It may seem hard to believe that in a country that loves the movies as much as America does, a film studio could possibly ever cease to exist. But the truth of the matter is that there isn't one single studio that hasn't teetered on the brink of extinction at some point during the history of the motion picture art form. And one studio, United Artists, did indeed go belly-up as the result of the cataclysmic failure of a single film, namely Michael Cimino's 1980 opus HEAVEN'S GATE. This was the subject of the 2004 made-for-TV documentary FINAL CUT: THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF 'HEAVEN'S GATE', a fascinating, and rather tragic look, at how the good intentions of two young executives, Steven Bach and David Field, were demolished by the exacting perfectionism and ego of a director who seemed to have let success go to his head.
FINAL CUT, which is partly based on Bach's book of the same name, takes a look at the growth of United Artists from its beginnings in 1919 as the result of four big Hollywood names (D.W. Griffith; Mary Pickford; Charlie Chaplin; Douglas Fairbanks) to a Hollywood powerhouse that lasted until 1978, when its parent company Transamerica had gotten into a fight with the studio's top executives, and Bach and Field took over. We learn how the two men, who had at best minimal experience at the business end of film, took a look at what Cimino had accomplished with his 1978 Vietnam War opus THE DEER HUNTER (winner of five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director), and how they let him make whatever film he wanted. That film, HEAVEN'S GATE, was an epic Western film based on the notorious Johnson County War in late 1880s Wyoming in which cattle barons clashed with European immigrants, resulting in a bloodbath of staggering proportions.
What follows all of those things is a Hollywood tragedy of even more epic proportions.
Cimino, flush with the success of THE DEER HUNTER, had prepared the screenplay for what he called JOHNSON COUNTY WAR back in the early 1970s, while he worked on the screenplays for MAGNUM FORCE and SILENT RUNNING; and apparently, he told Bach and Field that he could make it for the relatively average cost (of the time) of $7.5 million. But by the time the dust had settled, the cost of what became HEAVEN'S GATE had soared to $44 million, and it had gone a whopping four months over schedule. And Cimino's rampant perfectionism is laid out quite well by co-stars Jeff Bridges and Kris Kristofferson, as well as actor Brad Dourif (who portrays one of the European immigrants in the film) and legendary cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond. In the end, however, bad publicity in the press, a lot of it caused by Cimino closing the set off to outsiders, not to mention reports of animal abuse and filmed takes numbering in the fifties at times, was what doomed both HEAVEN'S GATE and United Artists itself.
FINAL CUT, narrated by Willem Dafoe, paints a fairly even-handed depiction of what went on with both how United Aritsts mishandled HEAVEN'S GATE and how Cimino mismanaged his own oversized ego. I have seen the final three-and-a-half hour cut of the film; and while I think it is easy to condemn this film as a bloated mess, something that is still being paraded about by film critics and pundits alike, it is really not that cut-and-dried. As FINAL CUT demonstrates, yes, HEAVEN'S GATE is quite excessive at times, and extremely slow, as if Cimino was trying to make a Western version of DOCTOR ZHIVAGO and GONE WITH THE WIND, forgetting recent masterpieces like ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST and THE WILD BUNCH, which were true Western epics, but got there without even trying. But as FINAL CUT also demonstrates, the film's reputation as "the film that destroyed a studio", and arguably destroyed the Western genre, is not all that there is to it, and that it still has quite a lot to recommend. Even Bach, whose patience was tested during this entire time by Cimino, says that so many of the critical blasts against HEAVEN'S GATE never focused on what the film was about as a film, only the bad press behind it.
FINAL CUT is not necessarily a plea or an apologia for a director whose excessive perfectionism helped destroy a genre and a studio. But it also makes the case for a reassessment of HEAVEN'S GATE, which, although heavily flawed in ways that can't be repaired, nevertheless has moments of unquestionable power. On that account, it is by far one of the best films about films there is out there.
FINAL CUT, which is partly based on Bach's book of the same name, takes a look at the growth of United Artists from its beginnings in 1919 as the result of four big Hollywood names (D.W. Griffith; Mary Pickford; Charlie Chaplin; Douglas Fairbanks) to a Hollywood powerhouse that lasted until 1978, when its parent company Transamerica had gotten into a fight with the studio's top executives, and Bach and Field took over. We learn how the two men, who had at best minimal experience at the business end of film, took a look at what Cimino had accomplished with his 1978 Vietnam War opus THE DEER HUNTER (winner of five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director), and how they let him make whatever film he wanted. That film, HEAVEN'S GATE, was an epic Western film based on the notorious Johnson County War in late 1880s Wyoming in which cattle barons clashed with European immigrants, resulting in a bloodbath of staggering proportions.
What follows all of those things is a Hollywood tragedy of even more epic proportions.
Cimino, flush with the success of THE DEER HUNTER, had prepared the screenplay for what he called JOHNSON COUNTY WAR back in the early 1970s, while he worked on the screenplays for MAGNUM FORCE and SILENT RUNNING; and apparently, he told Bach and Field that he could make it for the relatively average cost (of the time) of $7.5 million. But by the time the dust had settled, the cost of what became HEAVEN'S GATE had soared to $44 million, and it had gone a whopping four months over schedule. And Cimino's rampant perfectionism is laid out quite well by co-stars Jeff Bridges and Kris Kristofferson, as well as actor Brad Dourif (who portrays one of the European immigrants in the film) and legendary cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond. In the end, however, bad publicity in the press, a lot of it caused by Cimino closing the set off to outsiders, not to mention reports of animal abuse and filmed takes numbering in the fifties at times, was what doomed both HEAVEN'S GATE and United Artists itself.
FINAL CUT, narrated by Willem Dafoe, paints a fairly even-handed depiction of what went on with both how United Aritsts mishandled HEAVEN'S GATE and how Cimino mismanaged his own oversized ego. I have seen the final three-and-a-half hour cut of the film; and while I think it is easy to condemn this film as a bloated mess, something that is still being paraded about by film critics and pundits alike, it is really not that cut-and-dried. As FINAL CUT demonstrates, yes, HEAVEN'S GATE is quite excessive at times, and extremely slow, as if Cimino was trying to make a Western version of DOCTOR ZHIVAGO and GONE WITH THE WIND, forgetting recent masterpieces like ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST and THE WILD BUNCH, which were true Western epics, but got there without even trying. But as FINAL CUT also demonstrates, the film's reputation as "the film that destroyed a studio", and arguably destroyed the Western genre, is not all that there is to it, and that it still has quite a lot to recommend. Even Bach, whose patience was tested during this entire time by Cimino, says that so many of the critical blasts against HEAVEN'S GATE never focused on what the film was about as a film, only the bad press behind it.
FINAL CUT is not necessarily a plea or an apologia for a director whose excessive perfectionism helped destroy a genre and a studio. But it also makes the case for a reassessment of HEAVEN'S GATE, which, although heavily flawed in ways that can't be repaired, nevertheless has moments of unquestionable power. On that account, it is by far one of the best films about films there is out there.