Gangs of New York (2002) on Netflix
In 1846 Five Points, Bill Cutting kills Priest Vallon in a gang fight. Sixteen years later Vallon's son Amsterdam returns to the district and looks for a way into Cutting's crew.
- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb7.5/10510,745 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes72%
Trailer
Plot summary
New York's Five Points in the early 1860s is run by gangs, and the strongest of them, the Natives, answers to Bill "The Butcher" Cutting, who holds that the country belongs to the native-born and opposes the Irish immigrants arriving in the city. Sixteen years after Cutting killed Priest Vallon in a turf battle outside the Old Brewery, Vallon's son Amsterdam comes back to the district, having been sent as a boy to the Hellgate Orphanage on Blackwell's Island. He retrieves the knife that killed his father and seeks a way into Cutting's crew. An old acquaintance, Johnny Sirocco, shows him the local gangs and their tribute to Cutting. The pickpocket Jenny Everdeane also crosses his path.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Gangs of New York (2002)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Gangs of New York was held back over a year after the September 11 attacks, and its closing shot of modern-day New York City still shows the World Trade Center towers, which the attacks had destroyed more than a year before the film's release.
- Harvey Weinstein was unhappy with the shooting script of Gangs of New York and wanted other screenwriters brought in, so Martin Scorsese called screenwriter Jay Cocks into a room and fired him to placate the producer.
- In 1991, Martin Scorsese and Alberto Grimaldi resumed development of the project at Universal Pictures on a $30 million budget, and at one point Robert De Niro was set to portray Bill the Butcher.
- Disney chairman Joe Roth turned Gangs of New York down as too violent for a Disney-themed movie; Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer then also declined it, before Harvey Weinstein's Miramax took it on in 1999.
- Production designer Dante Ferretti rebuilt over a mile of mid-nineteenth century New York at Cinecittà Studios in Rome, including the Five Points slum, the East River waterfront with two full-sized sailing ships, a thirty-building stretch of lower Broadway and replicas of Tammany Hall.
- Voice coach Tim Monich rejected a generic Irish brogue, making Leonardo DiCaprio's accent a half-Americanized blend and studying old poems, ballads, newspaper articles and the Rogue's Lexicon for Daniel Day-Lewis's Yankee Nativist speech.
- William "Bill the Butcher" Cutting was inspired by the real William Poole, a bare-knuckle boxer, Bowery Boys member and Know Nothing leader who did not come from the Five Points and was assassinated nearly a decade before the Draft Riots.
- Martin Scorsese, the director of Gangs of New York, considered retiring from filmmaking after the experience of working on the film.
