Bach and David Fields (the two VP executives at United Artists at that time) fly to Montana and attempt to communicate to Cimino the dangerously growing situation. Cimino responds by barring all executives from the set. The film appropriately skyrockets to $25 million. As Bach reveals in Final Cut, Cimino's western was now going to have make blockbuster numbers just to turn a profit, performing in the Jaws and Star Wars neighborhoods. United Artists attempts to fire Cimino, at one point even asking David Lean to take over. Cimino realizes the dire situation, finally bucks up and finishes the film. With promotional and post-production fees, Heaven's Gate was going to cost United Artists $44 million - the most expensive film in history up to that time.
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.
Article comments
1 - Aaron, Duke De Mondo
Chris, i thouroughly enjoyed this, man. Those tales of hollywood disaster are always strangely enjoyable. You almost make me wanna watch heavens gate again.
2 - Chris Kent
Thanks El Senor Duke. I read this book over the July 4th holiday and decided to write a post. Not too happy with it as I didn't convey appropriately how fine this book is. A fascinating account by a man in the Hollywood loop for a few years of extraordinary filmmaking. Cimino claims this book is a "work of fiction." Bach has some interesting observations, most specifically how this film ended the syle of creative filmmaking during the 1970s and also why filmmaking is such an awkward and potentially dangerous form of creative art. It exposes a brief moment before films became pre-sold packages and when artistic merit still had box office clout.
I've always thought part of the success of The Deer Hunter was the presence of Robert De Niro - he was very much the glue that held that awkward film together. There was no De Niro on the set of Heaven's Gate - just Kris Kristofferson and the Montana scenery.