cameron diaz movies
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Chapter 2 - A “Cult” Book Often Hand-passed Among New Yorkers
 “Gangs of New York brings to life a time which we know about only through twice-told tales and people who left behind little more than their names,” says Luc Sante, the historian and writer. “To make this history palpable required an act of collective imagination.”The passionate quest to make the film began over thirty years ago, before Martin Scorsese directed the succession of dramas that would establish him as one of his generation’s most vital filmmakers. While house-sitting with a group of friends in 1970, he saw Herbert Asbury’s 1928 chronicle Gangs of New York – then a “cult” book often hand-passed among New Yorkers – sitting on a bookcase. The title jumped out at him. “I took it off the shelf and read it almost all in one day,” recalls Scorsese.
The book illuminates the legends and lore of Old New York’s notoriously colorful criminal underworld-- and also of a time and place, as Asbury reveals, that ultimately gave rise to the modern Mafia and American mobster. It was a New York City rife with small but ferocious gangs – with storybook names like the Shirt Tails, the Plug Uglies and the Daybreak Boys — all fighting to survive in a hostile and alien world.
There is a sense in the book of a “Clockwork Orange” future, except that it is a true history of America’s wild past. The book unveils a New York filled with renegades and mobs, slang and savvy, fierce battles and hidden machinations – and a country first discovering the power of the people in the streets.
Reading the book stirred in Scorsese memories of stories he had heard as a boy growing up in Little Italy. “The book contained all the folklore of old New York City and everything I read seemed to fit with my impression of the period,” he says. “I guess you could say the project became part of the continuing love and fascination I have for the City.”
Scorsese was captivated by the portrait of a time in New York City when immigrants were forced to live outside the law, yet the leaders of society lived above it. He imagined a film version of GANGS OF NEW YORK as an homage to classic American film epics about the roots of the country’s character – revealing the story of how young urban immigrants banded together in a time of hopelessness and fear and fought for the right to pursue their individual dreams. He mentioned the book to his friend and collaborator, screenwriter Jay Cocks, who was already acquainted with it. In fact, he owned a copy.
“I also had long been intrigued by the criminals and gangs of that period because my grandfather was a New York policeman,” Cocks says. “He kept old copies of the Police Gazette, which were filled with woodcuttings and engravings that illustrated the exploits of the criminal and gangs. I found it fascinating because it’s virgin territory in the movies. Most people are unaware of this period in New York’s history.” He summarizes: “I have always thought about this movie the way Marty once described it to me; as a Western on Mars.”
Cocks dove into historical research about the period, but also found inspiration in a line from a Bruce Springsteen song about waiting “for a savior to rise from the streets.” And from that notion of a people’s hero, the character of Amsterdam Vallon was born. Cocks then created Amsterdam’s world. He explains: “The reason Amsterdam was created seemed also to create Bill the Butcher, and Jenny seemed to spring from Amsterdam’s need for some sort of respite. There wasn’t any respite in that neighborhood, so they had to create it together.”
The story unfolds in New York’s long-buried Five Points neighborhood, a legendary landscape of crowded tenements and cobblestone streets on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that Asbury refers to in his book as “The Cradle of the Gangs.” Here, each day, scores of new Irish immigrants flooded the nearby docks in search of the American dream. What greeted them, however, was more boiling cauldron than melting pot. The Irish were largely despised, particularly by the anti-immigrant “Native Americans.”
The Nativists (as they were also called) saw the Irish as invaders – a threat to their land, work and the democracy for which their forefathers fought. As devout Catholics, it was also feared the Irish would give loyalty to their Church before the nation.
Scorsese sees this clash between new and old as one of the first real tests of what America was supposed to be. Should anyone be free to enter the country? What defined the country if not becoming a place made up of people from other places? Could immigrants be assimilated? Could they become American? Or would fear and intolerance stand in their way?
“This was an extraordinary era for the working classes and the underworld,” explains Scorsese, “a time when society was broken into tribes, and the tribes were constantly at war with one another. But unlike the American gangs of today, they were politically oriented.”
Scorsese explains the volatile historical background: “The first great immigrant population to arrive in New York came from Ireland during the potato famine, from the 1840s to the 1870s. At its height, more than15,000 immigrants a week arrived in New York harbor. They had no jobs, no money, and couldn’t speak the language. They mainly spoke Gaelic. Having come from Anglo, Dutch and Welsh stocks, Nativists reviled the immigrants because they felt they were the real Americans.”
Scorsese and Cocks further focused their tale on one particular Irish gang called the Dead Rabbits (the gang’s name originated in the Gaelic phrase “dod ráibéid,” meaning a violent, angry hulk). For Amsterdam’s gang leader nemesis, Scorsese and Cocks based their character on an actual Nativist of the era, Bill Poole, a butcher by trade and later a prizefighter, known everywhere as Bill the Butcher.
The real Poole, however, died in 1855, several years prior to the main action set in GANGS. He makes a powerful adversary for Amsterdam, a man who has insinuated himself into the very power structure of the city, and allied himself with the infamously corrupt Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall. For Amsterdam, who longs for the father he never had growing up, the obsession with Butcher leads to inner turmoil as they develop an almost father-son relationship seemingly based on loyalty and mutual respect but darkened by the truth of their past.
As Amsterdam and Bill the Butcher draw closer to a climactic turning of the tables, Scorsese and Cocks also wanted the film to reveal another side of New York never before seen at the movies – a New York in the midst of the Civil War. The film portrays the volatile mix of poverty, racial tension and general conflict that became like a powder keg ready to blow apart the city.
“The Civil War erupted in New York City in 1863 in a series of riots called the Draft Riots, which were the worst riots in American history,” Scorsese explains. “They lasted four days and four nights. In a sense, the riots were the War coming to New York. It all hinged on the first American draft – conscription -- instituted by President Lincoln. All able-bodied men were eligible, but there was an exemption: you could pay $300 and get out. For the poorer classes this was not possible. The draft aroused their fury.”
He continues, "Rioters destroyed property in every corner of the city, burning down whatever was in their path. By the second day, the draft was suspended, and the city was in a state of siege. It is at the very moment that the first Union troops arrive in New York to quell the rioters that the monumental battle to the death between Amsterdam and Bill the Butcher and their gangs is enjoined. The climax of the film is played out against the backdrop of the violence and racism of these riots."
Over time, Scorsese continued to fine-tune the screenplay for GANGS OF NEW YORK. Oscar-winner Steve Zaillian (“Schindler’s List”) worked on the structure of the story and award-winning playwright and screenwriter Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) concentrated on further development of the characters.
But the size and scope of the epic drama caused many to fear it was impossible to shoot. Over more than two decades of patient tenacity, the script continued to be refined. Notes Jay Cocks: “I’m glad it took all this time because the movie has many more facets, and some of those facets come from us having lived another 25 years. I must say that I don’t think there’s another filmmaker in the world who would have had the commitment and the stubbornness to see this through. Marty would not give up.”
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