One of Hollywood’s biggest flops ever is a masterpiece—especially in its extended cut
Film Features Billy John Hurt
Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: With the fabled Snyder Cut improbably making its way to HBO Max this week, we’re looking back on other significant directors’ cuts.
Heaven’s Gate, director’s cut (2012)
Heaven’s Gate, the King Kong of auteur flops, makes no bones about its grandiose ambitions—that much is obvious from the pomp and pageantry that opens the film. Throwing their top hats in the air as they bump and tussle behind a marching band, the rowdy Harvard class of 1870 swarms into a convocation hall. The long crane shot, with hundreds of extras, is presided over by Joseph Cotten of Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons—in a reverend’s collar, no less, as though his cameo alone weren’t enough to sanctify the proceedings. Then, after a full five minutes of speeches, it’s on to “The Blue Danube” (on which 2001: A Space Odyssey may as well own the copyright) and an elaborate waltz sequence that reviewers at the time would recognize as partly cribbed from Vincente Minnelli’s Madame Bovary.
That critics already had it out for the movie’s writer-director, Michael Cimino, is no secret. In the two years that followed the release of his Best Picture winner, The Deer Hunter (1978), he had acquired a reputation as an on-set tyrant. To make matters worse, he was a pathological fabulist who lied about serving in Vietnam and basically did everything to conceal the fact that he was in his 40s and had been a very successful director of TV commercials before he turned to the big screen. He was too old and too square to be an enfant terrible. In later years, long after Heaven’s Gate had become a Hollywood byword for disaster, he got so much plastic surgery that he became unrecognizable.
Yet Heaven’s Gate—the restored cut, rather than the severely truncated wide-release version—is a tremendous piece of filmmaking. Realistically, there was no way that a 219-minute period epic about class warfare budgeted at $44 million (about $140 million in today’s dollars) was going to be anything but a box office bomb, and cutting it down to an indecipherable 149 minutes didn’t help: It was the biggest flop in Hollywood history until the release of Cutthroat Island some 15 years later. This may be theoretically offensive to accountants; it is not clear why it should offend anyone else.
The subject matter is expansive, mythic, and to some extent uncommercial. The Johnson County War, in which the Wyoming Stock Growers Association hired gunmen and “cattle detectives” to kill small-time homesteaders and ranchers—leading to a standoff and an intervention from President Benjamin Harrison (not on behalf of the little guy)—is a historical episode unflattering to capitalism and domestic American power. Cimino started pitching what became Heaven’s Gate as soon as he arrived in Hollywood in 1971. The film bears little resemblance to real events: Cimino changes the class conflict, adds Eastern European immigrants, and makes his protagonist, Jim Averill (Kris Kristofferson), a Harvard grad. This is, in other words, a movie about false promises.
After the extended graduation ceremony that opens the film, we jump forward 20 years and find an older, beaten down Averill now working as a marshal in Johnson County. The poor, huddled masses are arriving by the thousand. A killer named Nate Champion (Christopher Walken, wearing weird, vampy eyeshadow) stalks the wide open, David Lean-esque landscape. The word of the cattle barons—a group that happens to include Averill’s alcoholic college buddy Billy (John Hurt)—is law. It would be an understatement to say that Cimino draws out the plot, which isn’t all that complicated; more than an hour passes before we meet some of the main characters, including Ella (Isabelle Huppert), the county madam, and J.B. (Jeff Bridges), the owner of the local cockfighting establishment.
Could it use some tightening up? Definitely not—the jumbo-sized, megalomaniacal sweep, which completely envelops the conflicts and cast, is what Heaven’s Gate is all about. However obvious Cimino’s influences might be, there’s nothing ersatz about his sense of grandeur and scale. There’s a unique thrill to watching the camera follow a character outside, pushing through a window to reveal, in widescreen, an honest-to-goodness steam locomotive whistling through what appears to be a full-sized 19th-century town. Scenes crowded with extras luxuriate in dances, roller rinks, sieges, and other forms of choreographed circular motion.
It really does take the complete, seemingly limitless running time to appreciate the scope of the film’s sweeping, romanticized vision. That being said, its spellbinding qualities are evident even in a clip, and the fact that critics back in 1980 dogpiled it with worst-movie-ever hyperbole only makes this writer’s wretched, parasitic profession look worse. Was it really the worst thing they’d ever seen or just the most hopelessly expensive? One wishes it really did bankrupt a studio. Alas, that part of the Heaven’s Gate myth isn’t true.
Availability: The 219-minute version of Heaven’s Gate is available to rent or purchase digitally from Amazon, Apple, and VUDU.
175 Comments
I liked Heaven’s Gate alright, but I think I had more fun reading Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven’s Gate written by former United Artists studio exec Stephen Bach. The beginning of the book goes into what was sort of different about United Artists as a studio in general, but mostly Bach goes through his old notes and rolodex to try to remember how exactly things escalated the way they did on that film set. It’s basically a giant lesson about sunk cost fallacy in the end.
The part that’s interesting to me is that all the dailies looked great, because yeah, in isolation all those scenes look really good, in combination it’s just too much.
The dailies may have been part of the problem (well, not specifically them). One of the main reasons why the film kept going so far over budget was the miles and miles and miles of film that Cimino shot. It would be interesting to see how much less that film would cost now, shot in digital, because the cost of just film itself, as well as development and printing, was so expensive back then.
It’s actually not unheard of for directors to shoot lots of footage. Fincher does, Chazelle does it. Beatty and Coppola did it. This is part only part of the problem. The big money suck was how much Cimino spent shooting all that footage. He took too much time executing shots, precisely laying every scene out, waiting for the right conditions. He would hand pick his extras, and personally arrange them one by one, like a painter composing a shot. He spent a whole day getting ONE camera setup right. Another day, his crew filmed NOTHING the entire day because he was waiting for the right cloud pattern for the background. Waiting like this, you run up costs in labor and people standing by, including meal penalties from his union crew because he refused to break for lunch. He was so deliberative and precise, that after 5 days filming, he was four days behind.
Compare that to prologue at Harvard, which was shot under strict controls for time and budget. It is no less splendid in scope and composition. But it was too late. If Cimino had been reined in from the get go, if he’d had a strong producer controlling him, as had been the case in the past, I think he would’ve had the same, visually splendid result, but done with less than half of what was spent, and I think the result would’ve been received far more sympathetically by the public and the press.
Of I recall correctly, while Cimino shot more film than average (costly, but by no accounts all that unusual), the percentage he had developed was way above average. It really drove the point home to me about how digital filming has made filming more widely accessible. Sure, it takes more than just a cellphone to make a good movie, but it costs next to nothing for an amateur director to shoot a few different angles and takes. Not that remaking Heaven’s Gate today would be advisable, but maybe just that scene in the old timey roller rink.
Yes you’re correct, he printed nearly every take he shot, which inflated lab costs, but as a percentage of the budget, it didn’t have that much impact. The bulk of the cost overruns had to do with the length of the shoot. IIRC to keep the whole production going cost $250,000 a day, and he worked so slowly, that at one point he was averaging $1,000,000 spent for every finished minute of footage, which is insane.The film started production in late April ‘79 for a December release. They didn’t even wrap shooting until the follow March. That’s how badly managed the production was, and that’s where the bulk of the money went.Also one thing that doesn’t get discussed is Cimino may have committed embezzlement. He apparently owned a chunk of land through a holding company that the production then rented for use in the production. He was effectively paying himself to rent land he already owned.
He shot WAY more than average. It was the most footage ever shot for a film – ever – up to that point. Piles and piles of it.
Warren Beatty wound up topping it by shooting 2.5 to 3 million feet of film, and printing a third of it. He loved to shoot lots of takes, but worked more quickly than Cimino.
I recently read a Beatty biography. I forget who said it, but somebody who worked on Reds with him was questioning whether you’re really a good director if you shoot every scene from every conceivable angle, over and over and over again, then spend over a year with a team of editors piecing it into something coherent. He had editors working on Reds around-the-clock. I happen to like the movie a great deal, but I can dig what the person is saying. It’s not like he had to storyboard everything, but you really should have SOME idea what you’re planning to do. Diane Keaton got so sick of it she said, “That’s enough” during the shooting of Beatty’s big death scene, walked out to her car, drove away, and literally never came back! It was the last day she worked on the movie. And she was dating the guy!
This is one of those philosophical things, where I expect many will disagree with me, but as a filmmaker, I’m personally really opposed to a lot of takes. Beyond all the problems it creates for the budget, schedule and editing process, it’s just psychologically battering for everyone involved, and the results usually aren’t worth the trouble. People love to cite David Fincher and Stanley Kubrick. Personally, I’ve never felt performances were terribly strong for EITHER filmmaker. Kubrick was particularly clinical in his approach to his actors, who were just another element of set dressing for him. And Fincher, I just find to be a fairly workaday director whose repetitive take shooting seems to reflect an indecision in his process, and a desire to have many, many options. Which I find lazy. It’s what rehearsals are for, to hone in the performance. When you go before camera, you should have eliminated most of the guess work, and it should be about fine tuning. I think Clint Eastwood has gotten far better work from his actors, and he’s (in)famous for shooting just two or three takes, and moving on. It’s also the inflexibility I dislike. Different actors respond to different modes. Robert Altman discovered this on McCabe & Mrs Miller, with Julie Christie and Warren Beatty. Beatty needed lots of takes, to effectively workshop his performance on camera. Christie was best on the first two takes, and then quickly began to lose steam as it was increasingly about going through the motions. That Altman resolved these two disparate approaches and got career best work out of both of them, is a testament to his strength as a director. Which isn’t to say there’s not a place for repetition as a directorial method, but it’s gotta be used for something greater than a director’s indecision and need for lots of options. Bresson used repetition as a means to an end, to compel his actors to shed their bad habits from years of training, to achieve something on screen that was free from artifice. And Dreyer used repetition in collaboration with Falconetti in order to truly fine tune the performance. And it made a difference. Their film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, survives in two versions, the original cut, and a second cut made from second best takes after the first was thought lost in a fire. If you compare the two you can see the difference. The best takes are superior to the second best takes. They were truly searching for the performance on camera, and needed to capture the process, and repetition was the means to the end.
I agree with every word you’ve written there, all of it, and I know McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Bresson, and Dreyer’s film very well. Sidney Lumet also shot very few takes (my friend is an assistant director who worked on one of his films, and she says she never saw a director move so fast in her life), but his secret was always insisting on two weeks of rehearsal. I would imagine that’s the best approach. How do you feel about shooting scenes in single takes with no cover? I feel like that, too, would help an actor immensely. Woody Allen is a master at that, and he very often gets great performances out of his actors…and isn’t it strange to have to flinch a little when you reference Woody Allen nowadays? (Kubrick and his 55 takes of every scene is absolutely ridiculous to me. I honestly believe he was autistic to some degree and couldn’t make himself stop once he got going. I truly love some of his films, but I think several of them are vastly overrated because of their obvious technical skill, as opposed to their being emotionally involving. The performances often lack real depth. I feel like he wrung it out of the actors while shooting take after take after take.)
I’ve worked on a lot of productions, and I’m amazed how how little any of them used rehearsal. They just do it on camera, because I guess they figure it’s digital, they might as well get coverage. I don’t get it.My last feature was a non-fiction film, which for a number of logistical reasons was shot on 16mm film. And in order to keep on budget, I had a very strict shooting ratio. In some instances I shot only two takes for a particular shot in the film. Other times, just one. And it made for a marvelous experience in the edit, because instead of having to sort through ten or twenty takes of the same shot, as has been the case on other films I’ve edited, for my film, it was all about deciding between take 1 or take 2, and it really allowed me to focus on the merits of each shot, to interrogate it visually and truly make an active decision. Because after you’ve shot so many takes, I really think you’ll start getting diminished returns, and when you’ve got ten, twenty, thirty takes, it ceases to matter, and it renders the editor more passive because they’ve got so many choices, and none of them really have weight because oh if the director doesn’t like take 13, why not try take 26, and oh hey, take 31 was pretty good too.
As for your question about master shots without coverage..LOVE EM! I find so much of the standard cinematic lexicon so damn tiresome. Over the shoulder shots, repetitious cutting back and forth. It heightens artificiality. As an editor, I can often spot when I’m seeing different takes jammed together, and it robs the scene of spontaneity and honesty. Master takes put more responsibility upon the director and actors. John Ford loved masters, and would make a point of avoiding shooting coverage, because he KNEW the producers would force him to use the footage. Most famous, there is a magnificent shot in How Green Was My Valley, where a woman departs a church, married to a man she does not love. Her true love, the church’s pastor, steps into view in the distance, just as the bridal carriage departs, and he stands alone, small in figure against trees and cemetery tombstones, and walks away . It’s simply perfect, and when they filmed it, the DP asked Ford if they wanted a close up of the pastor, and Ford said, “No, because you know the Producers will want to use it.” And they would’ve. And it would’ve been utterly wrong.
I’ve also been steeped in a major endeavor to reconstruct “The Magnificent Ambersons,” and it is FULL of shots like these, where Welles eschews coverage for single take masters. Three, four even five minute long unbroken takes. They’re phenomenal, and natural and real, and one can see why the studio freaked and cut out so much wholesale, because the shots were all or nothing proposals, because there were no cutaways. You couldn’t edit them. You had to take or leave them. And as a result, fifty minutes was cut out, in one of the greatest artistic travesties every committed.
We have a great deal in common considering your reference points. I feel precisely the same that you do. (You’re doing God’s work on that “Ambersons” project, as I’m sure you know. It will be fascinating. If you run into Peter Bogdanovich during the process, tell him to go fuck himself for me. He was briefly connected to something I wrote years ago, and let’s just say I didn’t appreciate his behavior. That’s the nice way of putting it.)
I’m so sorry to read that. Bogdanovich is a piece of work for sure. Did you listen to the amazing ten part podcast on his partner, Polly Platt? She was the key to his success. When that collaboration ended, his career took a deep dive.
Yeah, I know all of that. He’s a piece of work to the point that I used to note studio executives would openly laugh if you mentioned his name, but they wouldn’t dare laugh at any other names! Again, I’m sure you recognize Hollywood is the land of pretending everyone is your friend if you think you can possibly utilize them to make some money further on down the road. Never is heard a discouraging word, even when one seems applicable. But it appeared nobody saw Bogdanovich as a possible future cash cow, not at that point. (All of that said, I still love both The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon. I can still watch them. He – and Platt – had it going for a while, anyway)
Oh yes, such phenomenal films. And ones that, ideally, should have a co-director credit on them for Platt. They really are as much hers as they were Bogdanovich’s. Does he do anything anymore, except appear as himself on documentaries about John Ford and the good ole days?
The last time I saw him on TV he didn’t seem healthy. I still admire him as a film historian. His books of interviews with actors and filmmakers are terrific. I don’t know if he’s still doing any of that type of writing, but I would welcome it.
Sounds about right. Beatty is known for being a massive narcissist with OCD and a habit of cold calling people at three o’clock in the morning so he can flex.Tool…
I’d like to know that, too, but the photography wouldn’t be quite that gorgeous in digital. The key reason to even try watching the movie is that photography.
It’s basically a giant lesson about sunk cost fallacy in the end.I saw part of a documentary about it, and it seemed like he was just never going to finish the movie.It was like he made them stop him, so if it didn’t work out, he could blame them. He could always say it would’ve been a masterpiece if only they’d given him a little more time and money.
What a silly man. That would never work…
This is likely the documentary you saw. It’s based on Steven Bach’s book about the making of Heaven’s Gate and the Fall of United Artists, Final Cut
The book should be required reading for all film students to this day along with a detailed history of “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.”
What was the issue with Star Trek: The Motion Picture? I remember it being kind of overlong and meandering, but nowhere near Heaven’s Gate. Was it a big flop/money pit?ETA: Apparently: https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/the-troubled-production-of-star-trek-the-motion-picture/
My older brother and I were so excited to go see this in the theatre. We were so, so bored and I remember leaving feeling cheated. I wondered about ten years ago if the movie would be better now that I wasn’t a teenager anymore. I couldn’t get through 1/2 of it. Maybe because I knew the ending, but it was still so, so boring.
Same here. My friends and I were big movie-heads – we’ve all ended up working in movies, in one job or another – and it was just brutal to sit through.
It was just kind of baffling how long and boring it was, because the TV show was always relatively focused and on-point, even the bad episodes, due to the constraints of the format.Jesse Baker’s post below probably explains why it the movie turned out the way it did: The producers decided they wanted to make a Star Trek movie like 2001: A Space Odyssey, even though Roddenberry’s kum-ba-ya optimism is almost diametrically opposed to Kubrick’s cynical humanism.
STTMP just went way, way over budget – it came in came in equal to Heaven’s Gate at a bit over $44 million. Remember, Heaven’s Gate is a film that required extensive location shots, elaborate period set sets and costumes, and large numbers of extras. Star Trek mostly involves the same seven or eight people wearing spandex jumpsuits, sitting around one static set, describing what they’re viewing on a screen.Of course, that’s not the entire story – the special effects were fairly involved, even for their time. This is before ILM became a one stop shop for all Hollywood’s outer space movie needs. In fact, they were so involved they final reels were literally being assembled minutes before they were to be flown out to the premiere. That, scripting problems, and Gene Roddenberry’s never productive relationship with studio brass, all made for what Paramount saw as an unnecessarily expensive and difficult project.Of course, Star Trek was highly profitable, so it does not have the mega bomb reputation of Heaven’s Gate. But there’s a great anecdote that tells you how the studio regarded the experience of making Star Trek: When they began developing Wrath of Khan they had long ago become fed up with Roddenberry and brought in Harve Bennett, a veteran TV producer. At a meeting with Paramount brass, Bennett was asked his thoughts about the first film. He confessed he found it slow and boring, and said he felt he could do better. He was then asked by Gulf and Western CEO Charles Bludhorn if he could make a sequel for “less than forty-five fucking million dollars?” Bennett replied, “Where I come from, I can make five movies for that.”
Don’t forget Stephen Collins
I just watched Wrath of Khan (again, for the millionth time) last night, and it still amazes me that they made it for nothing and is, essentially, the best Star Trek film ever, and easily in the top 10 of best sci-fi films in the modern era. ETA: I was sure that it was made for -only- $10 million, but I was off by $2 million. Grossing $97 mil in 1982 dollars on a $12 million budget ain’t all that bad. Considering I’ve seen all the Star Trek/Wars movies multiple times, WoK easily has the tightest script between all series and really doesn’t seem to play out scenes or narratives for unneeded dialogue.
Comparing TMP with Wrath of Khan is one of my favorite object lessons for how all the money in the world can’t compensate for fundamentals like an exciting story concept and good characterization. There was a little bit of luck involved too. In my opinion, it’s hard to underestimate how much James Horner’s score elevates the film above “cheap Star Trek sequel.” At the time, he was a relative unknown and thus an affordable alternative to Jerry Goldsmith.
“There was a little bit of luck involved too.”WoK is a master class in re-working old sets, utilizing previous equipment, and throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. Apparently either Nimoy or Shatner had to personally convince Takai to come back for WoK. The Genesis planet CGI proposal was supposedly the first of its’ kind in any movie at that point. I also just re-watched ST:Beyond, and the number of studios that backed it…baffled me. The last production house listed was Skydance, which made me wonder how many franchises Tom Cruise has his hands in anymore.
“[A]nd throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.”Much of the credit there goes to Nicholas Meyer. From Wikipedia: Karen Moore, a Paramount executive, suggested that Nicholas Meyer, writer of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and director of Time After Time, could help resolve the screenplay issues. Meyer had also never seen an episode of Star Trek. He had the idea of making a list consisting of everything that the creative team had liked from the preceding drafts—”it could be a character, it could be a scene, it could be a plot, it could be a subplot, […] it could be a line of dialogue”—so that he could use that list as the basis of a new screenplay made from all the best aspects of the previous ones… The effects company required a completed script in just 12 days. Meyer wrote the screenplay uncredited and for no pay before the deadline, surprising the actors and producers, and rapidly produced subsequent rewrites as necessary.
I’m very familiar with the WoK origins. But this was a good refresher. It also amazes me that Meyer managed to bring ST back twice, then the third time he was brought in, he put a shovel in the ground with Nemesis. In all honesty, I do like the TNG films, but they lack the full dynamic of the OS movies. Even the best of the four TNG, First Contact, is somehow out of character for even Picard. This is perhaps why I really like ST:Beyond. It captured the heart of ST in only the first 15 minutes…but then left it behind (for the most part). I still like it better than the second ST redux. Also: Karl Urban may be the best non-DeForest Kelley to play Bones. Pine was fine as Kirk, Quinto was decent as Spock (perfect in the scene with the Vulcan ambassadors in Beyond), but Urban nailed Kelley’s nuances and tone.
Meyer’s contributions to Star Trek IV (basically, the 20th century story) are also the best parts of the movie. I don’t think Meyer was actually involved with Nemesis. Though imagine how much better it might have been if he had been! I found this on the following website:
http://www.warpedfactor.com/2015/10/10-things-you-might-not-know-about-star.htmlNicholas Meyer, director of both Wrath of Khan and Undiscovered Country,
was approached to direct Star Trek: Nemesis by producer Rick Berman.
Meyer was interested, but insisted that he would want to do a complete
rewrite of the screenplay before production. Berman was forced to
refuse, as he had already promised John Logan full control over the
screenplay, and so Meyer respectfully turned the offer down.I think the major problem of all of the TNG cast films is that they failed to recognize the fundamental difference between that show and TOS. The latter was a show about Kirk and Spock (plus their cantankerous friend, McCoy), with a colorful supporting cast. TNG was far more of an ensemble show – Picard showed up in nearly every episode, but there are many where he’s in the background. The movies all tried to force Picard and Data into Kirk and Spock roles, and mostly had very little for the rest of the cast to do.
I prefer TMP To WoK.
I’ve grown a lot fonder of TMP than I used to be. I admire its ambition, and its attempt at doing a “smart” Star Trek film. The cinematography is top notch. Robert Wise was an amazing director. I still like Khan more, but I wish current iterations of Star Trek would tilt the lever just a little bit away from the latter and more towards the former.
One thing I find ironic about TMP is that it was inspired by the success of Star Wars but ended up being more like 2001.
Among other things, the script was a heavily altered script for the planned but never finalized “Phase II” TV reboot of Star Trek that Rodenberry had been trying to get off the ground that was heavily rewritten to include Spock (who had told Rodenberry that he wouldn’t come back for it; the Vulcan who died a horrific death in the transporter accident was a meta bridge drop on the character that would have replaced ) and the budget doubled due to the fact that the producers decided to make the film basically be Star Trek Meets Kubrick’s 2001 (which it pulls off in spite of the fact that it shouldn’t have worked).
I’ll give the producers who wanted to turn Star Trek into 2001 points for balls, if not sense.I disagree that they pulled it off, but at least that explains the overlong, meandering V’GER scenes. Among other things, the script was a heavily altered script for the planned but never finalized “Phase II” TV reboot of Star Trek that Rodenberry had been trying to get off the groundYou know who could probably make that work? Zack Sn(Phony Pope is immediately torn to pieces and eaten by wild dogs)
The budget was 33m, the cost 44m and the box office $88 m.
Excellent, thank you for the recommendation. I love reading about how these disasters unfold behind the scenes. Have you read The Devil’s Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood?
I have, and it’s enjoyable, but Final Cut is better.
I can’t find it now, but didn’t Roger Ebert have a famous quote about how no movie could be considered good if a documentary (or in this case, book) about making the movie would be more interesting than the movie itself?I’m kind of butchering the quote, but hopefully the concept makes sense.
I’d heard a similar quote, which may be the one you are thinking of, attributed to Gene Siskel, that the movie is no good if you’d rather watch a documentary about the film’s stars having lunch.
I’ve heard that quote (paraphrase?) before, and it seems to lose some luster for me when comparing Apocalypse Now and the 1991 documentary on its’ filming. It does seem to be not the norm, however. I do like how Coppola essentially got reinspired by the doc to finally do his directors cut of Apocalypse.
Thank you for bringing up that book , never heard of it and now planning to buy it.
This book and “Hit and Run” about Jon Peters and Peter Gruber fooling the Japanese into letting them run a movie studio are probably the two best Hollywood insider books I’ve read. Unless you have others I may have missed…
Oh my god, I’d almost forgotten about that book. The part where Jon Peters and Peter Guber decide to go to couples counselling together to mend their frayed “relationship” was mind boggling.I can’t even imagine what it must have been like for the therapist to sit there and keep schtum while these two dishonest bloviating narcissists gaslight each other into thinking that there was actual emotion and respect between them.Bob Shaye of New Line Cinema used to keep a plaque on his desk that said “Don’t smoke the Hollywood crack pipe”. I think The Devil’s Candy, Hit & Run, and High Concept are the perfect trilogy to encapsulate late 70’s to early 90’s hollywood hubris and crack pipe smoking…
Robert Altman’s thoughts when Don Simpson died: “Good. I’m only sorry he didn’t live longer and suffer more. “
I think that Siskel and Ebert once reviewed a big, multi star epic that they found overblown and dull by saying that a more interesting movie could have been made about the deals to put together the production than the actual movie itself.
I feel in this, as with many historical epics, the pomp and pageantry kind of overwhelms things- it makes it harder to relate and connect to the story at its heart. Like Cimino clearly wanted to get into the culture and community of these immigrant ranchers, as he did with the steeltown folks in Deer Hunter, but they never quite register as people (apart from Ella, thanks to Huppert’s great performance.)In Final Cut, former UA head Steven Bach’s book about the film- which to be sure is from the perspective of more of a bean counter- he says the original Johnson County War script had a more ruthless, violent Western feel, and I feel like that was the way to go. The plot is very simple, it’s bad men coming on the noonday coach and the townsfolk have to stop them, there’s almost no moral ambiguity here, and I don’t think it’d lose the class warfare angle if it were a leaner picture. But UA got a little nervous because they released Comes A Horseman and that flopped so they wanted it less Westerny, and stuff like the prologue and epilogue made it feel more like A Big American Epic like The Godfather, or The Deer Hunter. I just don’t think the pace works. Even stuff like the scene in the clubhouse where the protagonist learns of the owners’ plans to kill all the rustlers, which should be something pretty brief and impactful, seems to drag a while. I doubt the 145-minute cut fixed things because it’s rarely *just* a matter of making a movie shorter (is it even possible to see that version now? Is it on the Criterion disc?), but at 219 minutes it’s just kind of a slog.
I think some of the vitriol from critics also comes from the fact that it feels very self-indulgent as you’re watching it and I think that comes in part from the pace. You’re left a lot of time to say “Oh, wow, this is still happening…” or “Wow, this shot is long…” and that’s not how you want to feel a watching a movie. The comparable passion projects from that era don’t generally feel that way to me.I posted this above, but there’s 5, uninterrupted minutes of a fiddler on roller skates just being a fiddler. That’s a choice and one that really does very little to advance the plot or develop characters. That’s not something in isolation. There’s a lot of scenes that are beautiful in their own way but do absolutely nothing.I also have to admit I have never watched it without knowing all the backstory. I knew about the film before I saw it, but I did watch with a friend who just knew it was meant to be bad and I remember them saying: “I didn’t expect so much roller skating.” And it’s like nope, that’s kind of a surprise in some ways.
To shorten your comment, the problem with the movie, even in the “shorter” version is- It’s boring!
That, and I feel like critics were beginning to sour on some of the tropes of the New Hollywood. We look back on it as a golden age and it was generally pretty good for movies but some of the relentless dourness was wearing on people. Like the downer ending on this one feels kinda like it’s just there to be a downer- it was important to Cimino, who ended the script with “What one loves most are the things that fade”, but it’s not really what the film’s about. I can totally appreciate slow scenes that don’t strictly “add to” the narrative, I think Tarkovsky’s Solaris is great and that’s got a 15-minute sequence of traffic, but folks like Tarkovsky and Kubrick can really make a slow pace feel hypnotic and immersive, and Cimino, as great a visual director as he is, never quite reaches those heights. (This is also why I get very impatient at modern sci-fi movies that are clearly trying to be like 2001, like, 2001 only works because every frame is pure visual art. Are you really that confident in your own abilities?)
Some people blame Spielberg and Lucas for killing the Golden Age of Movies, but I think even if it weren’t for Star Wars people would’ve eventually got tired of all the downer movies.
I posted this above, but there’s 5, uninterrupted minutes of a fiddler on roller skates just being a fiddler. Someone posted that scene below and you are TOTALLY exaggerating… the part where it’s just a fiddler on roller skates fiddlin’ doesn’t go for five minutes, it goes for 90 seconds…….which is still, like, a hell of a long time to watch a fiddler fiddlin’ on roller skates, especially followed by 3:30 of additional roller skating WHILE the fiddler keeps fiddlin’.For me, I think, the wildest decision in that scene is to add a SECOND roller skatin’ fiddler about half-way through, who almost immediately falls over and has to do a complicated roll to avoid smashing up his fiddle.
I didn’t even realize Comes a Horseman flopped til your comment. Less than ten million gross, which wasn’t much even back then. That was a great movie.
I’m pretty familiar with that era of movies, but I’ve never even heard of Comes a Horseman.A western with James Caan, Jane Fonda, Mark Harmon (?!), Jason Robards, and Richard Farnsworth sounds like a movie I need to see.Then again, so does a western with Jack Nicholson, Marlon Brando, Frederic Forrest, and Harry Dean Stanton, and that movie sucked.
The short version was released on DVD by MGM in Europe, as it was the only one that existed in foreign dubs.
I do think it’s an extremely competently made film. In a lot of scenes, it is visually gorgeous.But it’s also a movie full of choices that just make you go “huh?”I remember that it popped up on a list of the 100 Worst Ideas of the 20th Century, and to me that’s a better assessment. One of my favorite quotes about the movie is from 2008 from Joe Queenan: “This is a movie that has five minutes of uninterrupted fiddle-playing by a fiddler who is also mounted on roller skates. This is a movie that defies belief.”It’s not the worst movie ever made, but it is questionable why this would be the passion project of the guy who made The Deer Hunter and it certainly earns some of its rep for ruining auteur driven film.
It reads like a talented man high on his own success. The Greeks themselves couldn’t write a better morality fable then this.
It’s also such a different movie from The Deer Hunter and maybe he just needed some stepping stones. A lot of the 70s Film Brats went on to do things farther from where they started but not quite as quickly or extremely.
As a general rule I’m skeptical of giving directors unlimited time and money. I think the best art always comes from working within constraints. Eyes Wide Shut has some amazing scenes, but there’s no need for it to be as long as it is. Behind the scenes, Kubrick was so obsessively controlling that he not only took a year and a half to shoot the film, but was acting as Tom and Nicole’s marriage counselor. My point is that even brilliant directors aren’t gods. Somebody needs to say no to them eventually.
I feel like critics really want to give Cimino the benefit of the doubt. He made The Deer Hunter! An undisputed classic by almost any measure!
And I don’t disagree, but it’s the anomaly in his oeuvre, not the rule. He made nothing even close to comparable, before or since. Sometimes a person only has one great movie in them, and sometimes a style is so chaotic and avant garde that it coheres for the a moment in just the right alchemy of circumstances to make to it work before careening off into the darkness again.
I feel like critics really want to give Cimino the benefit of the doubt. He made The Deer Hunter! An undisputed classic by almost any measure! Is it? I remember liking it the last time I saw it (which was a while ago), but I also remember it being kind of a mess, elevated by its great cast, including John Cazale’s last performance.
Hubris is a hellofa drug.
I feel like the powers that be were just waiting for something to be the end of the auteur era. Looking at the media at the time they were totally gunning for Apocalypse Now being the nail in the coffin, unfortunately for them it was actually a success (and better than anyone expected.) If Days of Heaven had done the same something else would have been the fall guy for the end of the era, it seems inevitable.
I don’t disagree, but it does seem like an act of hubris on Cimino’s side when you read about production and where he dug his heels in and the allegations around his behavior. It may just be the Cimino was not the guy who should have free reign on a movie. Maybe he just needed better/different collaborators because I do think there is a lot of good in Heaven’s Gate. It’s just also kind of a mess at the same time.
It was a series of things, first Sorcerer, then this, then finally One From The Heart which killed Zoetrope. And movie studios got in general very panicky about movies going over budget because of things like this. (There’s even a story about Lucas being denied a loan extension when Empire went over budget, just because the bank made that a policy.) There were a lot of *attempts* to control movies going over budget going forward, but I say attempts because of course nothing actually worked.
I have to disagree on the rolling skating/fiddling scene. First off, I think it’s lovely and was one of my favourite scenes when I watched the film, but aside from that bias, I think the whole section in the roller rink shows that the settlers really are a community, much better than the cock fighting and arguments. Which is important in establishing why they band together to fight at the end instead of just scattering.For me, the opening at Harvard is the big hill to get over. I get the point of it, but it’s the one part that I feel really should’ve been trimmed. Also, much as I love John Hurt, it feels like his character must’ve had an actual arc and point in an earlier draft of the script, and would’ve been cut from the final film except that it was John Hurt, they’d already got him to Montana and had to pay him anyway.
And that’s fair – again, I do agree with the premise that the level of criticism is probably much more than this film deserves. I do agree it’s a lovely scene. It’s just, for me, a bit indicative of the film – it’s a movie where we’re going to spend 5 minutes on fiddling and a lot of other 5 minute chunks of time on other things that aren’t consequential. Maybe that is the movie he wanted to make, but man, does it feel long which makes it harder to enjoy those moments, for me.On the John Hurt front – Allegedly, he spent so much time waiting in Montana, that he ultimately left, filmed The Elephant Man and came back to start filming again because they said they still needed him.
It’s unquestionably a flawed film, I suspect I’m just more on it’s wavelength than most.Yes, I did read that anecdote about Hurt filming he Elephant Man in between scenes on HG. What would they have done without him stumbling around drunk, making 19th century jokes in all those scenes? I suppose he’s supposed to represent the banality of evil or something along those lines, but that could’ve been accomplished with much less screen time. In the climactic battle, they cut back to him so many times; you knew how it was going to end for him, but boy did they take their time getting there.
Cimino was only able to shoot the opening by FINALLY picking up the glacial pace of shooting and staying within his enforced budget. Though set at Harvard, they refused to allow the production to shoot there so they went to England and use Oxford as a substitute so that added a big chunk to the budget and cost them over $500,000 to shoot the scene. Cimino was on a very tight leash and if at any moment he disobeyed his orders or went over budget, UA would order the producti0on shut down and send everyone home.
They’re not even bad scenes, just a pretty big hill to get over for a prologue that arguably only makes a single, simple point. It also takes a lot of suspension of disbelief to pretend that Kristofferson and Hurt aren’t clearly twenty years older than the dozens of students surrounding them for that extended length of time.
If you read Final Cut, or watch the documentary, you can tell that UA really didn’t want to let Cimino to shoot it as the movie was already millions over budget. However, they simply convinced themselves it might be – or it WILL be – another Deer Hunter. During the entire length of production, everything UA initially said no to, Cimino won in the end. He just continually did it his way, and it’s one that cannot work. Waiting all day for that one shot when the clouds part and the sun shines down just perfectly cost them hundreds of thousands. Or moving an entire portion of the town set back six feet. Not by tearing it down and rebuilding it, which would have been cheaper, but moving what was already built back three feet on each side. I don’t think he sacrificed anything. By the time they were deep into it, Cimino tried to make a stand and quit but US called his bluff because they already looked into replacing him but no other director was insane enough to take it on. Nor would any other studio throw good money after bad and co-produce the film. UA was stuck, but in the end, their owner Transamerica simply wrote the entire escapade off and sold UA to MGM.
You forgot the collateral damage the film did as Cimeno going overbudget cost Scorsese’s Raging Bull the money promised to Martin for the film’s promotion, which hurt it badly when it came to Oscar season and cost Martin the Oscar for best picture/director. Or other directors who had their projects shut down or denied because UA didn’t have money to fund them due to Heaven’s Gate.
You are correct. They were also forced to sell off projects that ended up being successful such as Splash. Who knows if they would have turned out the same under UA, but the company really could have used a hit at the time, but it wasn’t going to happen. Not even For Your Eyes Only was enough to help.
And of course, Oxford doesn’t resemble Harvard much visually, Cimino just thought that the “feel” of one of the world’s most prestigious universities “playing” another of the world’s most prestigious universities would come through on film.
And UA simply let him do it instead of telling him to look stateside. After reading Final Cut, you really do understand that UA was mostly at fault here. They wanted a Cimino picture, and they got one. EVERY red flag that came up to give them pause was dismissed as “Nah, It’ll be fine” ( YouTube watchers will understand when I say all I hear is The Critical Drinker now when I read that.)Cimino lied on his resume – He was much older than he stated. So what, It’s Hollywood. Who doesn’t? He was not in the Green Beret’s as he once told an interviewer, nor was he a director of documentaries.
Cimino quietly purchased land in Kallispell, Montana that he conveniently found to be great for shooting and tried to charge UA a fee for shooting there. The soon found out and told him where to put that fee.
He wrote “The Dogs of War” and when asked to direct it, said no.Clint Eastwood had to corral Cimino from multiple takes during Thunderbolt and Lightfoot telling him he had the shot and move on.
(Eastwood was producing as well as acting)The historical basis of Heaven’s Gate, The Johnson County War did happen. Sort of. There wasn’t any war, and the fighting that did occur was nothing as it was portrayed in the movie.He cast Isabelle Huppert without getting UA approval. They told him no, her English was horrible….the next day they gave in and said yes.It is amazing what you can ignore when it isn’t your money. Admittedly it is all there on the screen. There was little Russian caviar and lobster on the menu, but wow 52 takes for a whip crack? Damn.Within the first two weeks he had shot over 2 hours of footage and of that only approved less than 3 minutes of it. He was already nearly two weeks behind schedule.
That gives an insight as to why Eastwood is still producing and directing movies even at 90: he makes a deal and then delivers a film on time and within the budget.
Eastwood is renowned in Hollywood as having some of the best run productions and his shoots are mostly calm and cool. Really, would you want to be the one crew member to say no to Dirty Harry?
Once on You Tube I found a clip from Graham Norton’s show where Tom Hanks talks about working on a Clint Eastwood movie and he said that Eastwood never yells “action” or “cut” to start or stop a scene. Hanks said that Eastwood always starts the scene by saying in a normal tone “OK, go ahead” and he told Hanks the reason is because that when he worked on “Rawhide”, the old-time directors would shout out orders and yell “Action!” and it would upset the horses, so he doesn’t do it. Hanks also said that instead of yelling “cut”, he just says “That’s enough of that.”
And UA simply let him do it instead of telling him to look stateside. After reading Final Cut, you really do understand that UA was mostly at fault here. They wanted a Cimino picture, and they got one. EVERY red flag that came up to give them pause was dismissed as “Nah, It’ll be fine” ( YouTube watchers will understand when I say all I hear is The Critical Drinker now when I read that.)Cimino lied on his resume – He was much older than he stated. So what, It’s Hollywood. Who doesn’t? He was not in the Green Beret’s as he once told an interviewer, nor was he a director of documentaries.
Cimino quietly purchased land in Kallispell, Montana that he conveniently found to be great for shooting and tried to charge UA a fee for shooting there. The soon found out and told him where to put that fee.
He wrote “The Dogs of War” and when asked to direct it, said no.Clint Eastwood had to corral Cimino from multiple takes during Thunderbolt and Lightfoot telling him he had the shot and move on.
(Eastwood was producing as well as acting)The historical basis of Heaven’s Gate, The Johnson County War did happen. Sort of. There wasn’t any war, and the fighting that did occur was nothing as it was portrayed in the movie.He cast Isabelle Huppert without getting UA approval. They told him no, her English was horrible….the next day they gave in and said yes.It is amazing what you can ignore when it isn’t your money. Admittedly it is all there on the screen. There was little Russian caviar and lobster on the menu, but wow 52 takes for a whip crack? Damn.
I was thinking that there must be dozens of colleges in New England, New York or Ontario that look more like mid-nineteenth century Harvard than Oxford does. Why not shoot there?
Because they’re not the same level of world-famous big-brain-factories that writers can use as a way to indicate that a character is intelligent, which Cimino apparently believed totally would have come across on screen. People would have totally been able to tell if they’d filmed at an institution that characters in movies don’t constantly cite having gone to as a way to indicate their brilliance! Apparently.
By the way, the fiddler is David Mansfield, who also wrote the score to the film, after being part of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975-1976.I’ll give you an idea about how much the production was fucked. For decades, Cimino had an on again off again romantic relationship with his producer, Joann Carelli. But he also had an affair with Isabelle Huppert, which he cast as the female lead in Heaven’s Gate, developing her part more and more. During this time, Carelli felt in love and married… David Mansfield, which Cimino kept on hiring for his next three projects.
And to be clear, the fiddling is excellent. I’m not trying to find fault with the actors or performers because I do think they all just did what they were told to do. Why they were told to do these things is a little more of a mystery. The answer seems to be “because Cimino said so and he was the auteur,” which suggests Cimino need a different setup. I don’t know that this movie would have been good in other hands, but I do think it has enough stuff to suggest there was a good movie somewhere in there.
And according to “Final Cut” Carelli totally screwed Mansfield over on the score, paying him something like $10K to do it, for which the production then gained ownership, after which she then sold the score to UA for something like ten times as much.
That Joe Queenan quote makes me want to see the movie, because 1. that scene as he described it is something I’ve definitely never seen before, and that’s usually a good thing for me rather than a reason to go “wtf even is this – next!”… and 2. the intensity of Joe Queenan’s contempt, which is pretty much the only notable quality I’ve ever seen in his writing, is often directly proportional to how much I’ll like a thing or at least see interesting qualities in it that he doesn’t give a shit about. He’s always seemed to me more like an attitude more than a critic. I still vividly remember from 30+ years ago a hatchet job he did on Stephen King’s IT in which he didn’t criticize the book’s story or writing so much as just insulted the characters themselves – calling them “Fatty”, etc, in a way that made it clear he wasn’t saying that was King’s attitude toward them but Queenan’s – like he actually enjoyed bullying fictional characters *because* they were depicted as victims of bullying. I haven’t seen any sign that he grew up since then.
“But it’s also a movie full of choices that just make you go “huh?”Like the scene where a bunch of old dudes are graduating from college and you realize that, no, John Hurt is in fact supposed to be playing a 23 year-old?
I think it earns a great deal of the rep. But all the auteurs of the 70’s made their beautiful turkeys- “New York, New York,” “One from the Heart,” “1941,” “At Long Last Love,” etc. As great as they were (or still are) those directors bit off more than they could chew, or, in some instances, took a big bite and didn’t have any idea how to properly chew it once they got going. They all eventually blew it in a very expensive way, but Cimino did it more drastically than the rest of them and was an egotistical asshole to boot. The studios were able to point at all these incredibly talented filmmakers and say, “Look! Even he wasted a pile of money when we let him do what he wanted!” That was the end of it. The trick, of course, is that the studios blow just as much money on their own as they ever lost by trusting talented directors. But studio executives have to feel like they know what they’re doing, so now they get to ride people’s asses on every movie, regardless of how many bad movies that executive has controlled in the past. I’m a screenwriter, and it’s quite an experience to sit in an executive’s office and look at the posters on the walls for all the horse shit they nurtured while they tell you why they don’t like your script.
I think the film’s biggest flaw is the script. SO many directors get it in their head they can write too, and this is a rarity. The Deer Hunter was great because Cimino collaborated (and you can make a strong case that it was mostly Deric Washburn’s contribution) on the script. Heaven’s Gate was all his, and the story is incredibly thin. So many characters in the film are too thinly drawn out. As viewers, we’re left wondering why so and so matters. Who is Jeff Bridges? Why is he there at the end? A big improvement could’ve been made by merging the characters of Champion and Irvine. Separately they’re under developed and rather inert. But merged, they could be fascinating alter egos for Averill, two sides of the same coin.
That and the film dearly needed more time in the edit. THe first cut was reportedly 5.5 hours long. The battle alone was the length of a feature unto itself. Based on the duration of the battle in the final cut, it can be deduced that a large portion of the cut footage was from this sequence, and it shows. It’s a chaotic mess of shouts and circling horses, and Jeff Bridges shouting “Get down!” over and over. You can palpably sense when the film falls all to pieces, and it’s roughly at the 2/3s mark. Up to then, it’s a masterpiece.
Wow. Trailers have sure come a long way.
Contra-verse-ee-al.
Ella (Isabelle Huppert), the county madam, and J.B. (Jeff Bridges)Isabelle to Ella is basically just tweaking the end of her name slightly, to make another name.Jeff Bridges to JB is literally just using his initials.I’m starting to think the director just didn’t want to have to relearn people’s names.
So its like the Office? Creed played by Creed Bratton.
Also:Angela played by Angela KinseyPhyllis played by Phyllis SmithOscar played by Oscan NunezYes, they were really bad for that in the show. It was great.
I know. It was awful. I loved it.
Creed Bratton is just a perfect name for a person who happens to be playing a slightly exaggerated version of himself
I cannot stand westerns (or ‘anti-westerns’).
One day you’ll see one that will click (to me it was Rio Bravo, for some friends it was Shane) and suddenly change your opinion. Westerns are very tied to masculinity and ruling over the wilderness, themes that only resonate on a certain state of mind.
I’m well aware of that AND that state of mind.Not remotely interested.
What. Did you take this badly?
While posting just to state they hate the movie is kind of a dumbass move, I kinda find it offensive whenever people react with “You just haven’t seen the right one” i.e. your taste is wrong and I will sit here and prove it to you somehowLike my friend who insisted I would fall in love with the Grateful Dead if I just heard the right album. After what seemed like years of listening to that “music”, not only do I now hate the GD, I hate that former friend too.
The Searchers. Yes, John Wayne, but he is actually the bad guy in this movie.
Howard Hawks actually beat John Ford to the punch with “Red River”, which showed Wayne could actually play a bad guy rather than just being John Wayne.
I find them extremely repetitive. And I agree with Carlos about how closely they are tied to certain ideas about masculinity. I just fucking hate that presentation of masculinity as well.
I would say “Heaven’s Gate” is one of the most visually exquisite period pieces ever filmed and the only movie I can think of that comes even close to accurately capturing the way that era actually looks in old photographs. Unfortunately, it really is an inert slog of a flick. The script isn’t very compelling and is lacking in even rudimentary dramatics. Worse, the leading cast are all, at best, middle-weights. Kris Kristofferson may look the part but, Jesus, he has the screen presence of a tumble weed and although many of the supporting cast (John Hurt, Sam Waterston) are solid they are little more than set dressing. John Boorman once said that by the late sixties the old studio guard had utterly no idea what kind of films they should be making and were blindly greenlighting films by new directors out of sheer desperation. Whatever “The Deer Hunter’s” merits it hardly justified such a steep investment let alone carte blanche for a director with only two movies under his belt (and for a “western” at that.) This movie could and should have been made for a lot less money and while it would have lost much of its spectacle it would have still looked beautiful and almost as authentic (see the coincidentally titled “Days of Heaven” from two years earlier, or “Matewan,” from 1987, for comparison.) I suspect critics and perhaps even audiences might have then cut the movie a little more slack. I actually wish the film had been better and more successful and can only imagine what films we might have gotten had Hollywood gone down this fork in the road instead of the one “Jaws” “Star Wars” took us down.I honestly don’t think even the more brutal critics were off the mark here, though, if given the opportunity to see the film again on a large screen with a restored print, I’d be very tempted but I still wouldn’t go for anything more than the scenery. Regardless, I always welcome almost any film’s critical reappraisal. It never hurts to question one’s prior judgement through the lens of time.
Well, if you want an atmospheric and revisionist western, photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond, in which the lead has an affair with a foreign bordello madame, you can also try McCabe and Mrs. Miller, which was most likely made with a tenth of the budget and actually had a bigger box office than Heaven’s Gate.
Still Altman’s greatest in my book..
Worst movie ever? No, but it’s not good either. Cimino peaked with Thunderbolt & Lightfoot, and it was downhill after that. It was not worth destroying UA over this bloated nonsense.
I just watched Thunderbolt & Lightfoot a month or so ago. It was good, a little weird, and made me think George Kennedy might have been the secret weapon of the 70s. Or maybe not secret exactly, but if you’d first seen him in The Naked Gun you have a lot of good shit waiting.
In T&L the visuals of Montana are stunning and gorgeous. The difference with it and Heaven’s Gate is the plot keeps rolling along instead of stopping to admire the scenery.
It really did bankrupt a studio – United Artists:https://www.amazon.com/Final-Cut-Making-Heavens-Artists/dp/1557043744Read it. It’s its own sprawling epic. And much less expensive.
See? One book too many, just like the film (fuck, I’m dumb).
Your comment was fine, it just needed the editor to fix it in post.
Well, if we want to be pedantic (and why the Hell not), it didn’t bankrupt the studio. UA were perfectly solvent at the end of it. The problem was Transamerica, their parent company, was embarrassed by the whole thing and saw it as reflecting badly at their attempts at managing the company (going back to the whole reorganization that led to several execs defecting and forming Orion.) So they decided they didn’t wanna be in the movie business anymore and sold. If some other non-studio corporation had bought them they might have survived, but instead it was MGM. (Sorta like Disney buying Fox, really.)
I absolutely fucking love this film. Not as a flawed, ambitious folly, not as a key part of Hollywood history, not as a monolith to pride and ego, but purely on its own merits. It’s bloody great.On the other hand, I cannot stand The Deer Hunter.
Oh, also, the only reason so many critics piled in like they did is because, with time and distance, they realised they’d been sold a pup with The Deer Hunter and felt embarrassed.
Yup. Everyone raved about Deer Hunter because it finally confronted the national flu that was the Vietnam War, and it was INCREDIBLY well acted, but the first time I saw it I (correctly, as it turned out) guessed that the writer was fixated on Russian Roulette and decided to build an entire film around it. (Cimino was hired to adapt “The Man Who Came To Play”, a story about Russian Roulette in Las Vegas, and basically plunked the action into Vietnam.)All the negative stuff written about “Heaven’s Gate” is exactly how I feel about this film. And I’m not trying to be edgy here. I like weird films lots of other people don’t like. I like mainstream blockbusters. I’m usually capable of watching something and saying “not my thing, but I understand why it’s was popular.” But this one (and a few others that are considered “classics”, like Doctor Zhivago) just mystify me that so many people with opinions I respect could be so easily fooled.
Excellent film.
What is funny is, in my opinion only, Heaven’s Gate basically took the same beats from “The Deer Hunter” but fell flat. The overlong extended party at the front was basically just like The Deer Hunter. The Deer Hunter also was about as depressing as one could get, it was at its core anti-patriotic (remember the ironic singing at the end) and would have been considered just as a sure fire miss content wise as Heaven’s Gate.The big difference was stellar performances by Deniro and Walken in The Deer Hunter papered over the uncommercialbility of the plot, it had a couple of the best individual scenes in movie history, and was timely for its time as it dealt with the Vietnam hangover the country experienced where Heaven’s gate was a period piece.
Of all people, Christopher Lambert, who was the star in The Sicilian, has one of the best takes on Cimino. According to him, Cimino was the most talented guy of his generation, better than Scorsese or Coppola, but he was too intelligent for his own sake. He was an architect, a painter, a writer and a director. On the set, he was the best at everything. So, he wanted to oversee it all. He couldn’t delegate, he didn’t know how, while it is a necessity on a film set. And it resulted in acute paranoid crises, or some crazy attempts at manipulating people.Let’s not forget that Cimino was obsessed with The Fountainhead, and the Howard Roark figure. He bought into the myth of the creative genius hated by idiots and beancounters. Weirdly, as Ignatiy rightly points out, the long version of Heaven’s Gate is an extended cut, not technically a “director’s cut”, because the shorter cut was something he also put together, as he was allowed to (and because no outside editor could manage to bring the film to a decent runtime). And it’s an incoherent mess (as one of the shots from the final scene is missing, we never get the reveal for the photograph that Kristofferson carries around, while these scenes still play in full in the short version) that seems to exist only to make us assume there’s a masterpiece buried in the missing footage.Also, Cimino completely changed the color grading for the 2012 restoration (in addition to a few minor changes).
Very often, when we reappraise Hollywood types, tge vibe i get is, “they were a smart person who chose the wrong industry and kind of got kicked around for saying what they wanted.”
Whoa, whoa— I know the fact that he is in “The Sicilian” is relevant here, but please, Christopher Lambert is, and forever will be, the star of “The Highlander.”Please re-edit as “Christopher Lambert, who was the star in The Highlander, was also the star in The Sicilian…”
“Highlander II: The Quickening‘s Christopher Lambert.”
Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes cost 30 made 45.
I wouldn’t agree that “Heaven’s Gate” is a masterpiece, but it is certainly better than its reputation.So, by the way, is “Ishtar.”
I always find it a little funny and weird that this movie shares its name with a cult that committed mass suicide.
I didn’t necessary think it had anything to do with that, but I also had not a clue what this move was actually about until this article.
Two years later they released a really terrific western, The Grey Fox. Now that one is worth seeing.
I worked at a video store in the late 80’s through the early 90’s. That movie was a solid renter. Mostly by women, and not women of a certain age, shall we say. Young, old, middle aged, they would rent the movie and come in to ask if we had anything else with Richard Farnsworth in it. They thought he was the bee’s knees after that movie. Watching all these women come in and gush about an elderly guy was one of those formative experiences. Made me less scared about growing older.
I saw this turd, and that’s being nice, on the opening day, on the first screening. Several people walked out as it dragged on, and during several scenes people made loud comments. Some were pretty funny. When the roller skating began, well, that got some laughs and more comments. As it ended, someone yawned and said, “WTF was that all about?”. Pretty much everyone there, about 30 people total, got more enjoyment out of that question than we did the entire movie. It wasn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen, but there was so many things wrong with it, and it had no “life” at all. A really bad movie, like The Exorcist II, could be funny, and the heckling at it made it the best time I’ve ever had at the movies. Anytime “Pazuzu” was mentioned, we roared with laughter. I was sore for a week from laughing. Oh, and the supposed “original cut” they put out is not the one we saw on opening day. I thought, “I must be mistaken”, so I called the friend who went with me that day, and he went and after watching it said the same thing, “It’s not the same at all!”. Why they lied is a total mystery, and saddened us as the one we saw was a lot worse, and more fun to goof on.Worst movie ever that isn’t low budget scifi? End Of The Road, with Stacy Keatch and James Earl Jones. So bad when it was released onto VHS, I was able to buy sealed unopened copies of it from the big video store for about half the price of a blank TDK or Maxell VHS cassette. “Wee See Jacob Horner, wee See!” said by JEJ with a bad Chinese accent is a highlight, as is a guy screwing a chicken. Listed in the credits as “Chicken Man”. Pompous as it gets, it somehow gets 6.6 out of 10 stars on IMDB, which astounds me. And at the end is an abortion scene. I have the DVD of it, and nobody who has seen it thought it was worth the time involved. That all changes if you are high/drunk, then it’s a masterpiece, the laughs never end, but sober? Nope.
Can you do reviews on movies you don’t like. This is the best comment on this thread.
Thanks!
I would, but I’m afraid that I hated a lot of very popular movies over the years, and I would 3 degree burns from the flaming I would get.
As Howard Hawks once said “All you need to make a great film is some impressive sets, an “epic” run-time and a boring love triangle that barely goes anywhere.”Okay, you know the real quote. I REALLY wanted to like this film, but…it’s just such a mess. It’s not the worst film ever made, by any realistic definition, but it’s just so half-baked and unfocused that it might actually be the worst film New Hollywood produced. Cimino sincerely believed that he’d cracked the code to Great American Filmmaking, yet apparently he thought everyone had left The Deer Hunter saying to themselves “Boy that wedding scene sure was something; much more exciting than the Russian Roulette.”Heaven’s Gate certainly LOOKS like a classic film and if you lived in, say, France, you’d probably assume that there was a classic love story in there too, underneath all that dubbing.But noooooooo…Kristofferson and Huppert have no chemistry. At all. I’ve seen more passion in the monkey cage at my local zoo. And not only are we supposed to care about their romance, we’re supposed to care about whether Huppert’s Ella will choose Kristofferson’s Jim or Walken’s Nate, despite the fact that neither of them are particularly likable or well-defined. Nate Champion in particular is a horrendously-written character who’s established as a murderous psychopath and then “humanized” by the sudden revelation that he’s almost completely illiterate, a fact that holds no connection to his job as a hired killer and serves only to set up his inane last letter just before his last stand.It’s sad that a man who’d managed to put four Oscar-nominated performances onscreen after only two films suddenly decided that he needed the lead actor from Convoy and an unknown French actress, whom he apparently had a crush on, to anchor his Big, Important Western. If only James Brolin and Jane Fonda had been available…Like most major flops, Heaven’s Gate remains rightfully obscure; and like most poseurs, Cimino staggered onwards to ever-diminishing returns. One would think that a true visionary could strike fire from even the meanest of rocks, yet Cimino never got more than a spark or two going in the four films he directed after Heaven’s Gate. Desperate Hours and Sunchaser in particular stoop to made-for-TV obviousness and completely lack suspense, despite being billed as thrillers. Tellingly, there’s never been a career-spanning reappraisal to go with all these spirited defenses of poor old Heaven’s Gate.Just because a film flops doesn’t mean it’s misunderstood. “Cutthroat Island,” “1941,” and “Sahara” are not diamonds in the rough waiting to be truly appreciated, but simply expensive follies, more interesting as curios then art. If they teach us anything, it’s that sometimes even professionals and artists at the top of their game miss completely and prove themselves all too human, and while our own failures fade with time, theirs endure and inspire debates among complete strangers in online forums.
I love it to death. I saw it for the first time on TV and it felt like an overlong opus with good scenes. Then i watched it on the Prince Charles Cinema a few years ago and I was HOOKED to the seat, crying most of the times because of the immense beauty and how the theme resonated with me. Right now not only the waltz but Ella screaming of happiness, the really dark landowners meeting or John Hurt depressed on the battlefield are things that still haunt me. There were many problems during its shooting and probably it did not deserve the amount of suffering, but God IT IS the best cinema can offer.
Oh my god, get a grip.
Edit: wrong
it’s on to “The Blue Danube” (on which 2001: A Space Odyssey may as well own the copyright)*deep breath* WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Em.Socialism is the ideology where those who control the means of production are not responsible for the means of production. Capitalism is the ideology where those who control the means of production are responsible for the means of production.Since you used Capitalism without understanding what it means, let me break this down and make it simple for you with a story you probably know. Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol.” At the start of the story Ebeneezer Scrooge is a Socialist. He owns a business. He controls his clients. He controls Bob Cratchit. However, Scrooge does not take responsibility for his control. Scrooge does not provide any leniency to his clients whom use his financial services. When things go wrong in their life Scrooge does nothing to help ease their burden to him. Scrooge does not provide the tools, utilities, or working environments for Bob Cratchit to be a useful employee. Again: That is socialism. By the end of the story, after the 3 nightmare’s, Scrooge becomes a Capitalist. Scrooge immediately takes responsibility for Bob Cratchit’s working conditions, promising to provide the tools and utilities Bob needs to work. Scrooge also immediately does what he can within the limits of his abilities to help an immediate family member of Bob’s, Tiny Tim. Scrooge becomes a Capitalist.A secondary note is that the concept of a Corporation, where a non-physical entity is granted the rights and legal protections of a physical entity, is a Construct of the Socialist Ideology, not the Capitalist Ideology. Corporations, generally, are about removing the controller(s) of the property(ies) from the legal, ethical, moral, or fiscal responsibily(ies) of those property(ies). A CEO who makes 100 times what the average worker makes isn’t a Capitalist, they are a Socialist. They control the means of production, but they bear no responsibility for those means of production. Calling it Capitalism, the exact opposite of what it is, just makes you flat wrong. It also destroys any credibility in other areas, such as film review. Why should we think you know anything about “Heaven’s Gate” the movie, when you complete antonyms in your description of events within the film?
Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Yes? Well, socialism is exactly the reverse. —Len Deighton
The film bears little resemblance to real events:
Lost me right there.
They were expecting a documentary.
This just reminds me that Wyoming should not be a state and that the tiny number of people that run it are not good and are an enemy to progress.
I think Wyoming is fine as a state, but they should have like 0.3 senators at most. And should be governed solely by various farm animals.
I remember checking state populations years ago and read that the population of Wyoming was 225,000. I thought it was a misprint, it wasn’t
Just how long ago were you checking on that? It was accurate – for 1930!
That’s what google is for
What was the population of Wyoming in 1930
My brother in law worked on that movie. Supposedly as a director’s assistant, in reality as the production crew’s drug connection. As a kid I remember hearing about this “shitty movie” (my dad’s words) that was taking forever to film that my junkie/dealer BIL was always pitching as his way into the Hollywood big time.
I liked the movie. One big thing I learned from it is:When your hat blows off during a gun fight, don’t go running after it!Meaning: STAY FOCUSED!
Someone—I think it was Roger Ebert—said of this film that “The Deer Hunter was Michael Cimino making a deal with the Devil and Heaven’s Gate is the Devil coming around to collect.”
It was Vincent Canby, who wrote was remains one of the most withering reviews of a film ever written. In addition to the line you mention, he also said the film was like a forced four hour walking tour of your aunt’s living room, and that the film was a rarity: an unparalleled disaster.
Roller Rink Dance Scene – Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980)
Thank you for this, Ignatiy. One can feel the tide turning on this movie’s reputation.I can watch it a dozen times just for the roller skating sequence. I don’t think John Ford, Nick Ray, Sam Fuller, or Sergio Leone at their most subversive could have thought to drop something like this inside a Western.It’s such a beautiful film.Waiting for The Criterion Channel to run it with the requisite symposia that will us understand better.
Another good director’s cut is Brazil. I liked the original release, but walked away scratching my head. The director’s cut pulls it together. Yes, it’s longer, but not crazy long. Highly recommended.
In later years, long after Heaven’s Gate had become a Hollywood byword for disaster, he got so much plastic surgery that he became unrecognizable.Didn’t Cimino eventually come out as trans, or was that just gossip/conjecture?
He didn’t, but I figured that Cimino’s journey was going in the same direction as Caitlyn Jenner’s: late-in-life transition followed by coming out.
Yeah it’s really hard to say. He got such radical plastic surgery, was so unrecognizable by the end, that it did prompt a lot of speculation that it was to an end, i.e. transitioning. His face definitely took on more strongly feminine features. But I think it could also have just been a manifestation of his own perfectionism.
I love “Heaven’s Gate.” I’ve seen it half a dozen times. I love the soundtrack, too. Then again, I am a huge fan of historical epics.
(Christopher Walken, wearing weird, vampy eyeshadow) Sold.
His main problem was not having loveable droids and cuddly aliens.
It is a flawed film but certainly a gorgeous one that does explore a lot of the fallacies of idealism but also covering a dark chapter of American history. I have the 212-minute restored version of the film approved by Cimino as it definitely offers a lot more breath into the uncut version of the film. I don’t think it’s Cimino’s best film (that’s “Year of the Dragon”) but certainly his most definitive.
Only 219 minutes? Wim Wenders “Until the End of the World” (dir. cut) was 287 min.
After 3 hours of JFK in a theater I was ready to shoot someone. Tried to sit through Lawrence of Arabia multiple times, couldn’t do it on my couch at home because life is too short. A couple of nights ago Heaven Gate was on HDNet movies and I didn’t even try to watch it because 5 hours and 26 minutes for a movie is just a writer, producer ,director circle jerk
I’m the same with Lawrence of Arabia, as obviously gorgeous as it is. It’s a movie about people going somewhere else. Every time somebody hops on a camel and starts riding, you might as well go mix yourself a drink.
I really like Peter O’Tool as a actor and laughed at his funny drinking stories but the worse thing about that movie is it beat “The man who shot Liberty Valance” for best picture in 1962. That movie I’ve watched many times
Heavens Gate was completely unwatchable. At least, in Cutthroat Island you got to see Geena Davis’ titties appear and disappear from scene to scene.
Too bad some of the horses had to be “method actors” and actually die for the making of the film.
There is no reason whatsoever for that endless goddamn sequence at Harvard at the beginning of the movie. None. The only reason it’s there is because Cimino wanted to do it and he was half out of his mind over his self-anointed “genius.” There are gorgeous shots throughout, but the settlers are written like fucking cartoon characters in babushkas. It looks fantastic and has a couple of strong performances in it, but it’s a far cry from a masterpiece, regardless of which version you watch.
he was half out of his mind over his self-anointed “genius.”
And, you know… (puts finger to nose, makes sniffy noise)
I never saw the theatrical release of Heaven’s Gate, but I remember seeing this version on TV (maybe L.A.’s Z Channel) and finding it quite watchable.
I saw this in the theatre. The only way I can recommend it. I don’t agree it can’t be edited down – the scene where the ranchers vote on whether to hire killers for the immigrants is neverending – but I’m not sure that Steven Soderberghs Butcher Cut is the right way either.