Heaven's Gate is premiered in New York, a three-and-a-half hour monstrosity that receives devastatingly bad reviews. It is eventually released to the theaters and makes $1.8 million. It is the biggest bomb in motion picture history (cue dead elephant hitting the cement). Heads roll at the studio, Cimino's career is finished and United Artists, a film company created by Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, is purchased by MGM to disappear forever into the sunset.

Cimino's Heaven's Gate also spelled the end of the free-spirited, amazingly creative decade of the 1970s. Producers and studios took the reins out of the hands of superstar directors (Coppola's Apocalypse Now ran a similar Heaven's Gate route, but he pulled success from the fires of disaster, perhaps inspiring this debacle as much as anything else). The beauty of Final Cut is it reveals a major film company handicapped by a runaway disaster. The executives had three choices - march until the bitter end a la Cleopatra; try an Apocalypse Now-like containment; or pull the plug and cut losses. Based on Cimino's great track record including the Clint Eastwood film Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and The Deer Hunter, executives fatefully chose containment.

As Bach notes in Final Cut, never in the studio's wildest nightmares did they expect as staggeringly poor a film as Heaven's Gate. Though the signs were there, including The Deer Hunter's uniquely indulgent style, Cimino's pouty refusal to cast more bankable stars and warnings from accountants about the dangers of filming in the remotest regions of Montana.

When watching Heaven's Gate today, it's an overlong, indulgent mess. Certain scenes will remind one of the greatest David Lean epics, yet there is no true intimacy. The characters are just faded photographs without life or emotion. Scenes (though beautiful) of dancing and skating go on for 10-15 minutes, barely propelling the lumbering story. Dialog is vague and stilted. Even the final battle (which is historically inaccurate), is about as ripe as a Ted Turner civil war epic. There's a lot of sound and fury and dying, but the viewer never really cares who lives or dies. And for a western, most unforgivable of all, it's boring.

Cimino's career was ruined after Heaven's Gate, and he's made just four mediocre films since then. The one-time genius comes out of hiding on occasion to give odd interviews and accept awards in France (they love him as much as Jerry Lewis over there). He usually compares himself to Jim Morrison or Picasso or Tolstoy, and he does so with Napoleonic seriousness. Cimino's a walking ghost undoubtedly wondering just what went wrong in Montana, when filmmaking was changed by an obsessive megalomaniac with dreams of Xanadu.

Final Cut is a tragedy exposing the end of a golden era of filmmaking and a once-great studio. It's as good as an Irwin Allen disaster film, and a lot cheaper.