Gangs of New York

Martin Scorsese’s 2002 film sits in the Five Points of mid nineteenth century New York, where Amsterdam returns for his father’s killer. Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker tested versions running from three hours forty minutes down to two hours thirty six on preview audiences. He later told Roger Ebert that 168 minutes is the right length and that no separate director’s cut is coming, because this is it. The closing shot was contested too: effects supervisor Michael Owens described it as matched dissolves from an 1863 Brooklyn graveyard, growing the city to the present with the World Trade Center in frame. The plates predate September 2001; erasing the towers, fading them out and dropping the shot were weighed, and it stayed as filmed. The speech was rebuilt from evidence: dialect coach Tim Monich worked from an 1859 dictionary of underworld slang compiled by a New York police chief and an 1892 wax cylinder of Walt Whitman, concluding that period New Yorkers sounded like mid century Brooklyn cabbies. Worth it if an accent reconstructed from a wax cylinder is the draw. Not if you want Bill the Butcher as history: his model William Poole was not a Five Points man, is not known to have killed anyone, and was shot almost a decade before the draft riots.