New York Magazine - posted by Arnzilla - November 26, 2001
The Emperor Miramaximus
by David Carr
"Any suggestion that we've lost our edge will be erased by the first five minutes of Gangs
of New York," says Harvey Weinstein. "Make that the first fifteen minutes," says Scorsese,
"although I'm not done editing it yet." Gangs is Weinstein's spendy--it was budgeted
at $90 million and has $11 million in overages--signal to the rest of the industry that he
has the wherewithal to muscle his way back to the vanguard of American film. And Miramax
sources point out that $70 million worth of international-distribution rights have already
been sold. The movie was scheduled to be out in time for Oscar consideration, but after
the events of 9/11 it's now being aimed at Cannes, which takes place in mid-May. The movie
jumps up and down on all of Weinstein's buttons: It's a statue-ready project (Helloooo,
Best Cinematography) made by a legendary director on an Italian location depicting
Weinstein's hometown, a place where immigrants used brute force to set their own place
at the table. "America," the trailer intones, "was born in the streets." The
romance of that line isn't lost on the grandson of an immigrant ("from the border of
Poland and Russia") fishmonger on the Lower East Side, a neighborhood that was defined
in the throwdowns depicted in Gangs. "The only way that you could get this film made
was through Harvey Weinstein's energy and contributions," says Scorsese in August.
While Weinstein and Scorsese may be hugging and mugging for the cameras, a source who
worked on the set recalls a meeting between the two where a phone went flying through
a window and out onto the piazza. Weinstein was not the guilty party. Asked about the
meeting, Scorsese smiles wanly and begins talking about his relationships with phones.
"I really, really don't like phones. I don't like phones ringing. I get very irritable
about cell phones and mobile phones," he says. "You could have had airborne phone over
Taxi Driver, over New York, New York. Certainly Raging Bull." When shooting was
already under way, Scorsese decided he needed to build a church so he could shoot the Five
Points neighborhood in the round. Weinstein balked for a time but eventually relented.
Although he categorically rejects analogies to the moguls of old--save the aesthete
Irving Thalberg--Weinstein feels a need to reach back into industry history to put his
outlay in perspective: "I built them the entire fucking place. I mean, I built two miles
worth of sets, like in the days of MGM." The movie is bloody and long, and, according
to someone involved with the making of the film, Weinstein is pressuring Scorsese to
come in with a shorter film. As a measure of his seriousness, Weinstein has ordered the
sound and film crews to cease working on the movie. Gangs is far and away the biggest bet
Miramax has ever made. "Amélie won't pay the interest on the money we're spending right now,"
said someone connected to the movie. On the day this story went to press, Weinstein and
Scorsese went tactical and called together to say that the reports were untrue. "I worship
Marty, it's like going to film school . . . the final cut of the film belongs to him,"
Weinstein says. "The person that I am fighting with over the length of the film is me,
not Harvey," says Scorsese. "This is the most painful part of making a movie, cutting it down."
Thanks to Arnzilla and Peanut !
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