Gangs is Weinstein's spendy--it was budgeted at $90 million and has $11 million in overages--signal to the rest of the industry that he has the wherewithal to muscle his way back to the vanguard of American film. And Miramax sources point out that $70 million worth of international-distribution rights have already been sold.

The movie was scheduled to be out in time for Oscar consideration, but after the events of 9/11 it's now being aimed at Cannes, which takes place in mid-May. The movie jumps up and down on all of Weinstein's buttons: It's a statue-ready project (Helloooo, Best Cinematography) made by a legendary director on an Italian location depicting Weinstein's hometown, a place where immigrants used brute force to set their own place at the table.

"America," the trailer intones, "was born in the streets."

The romance of that line isn't lost on the grandson of an immigrant ("from the border of Poland and Russia") fishmonger on the Lower East Side, a neighborhood that was defined in the throwdowns depicted in Gangs.

"The only way that you could get this film made was through Harvey Weinstein's energy and contributions," says Scorsese in August.

While Weinstein and Scorsese may be hugging and mugging for the cameras, a source who worked on the set recalls a meeting between the two where a phone went flying through a window and out onto the piazza. Weinstein was not the guilty party. Asked about the meeting, Scorsese smiles wanly and begins talking about his relationships with phones.

"I really, really don't like phones. I don't like phones ringing. I get very irritable about cell phones and mobile phones," he says. "You could have had airborne phone over Taxi Driver, over New York, New York. Certainly Raging Bull."

When shooting was already under way, Scorsese decided he needed to build a church so he could shoot the Five Points neighborhood in the round. Weinstein balked for a time but eventually relented.

Although he categorically rejects analogies to the moguls of old--save the aesthete Irving Thalberg--Weinstein feels a need to reach back into industry history to put his outlay in perspective: "I built them the entire fucking place. I mean, I built two miles worth of sets, like in the days of MGM."

The movie is bloody and long, and, according to someone involved with the making of the film, Weinstein is pressuring Scorsese to come in with a shorter film. As a measure of his seriousness, Weinstein has ordered the sound and film crews to cease working on the movie. Gangs is far and away the biggest bet Miramax has ever made. "Amélie won't pay the interest on the money we're spending right now," said someone connected to the movie.

On the day this story went to press, Weinstein and Scorsese went tactical and called together to say that the reports were untrue. "I worship Marty, it's like going to film school . . . the final cut of the film belongs to him," Weinstein says.

"The person that I am fighting with over the length of the film is me, not Harvey," says Scorsese. "This is the most painful part of making a movie, cutting it down."

Given that it's Scorsese and Weinstein wrasslin' at the edge of the cliff, it's like trying to figure out whether Rodan or Godzilla will bite the dust when the credits roll. But many in the movie industry have a prurient issue in the process. Weinstein "has done so well for so long," says Variety editor Peter Bart, "that people would inevitably be delighted to see him eat it."