Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino), 1980
This wasn’t “an unqualified disaster” or “a phenomenon.” This was just – a flop. – Steven Bach
Possibly the finest book written about the making of a film is Steven Bach’s Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven’s Gate, which chronicles the disastrous production of Michael Cimino’s epic western. It’s written from a rarely revealed insider perspective (Bach was a key executive at United Artist’s during the film’s preparation), but that isn’t its only appeal. It captures an important moment in film history: the last semblance of old-style moguls had been swept away (Arthur Krim departed UA in 1978 after 27 years) and the era of decentralised corporate ownership had begun.
It was a time of great uncertainty about Hollywood’s future, and not least amongst the anxieties was how to make films that actually made money. The examples of Jaws and Star Wars (two classic films which arguably have done Hollywood a lot of damage) were there, yet the pattern of big budget, high income, low intelligence blockbusters had yet to arrive. In this environment, it was possible for a studio to naively pour $36 million into a risky western intended to cost $7.6 million. Bach’s remarkably honest book details the way good money was rashly thrown after bad as the studio attempted to wrest control back from an out-of-control perfectionist director. And it details the ultimate disaster as the film was greeted by universally bad reviews and the studio that produced it went belly up.
In retrospect, it’s clearer Heaven’s Gate did not sink United Artists: as obscene as the $36 million figure was at the time (it’s chickenfeed now), it wasn’t enough to kill a studio. Other forces were at work, and other studios have followed the UA route since with no Heaven’s Gate to help them along. It has also become clearer that the critical drubbing the film got might not have been warranted. When a full length version was re-released in the early 1980s, many reviewers went gaga over it.
So who is right? Well, Heaven’s Gate is not the turkey the original wave of US critics (led by Vincent Canby) labelled it. Reading those early reviews now, there seems little doubt that most of the reviewers were not so much critiquing the film as reviewing the film’s production process, cutting down Cimino and (perhaps) the studio structures that had allowed him to run amok. Back in 1980, it seems, it was impossible to take in the spectacle on the screen without being distracted by the sheer waste that the spectacle represented. Time (and exposure to subsequent, far more wasteful pictures) has diluted this effect. Yet I don’t think it has exposed the diamond the second wave of critics saw.
Bach’s own assessment is that the meaning of the film was lost in an excessive display of filmmaking prowess. Writing of an early executive screening, Bach writes that “little by little the anxiety of anticipation gave way to satiety, then to a sense of claustrophobia induced by the inundation of image and effect.” Summing up the film at the end of his book, Bach presses the point:
Characters and story were sacrificed to the filmmakers love of visual effect and production for their own sakes. The “look” of the thing subsumed the sense of the thing and implied a callous or uncaring quality about characters for whom the audience was asked to care about more than the film seemed to.
It’s a view shared by many. Yet I’m not sure that Bach’s response wasn’t, like the early critic’s, driven principally by his overexposure to the facts of the film’s creation. Bach had to view recut versions of the films dozens of times during its postproduction, and it would surely be hard for him not to view the film as a “thing” rather than a living, breathing, story.
Which is not to say that the story is very lively or breathes very deeply. I’m just saying that I don’t agree that Cimino didn’t care about his story or characters, and I don’t think the scale of the movie should necessarily endanger the story. After all, the high budget end of the western genre has always been about placing people against a spacious environment and letting them play out their conflicts against an epic backdrop. In theory at least, Cimino’s story seems to follow this pattern well. He sets up an effective enough love triangle between the educated Kris Kristoffersen, the mercenary Christopher Walken, and frontier prostitute Isabelle Huppert. And he’s onto a good thing with the true (though freely reinterpreted) story of the Johnson County War, in which cattle ranchers attempted a government backed slaughter of suspected cattle rustlers. It’s a story that links right into the central thematic conflict of the classic western: the tension between the frontier and encroaching civilization. Essentially, the film is a Marxist take on George Stevens’ 1953 classic Shane.
It’s the way Cimino tackles this material that brings the film undone. I haven’t seen the short cut of the film, as it’s the three hour version that has been generally been available since the film’s “rediscovery.” In the long version at least, though, the film’s big flaw is simply that of pacing. The simple story I’ve outlined above takes forever to unfold. This is partly because Cimino lingers over his aesthetic effects and some big bravura moments, perhaps believing that “greatness” meant “epic,” which in turn simply meant “long.” These displays cost UA dearly, but they don’t bother me too much, with the roller skating sequence (which sounds ridiculous) being particularly effective. The real problem is that Cimino drags out every scene of exposition or character conflict to twice its required length: the film is all meaningful, loaded pauses. By trying to teasing out every nuance of feeling in every moment between his three central characters, Cimino simply dulls the mind and stops you picking up what really matters.
The film also has a serious structural problem. Cimino fought hard to add to the film a prologue and epilogue designed to frame and contextualise the action. Bach recounts how the studio was always keen to include the sequences, believing them to be of considerable merit even as it threatened to withhold the money Cimino needed to complete them. The epilogue, it must be said, is one of those sequences that probably looked great but in fact simply doesn’t work. The prologue, however, is probably the film’s most effective sequence. It introduces the Kristoffersen character at his graduation, and contrasts him with a fellow graduate played by John Hurt. The idea, here, seems to be that the body of the film will follow these characters and show their divergent paths. Yet the rest of the film fails to follow up on this promise, relegating the John Hurt character to little more than the status of an extra. It’s a shame, because Hurt probably gives the film’s best performance, and the idea of the conflict between these two graduates is a very good one.
Other problems? Well, there’s something about the photography that isn’t right. It’s not Vilmios Zsigmond’s cinematography, as such, since the film is often extremely beautiful. It’s the way Cimino constantly sets the camera up to shoot through dust, or haze, or smoke, or steam, or combinations of all four that rankles. It gets to be a joke after a while, as you start to count the ways that Cimino finds of visually obscuring his action and vistas. The problem isn’t helped by the even worse soundtrack, which is one of the most disastrously mixed you will ever struggle to hear and has become a source of minor infamy in itself. (I can think of no other film for which reviews so consistently single out the quality of sound reproduction for criticism.) Perhaps as part of Cimino’s quest for authenticity and mood, the most minor of sound effects seem to be have been privileged over the dialogue, making the film incomprehensible at times. You come to welcome the stretches with subtitles.
These are employed for the sequences involving the immigrant homesteaders, who wail and caterwaul about their plight for long stretches at a time. Many critics singled these scenes out for criticism, finding the cacophony of foreign voices too much of an assault. I don’t mind that so much, since, as I’ve suggested, I’d welcomed the chance to stop straining to hear and settled back to read the subtitles. The scenes are atrociously written, though. The immigrants are the film’s conscience, spelling out the film’s political message. Basically, the point is that it’s dangerous to be poor, and despite all the talk of welcoming huddled masses, the established wealth in America (as everywhere else) will triumph over the impoverished newcomers. It’s an interesting point to be made in a western, and the film’s advocates have snidely suggested the film failed because it was too politically courageous. Unfortunately, though, the point is undermined by the didactic, preachy manner in which Cimino delivers it. It’s too schematic and reductive to be persuasive: the cattlemen are cartoon-style bad guys, and the immigrants look like the chorus of Fiddler on the Roof. This is Cimino’s idea of a sophisticated political message?
The film does have virtues, though, which its critics chose to ignore. I’ve already mentioned John Hurt, but Kristoffersen and Huppert are also very good in their roles (there’s nothing wrong with Walken either, except that to me he just looks somehow wrong for the part). David Mansfield, who has a small role in the film, contributes an effective score. And between the smoke and dust and the rest, the film is intermittently impressive to look at.
The combined effect of these flaws and virtues is neither turkey nor masterpiece. It’s simply mediocre. When released, the film was a sensation for its cost, its lack of box-office, and its alleged badness. Yet even the most famous of flops have a way of fading from memory. Who remembers now, for example, that Steven Spielberg even made a film called 1941? As new debacles appear (first Howard the Duck, then Hudson Hawk, then the works of Kevin Costner) the old ones fade from memory. Some may get rediscovered in time, but most just recede into obscurity.
And one might just get remembered as the film that had a really good book written about it.