Martin Scorsese had grown up in
Little Italy in the borough of
Manhattan 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 in
Old 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?"
Development In 1970, Scorsese came across
Herbert Asbury's book
The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld (1928) 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. At the time, Scorsese was a young director without prestige; by the end of the 1970s, with the success of crime films such as
Mean Streets (1973), about his old neighborhood, and
Taxi Driver (1976), he was a rising star. In June 1977, producer
Alberto Grimaldi ran a two-page ad in
Daily Variety, announcing the film's production with Scorsese set to direct. That same year, Scorsese and Cocks wrote the first draft, but Scorsese decided to direct
Raging Bull (1980) instead. 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. Telling
The 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." 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. Due to the strong personalities and clashing visions of director and producer, the three-year production became a story in and of itself. 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 as
Robert De Niro and
Willem 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.
Post-production and distribution After
post-production was nearly completed in 2001, the film was delayed for over a year. The official justification was that after the
September 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 the
World Trade Center's towers, despite them having been destroyed by the attacks over a year before the film's release. Scorsese also went on a two-month hiatus during the film's editing. However, this explanation was refuted in Scorsese's contemporary statements, where he noted the production was still filming
pick-ups, even into October 2002. The filmmakers had also considered removing the towers, having the towers dissolved out of the shot to acknowledge their disappearance, or remove the entire sequence altogether. It was ultimately decided to keep the towers unaltered. 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 purported
workprint 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 his
final cut, he reportedly "passed along [the] three-hour-plus [work print] version of
Gangs on tape [to friends] and confided, 'Putting aside my contractual obligation to deliver a shorter, two-hour-and-forty-minute version to
Miramax, this is the version I'm happiest with,' or words to that effect". In an interview with
Roger Ebert, Scorsese clarified the real issues in the cutting of the film. Ebert notes,
Soundtrack Robbie Robertson supervised the soundtrack's collection of eclectic pop, folk, and neo-classical tracks. The score is by
Howard 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. ==Historical accuracy==