Leonardo DiCaprio starrer 'Gangs of New York' was 32 years in the making?

Gangs of New York is an American epic periodic crime drama movie, released in 2002. The movie was directed by Martin Scorsese and was penned down by Jay Cocks, Steven Zaillian, and Kenneth Lonergan. It was officially inspired by popular author Herbert Asbury’s 1928 non-fiction novel of the same name. The movie cast Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Cameron Diaz as the lead characters and was a huge commercial success at the box-office. But, fans will be surprised to know that Gangs of New York was 32 years in the making.

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Gangs of New York was 32 years in the making?

As per an article in Mentalfloss.com, the director of Gangs of New York (2002), Martin Scorsese read Herbert Asbury’s non-fiction book, The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld (1928) in 1970. The moviemaker immediately thought that the book would make a good movie. Martin Scorsese didn’t have any money or clout at the time and that is why he had to wait for years before the movie could finally go under production.

Martin Scorsese bought the movie rights to the non-fiction novel in 1979 and even got a screenplay written around the same time. Martin Scorsese then spent the next two decades trying to get the project off the ground before he found a willing financial partner in Harvey Weinstein at the Miramax Films.   

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Tyler Anbinder, who has works like Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum to his credit, also gave Martin Scorsese inputs on the Gangs of New York screenplay. Tyler Anbinder said that Herbert Asbury’s book from the 1920s exaggerated how dangerous the neighbourhood was at the time.

Tyler Anbinder had access to statistics that even Herbert Asbury did not. Tyler Anbinder said that other than public drunkenness and prostitution, there was no more crime in Five Points than in any other part of the city. Herbert Asbury had written that “there was one tenement where there was a murder a day,” but that fact is that Tyler Anbinder said that there was barely a murder a month in all of New York City at that time.  

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