I’ve always admired and loved Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York,” but I will admit that as I watched it in the fall of 2002, there was a sense that something much grander, and greater, was missing from the film. Daniel Day-Lewis’ towering performance as Bill the Butcher hid the flaws very well — maybe his greatest performance, with the obvious exception of Daniel Plainview.
The original cut of “Gangs of New York,” which was shown to a few journalists in 2001, including Hollywood-Elswhere’s Jeffrey Wells, must still be hidden in a vault somewhere. It was said to be over 3 1/2 hours in length.
Wells claimed that the behind-the-scenes battle between Scorsese and then Miramax head honcho Harvey Weinstein ended with “a polished, cleaned-up version of the ‘Gangs’ being released in December of 2002” and not the one he saw in 2001.
“The work-print version [I saw] is longer by roughly 30 minutes, and more filled out and expressive as a result, but that’s not the thing. The main distinction for me is that it’s plainer and therefore more cinematic, as it doesn’t use the narration track that, in my view, pollutes the official version. It also lacks a musical score, with only some drums and temp music.”
Wells added, “I don’t believe Scorsese for a second when he says the theatrical version coming out this Friday is the one that bears his personal stamp of preference. My guess is that Harvey’s mitts are all over this puppy. Scorsese may have his weaknesses or indulgences as a filmmaker, but he’s always let his films play at their own pace and allow them to be true to themselves — their own tempo, themes, moods. He’s used narration before, but never in such a way that the narration wound up feeling like an encumbrance. And he’s never been one to speed his films up when they weren’t working.”
Harvey Weinstein, the cuck that he is, even bragged at a TIFF dinner that he meddled with Scorsese’s vision:
“So Marty presents the final cut of the movie to me as a final-cut director and it’s three hours and thirty-six minutes,” Weinstein revealed to Vulture. “If you thought there was action in ‘Gangs of New York’ the movie, you should have seen that editing room! But we got the movie down to two hours and 36.”
So, almost a whole hour cut got off. The sequences most people complain about are the ones featuring Cameron Diaz, which I didn’t mind at all. Supposedly, Scorsese’s cut had no narration either (which I also wasn’t bothered by).