‘Gangs’ Acts Locally but Thinks Globally

Harvey Weinstein, the pugnacious co-chairman of Miramax Films, jumps aside as Leonardo DiCaprio and his security detail rampage down the hall of the Palais at the international film festival here.

“Harvey Weinstein!” a photographer calls out. The burly businessman stops and smiles before deftly ducking to the side to avoid being crushed by the DiCaprio phalanx.

This is the kind of media attention that Weinstein craves, the kind that can boost his prized “Gangs of New York” to box-office success and quell what was at first a whispering campaign and now is open speculation over the commercial and artistic well-being of the $100-million movie.

To turn around expectations on a film that is a year late to the theaters, Weinstein and the film’s director, Martin Scorsese, on Monday presented a 20-minute “extended preview” of the violent revenge epic to an enthusiastic crowd here.

“Gangs of New York”--with its star power, its larger-than-life personalities and the small fortune that international investors have staked on the project--has become the talk of Cannes 2002.

Fueling the anticipation and speculation is the fact that “Gangs of New York” is exactly the kind of movie that franchise-mad Hollywood has all but given up making: big, expensive, potentially artistic and with absolutely no possibilities for action dolls or Happy Meals.

It’s the film many studios turned down. It not only arrives late but also carries the stigma of being a package from the late and oft-reviled firm of Michael Ovitz, as well as the imprimatur of Weinstein, a divisive figure in his own right.

Based on the 1928 book by Herbert Asbury, the film, now scheduled for a Christmas Day release, is set in the grimy criminal underworld of New York before the Civil War. It tells the story of a young Irish immigrant (DiCaprio) seeking to avenge his father’s death at the hand of a nativist gang leader, Bill the Butcher, played by Daniel Day Lewis.

Although Hollywood is notoriously adept at crafting stunning 20-minute trailers, the slice of “Gangs” shown here was visually extravagant and promised 19th century gang warfare and a certain amount of “Titanic”-size love story. (In one scene, hellcat pickpocket Jenny Deane, played by Cameron Diaz, tries to bite the nose off DiCaprio before landing him instead in a lip lock.)

As he guided his crew from their news conference to their waiting limousines, Weinstein seemed elated. “I don’t know what people are going to tell me,” he said. “But afterward we had a 20-minute interlude, and people were walking over saying they were blown away. It helps when you see the scope of the production. People naturally have questions why it took so long, and when they see it, they go, ‘OK, I get it.’”

Beyond the amount of time and money invested, the personalities themselves have provoked a certain amount of interest and intrigue.

At the news conference, Scorsese and Weinstein made an elaborate show of amicability to dispel the tales of ill will and on-set battles. They called each other “Marty” and “Harve,” with Scorsese explaining their differences by saying, “I’m an excitable guy,” and Weinstein taking swipes at the media. “You guys keep writing about this project. This is an attempt at art,” he roared.

This past year has hardly been Weinstein’s finest. He was forced to fold his Talk magazine, at a cost of $27 million to the company, slash his staff by 75 and go home to New York without his usual batch of Oscars. The fact that the budget for Weinstein’s film is big--officially $97 million, but at least $115 million by the unofficial speculation--makes other studio executives shake their heads.

He doesn’t deny his anxiety. Holed up in a tiny elevator between floors of the Palais, Weinstein said: “I never get nervous before a presentation like this. This is the first time I’ve ever gotten nervous. It’s so personal to me, this movie.”

DiCaprio, Diaz and Scorsese are the major players on the film’s artistic side. But Graham King is the film’s major financial player.

Little-known in the U.S., King is the chairman of the Initial Entertainment Group, an overseas-distribution company, which shelled out $67 million for the foreign rights to the picture. This is the other part of the show at Cannes, where the people who put up the money for the films get to see what they paid for--and to hobnob with the stars.

All evening King has been looming around the periphery of the “Gangs” core. Yet the strapping Englishman is paying close to $1 million for this presentation and following dinner, as well as for hotel rooms at the $1,000-a-night Hotel du Cap and the private jet for DiCaprio and Diaz. He has also invited to the presentation all his buyers, the 200 or so distributors from around the world, all of whom paid record prices for the rights to distribute Scorsese’s vision of “the worst place on Earth” in Bangkok, Beirut and beyond.

The Film the Studios Turned Down

For the American studios, the decision to pass on co-financing “Gangs of New York” seemed something of a no-brainer. The script was ultra-violent, and Scorsese, for all his filmmaking laurels, is considered risky, at best, at the box office.

King, whose largest picture to date had been the Robert Altman film “Dr. T and the Women,” was ecstatic when he heard that he might be able to buy into this picture.

“For me to bring [these distributors] a Leonardo DiCaprio picture is huge, because Leo only goes through studios. For us, we wanted to be in the big boys’ game, and this was a way to start.”

As word got around before Cannes, he said, “it was like a circus.... The Koreans, the Swedish, the Malaysians are coming over to me, ‘Do you really have Leo?’”

‘Hate and Love ... and Leonardo and Cameron’

Unlike some American studios that were worried about the violence (an R rating would cut down the audience significantly from a PG-13), this was not a problem overseas.

“There’s violence, and then there’s violence. There’s Marty violence, and then there’s Schwarzenegger violence,” King said. “A lot of countries don’t differentiate. They call it action. Action is action. Everyone wants action.”

“The film has action in it. It opens in a big gang war in New York and ends in a draft riot,” said Scorsese, sounding a bit put out that foreign audiences might not differentiate between his moral, political examination of violence and a regular shoot-’em-up.

“I do know one thing foreign audiences might be interested to see is this particular depiction of America at a time when the country was still young and defining itself.... That might be something, along with rousing characters you love to hate and love [along with] personal conflict, and Leonardo and Cameron.”

And as the talk turned to commercial success, the question lurking behind all speculative chatter in Cannes, the director sighed.

“Every time I make a movie, it’s been a crapshoot. What does it mean to be successful? ‘Spider-Man’ is successful. Is that the figure we have to reach? This is the biggest budget I have ever worked with. We have a lot of hope for the picture and embrace the movie and love it, but it’s a movie by me.”