sort of. MGM and Twentieth Century Fox turned the project down cold. Family-oriented Disney bought the rights, then got cold feet. Stars like Willem Dafoe and Robert De Niro came and went. Finally, Harvey Weinstein's Miramax agreed to take on "Gangs of New York" - the most expensive undertaking in the film company's 22-year history. The steepest expense was the transformation of a 1.5-square-mile set on the legendary Cinecitta Studios, just outside Rome - where classics such as "Ben-Hur" and "Cleopatra" were shot - into the Gotham of yesteryear. The closed Italian set proved a haven for the A-list stars - DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis, Cameron Diaz, Liam Neeson and Jim Broadbent among them - who were given refuge there from the paparazzi. Then again, the foreign setting sometimes presented other challenges. "The story is about Irish Americans and Anglo-Americans, and we were surrounded by Italians!" executive producer Michael Hausman writes. "We tried to get blond-haired, blue-eyed people living in Italy to place in the foreground." That involved scouring the area for Irish priests and borrowing staff from U.S. Army and naval bases in Rome. Meanwhile, most of the cast studied history books of the period, and examined the vocabulary of the 1800s. DiCaprio spent an additional 11 months training in weight-training, knife-throwing and other fighting methods of the period. To prepare for his role as "Bill the Butcher," Day-Lewis - out of his self-enforced acting retirement after two years working as a cobbler in Rome - spent several hours a day chopping up meat in an English butcher's shop. Day-Lewis also insisted on staying in character throughout the months of filming, to the amusement of the rest of the cast. "I met Daniel Day-Lewis in the very beginning before we started shooting the movie, and I've since been hanging out with Bill the Butcher," Diaz says. "He goes so deep into character. He speaks only with the accent of Bill the Butcher whether he's working or not. It's quite frightening, but completely admirable." As the lead female, skillful pickpocket Jenny Everdeane, Diaz says she endured a lot of "rough- housing" with the boys - including 17 takes of a torrid love scene where her character scratches and bites at DiCaprio's face. "Leo and I have a few confrontations. I've done a lot of physical acting, even kung fu in 'Charlie's Angels,' but it's completely different doing it in a corset," she says. Meanwhile, DiCaprio's biggest on-set blunder was uttering "OK" - a term not in use in 19th-century America. Dialect coach Tim Monich reveals: "I became the period policeman. In an early scene, Leo said 'OK.' They cut, then he ran out of the room and said to me 'Oh, I know, I know. I can't say that.' "I asked 'What are you talking about?' And he said 'Well, on "Titanic," they told me I couldn't say "OK." But I said that "OK" was a very old American expression, it was used before the Civil War.' " Finally, after 22 weeks of filming and angst-ridden discussions over such things as whether Day-Lewis could wear a false tooth, the film's release date was announced: December 2001. Then came 9/11. In the aftermath of the terror attacks, the movie was postponed until the following summer and then, at last, to Dec. 20. Perhaps the new delay had something to do with its length: Scorsese's initial cut clocked in at more than three hours. It's presently down to 2 hours, 40 minutes. So lengthy was all that wrangling that, in the meantime, "Gangs" star Jim Broadbent went out to shoot "Iris" and scooped an Oscar for it - a whole nine months before "Gangs of New York" was set to be screened. In the end, it took three decades, $100 million and Martin Scorsese's never-ending supply of passion to make "Gangs of New York." Let the Oscar buzz begin. |
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