HANDLING THE MOB WHEN ALL IS SAID AND DONE, MARTIN SCORSESE MADE 'GANGS OF NEW YORK' HIS WAY.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

After decades of yearning, six months of arduous shooting and almost two years of controversy-dogged postproduction, Martin Scorsese's ``Gangs of New York,'' starring Leonardo DiCaprio, finally reached theaters last week. And the sweeping, 2 3/4-hour historical epic, set during the Civil War in the teeming, long-gone Five Points slum district of lower Manhattan, continues to be the subject of massive spin.

Reviewers split pretty evenly between loving it and hating it. The movie's opening-weekend box-office performance - a fourth-place $9.5 million with a per-screen average of $6,314, the second-best of the top-10 pictures - has been described as both solid and disappointing.

In early awards heats, ``Gangs'' chalked up a decent, if not leading, five Golden Globe nominations, while star Daniel Day-Lewis, who plays the flamboyant villain Bill the Butcher, has emerged as the film's favorite element among critics groups. And the postgame quarterbacking goes on.

``Basically, I was riding a wagon pulled by 18 horses or something, and just trying to keep it on track,'' admits the 60-year-old Scorsese.

``People have got to go in and say that this is just part of a process with Marty Scorsese,'' adds Harvey Weinstein, the colorful head of Miramax Films and the film's primary producer. ``It's got all of his movies rolled into one; every film that you've seen and loved of his are all quoted in some way in this movie. It's not better than 'Raging Bull' and it's not worse than this or that one. It is what it is, another magical step in, I think, America's greatest filmmaker's career.''

Budgeted at $85 million and coming in at a cost of at least $100 million, ``Gangs'' had been Scorsese's passion since 1970, when he first read Herbert Asbury's 1928 book of the same name. The chronicler of New York's underbelly in such acclaimed films as ``Mean Streets,'' ``Taxi Driver'' and ``Goodfellas,'' Scorsese had wondered about the origins of his native city's underworld since his childhood in Little Italy. The history-obsessed filmmaker became hooked on ``Gangs.''

But re-creating the vanished neighborhood was a prohibitively expensive proposition. Even so, Scorsese and screenwriter Jay Cocks had an initial ``Gangs'' script draft prepared by the mid-'70s, but the project never got off the ground.

Until, that is, 1999, when Weinstein agreed to back a production starring Day-Lewis, DiCaprio as the vengeful leader of the Irish immigrants and Cameron Diaz as the woman romantically linked to them both.

Through his favorite production designer, Dante Ferretti, Scorsese got a deal that allowed him to re-create the Five Points on a 1.5-square-mile section of Rome's legendary Cinecitta Studios' back lot, complete with tenements, an elephant and a working waterfront.

Delays and debates

But soon after production began in fall 2000, things fell behind schedule. Filming was not completed until early spring 2001.

``The logistics of putting some of the stuff on the screen the way I wanted to do it - that has been the biggest problem,'' Scorsese explains. ``Every scene had different bits and pieces worked into the background. Along with that were language problems and weather problems.''

During this period, reports surfaced about angry confrontations between Scorsese and Weinstein. Both men - widely noted for their stubbornness as well as their tempers - have since downplayed the incidents. Scorsese even acknowledges that, while there were shouting matches, the majority of them ended with the two men laughing together.

``That doesn't mean it was an easy film to make,'' the director admits, accompanied by his trademark nervous cackle. ``That doesn't mean I was very happy making it all the time. It's a big movie, ultimately. And when you have a big personality like Harvey Weinstein - who was the only man who could've gotten the film made - he's got his own way of doing things. I have my way of doing things, and it's like two people coming together for the first time: Do we clash with each other or mix well? Every day, it was a different formula. Some days were harder than others.''

``I think some days were trying for Marty, and I understand it,'' Weinstein says. ``He's a perfectionist, and I can only give him so much based on budget and resources. A lot of that was when Marty would say, 'I need this thing that I want to do, I need this shot,' and I'm saying to myself, 'God, we're eight weeks over budget, things are starting to spiral out of control.' Somebody has to say no.

``I'm glad I was the producer because Marty and I have a deep friendship,'' adds Weinstein, who is preparing to work again with Scorsese and DiCaprio on the Howard Hughes biopic ``The Aviator.''

Although Weinstein had covered close to two-thirds of Miramax's economic exposure on ``Gangs'' with foreign partnerships, he still had to get the most bang that he could financially. And that meant, if at all possible, getting the movie out in time for Christmas 2001. That represented an editing effort Scorsese felt was beyond his capabilities and those of his favorite film cutter, Thelma Schoonmaker.

Then came the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. A film that climaxed with the 1863 anti-draft riots that devastated New York City was considered inappropriate for Christmas. ``I think, last year, it just would have been absolutely the wrong thing to do (to release the film),'' says Weinstein. ``And once I came to that decision, I think, Marty breathed a sigh of relief.''

Cutting remarks

So it was back to the editing room. But when a planned summer 2002 release of the film was again postponed to this winter, rumors had it that Weinstein, well-known for cutting Miramax movies to his personal preference, was strong-arming Scorsese into making a shorter, more audience-friendly cut of his violent, long-cherished masterpiece.

At least one Scorsese supporter insists that isn't true. ``There's a lot of stuff always cut from films; it's called editing, that's what the process is,'' says Day-Lewis, who also starred in Scorsese's earlier foray into 19th-century New York treachery, ``The Age of Innocence.''

``Look, hovering over this film there's been a cloud of poisonous gas for so many months,'' Day-Lewis says. ``I guess because people haven't seen the film until very recently, there's been a fascination. Nonetheless, this really was a smoke screen beneath which Martin quietly got on with making the film that he always intended to make in his own way, to find what he believed to be the running time of that film as it pleased him. Whether you believe it should be longer or shorter or whatever, this is the film that he wanted to make. Nobody, nobody has coerced him into cutting anything from this film that he did not want to cut himself. So that's the inside story.''

However, others believe there's more of a story. A pirated print of an earlier, longer cut has been making the rounds, and some Internet critics have said that they like it better than the version that's in theaters.

Scorsese laughs at the notion that anything other than what the public can pay to see is his preferred version of ``Gangs.'' To prove the point, he reads off a long, detailed log of various cuts of the film he's worked his way through over the last year and a half. Some are longer, some are shorter than the two-hour, 45-minute release print, and they're all mixed up from week to week, month to month.

``I mean, I was just doing my work!'' he says, laughing at his critics. ``This is madness. I don't even know which cut they've got, I have not seen the tape. But I can tell you it's a work in progress. It's not my cut.''

Scorsese admits, though, that he did have some trouble narrowing down his vision of the film. ``If it was up to me, I would shoot scenes that depict the history of New York from 1820 to 1890, every day of its life,'' Scorsese confesses.

Released with a push

But there was one last major hurdle. When last July's release date was missed, Miramax scheduled a Christmas Day opening. Trouble was, the movie DiCaprio made after ``Gangs,'' Steven Spielberg's ``Catch Me If You Can,'' had already claimed that date.

In the end, Weinstein reluctantly moved ``Gangs'' to last Friday, partially because DreamWorks had the date first and also due to his friendship with the studio's co-owner Jeffrey Katzenberg.

``Let's put it this way,'' says Weinstein. ``It's easier to compete against another Leo movie than it is to compete with 'Lord of the Rings,' so I think there was a sacrifice made on our part. On another level, you say OK, they had the date first. But 'Lord of the Rings' is a monster, it's like competing with five movies.''

And indeed, ``Rings,'' which opened Dec. 18, towered over the weekend box office with a record-setting $62 million gross.

But in the end - whatever happens at the box office, awards competitions or in the longer view of film history - Scorsese stands by the way his baby turned out, regardless of how many midwives had a hand in its birth.

``I've gotta say, whether it was Leo or Daniel or Cameron or Harvey Weinstein, it was everybody pulling for me, to help create what I saw,'' Scorsese says, audibly emotional. ``It was actually a very moving process; it wasn't what they wanted, it was everybody hoping for me to get what I wanted.''

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) the good fight

The battle over Martin Scorsese's `Gangs of New York,' starring Leonardo DiCaprio, isn't over

(2) no caption (scene from `Gangs of New York'