Martin Scorsese spent twenty years bringing the brutal, forgotten history of New York to life.
In short: The production of Gangs of New York was as tumultuous as the 19th-century street wars it depicted. From a two-decade development cycle to a massive, custom-built set in Rome, the film became a legendary struggle between artistic vision and commercial pressure that nearly caused its director to retire from cinema.
Martin Scorsese’s fascination with New York’s hidden history began in the 1950s, when he noticed remnants of an older city—cobblestones and ancient tombstones—beneath his neighborhood. After reading Herbert Asbury’s 1928 book, The Gangs of New York, in 1970, he envisioned an American epic. It took until 1999 for Miramax Films to acquire the project, following years of failed attempts with studios like Universal and Disney, the latter of which rejected the film due to its extreme violence.
To recreate the Five Points slum of the 1840s, production designer Dante Ferretti built an entire five-block section of Manhattan at Cinecittà Studios in Rome. The scale was immense, featuring a waterfront with full-sized ships and replicas of Tammany Hall. This commitment to detail extended to the characters' speech; voice coach Tim Monich studied 1892 wax cylinder recordings of Walt Whitman to reconstruct the lost, nasal dialect of 19th-century New Yorkers, aiming for a sound reminiscent of a mid-20th-century Brooklyn cabbie.
The film’s release was delayed by the September 11 attacks, as the final shot featured the World Trade Center towers. While critics praised the visual accuracy, historians like Tyler Anbinder noted that the film exaggerated the presence of Chinese immigrants and the scale of violence. Despite the friction between Scorsese and producer Harvey Weinstein over the film's length and commercial viability, the final 168-minute cut remains the director's definitive version. Though it earned 10 Academy Award nominations, the project was a financial challenge, with internal Disney memos suggesting it lost $6 million, even as it grossed over $193 million worldwide.
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- Summary by Intellect · source: Gangs of New York
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