In April 1979, on a set in Montana, one of Hollywood's most decorated young directors was shooting a scene in which a man cracks a bullwhip. Michael Cimino, fresh from winning Best Picture and Best Director for The Deer Hunter, ran the moment again and again — the commonly cited count is more than fifty takes — while executives at United Artists read the daily reports with mounting horror. By the end of the first week of principal photography, the production was already days behind schedule while having produced only a couple of minutes of usable film. The picture was Heaven's Gate, and it was on its way to becoming the flop against which all others are measured.
United Artists should have been the last studio to die this way. Founded in 1919 by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith precisely so that artists could escape the moguls, UA had thrived in the 1970s as the director-friendly house of Rocky, Annie Hall and the Bond films. But after its parent company Transamerica clashed with UA's veteran management, the experienced executives walked out en masse to found Orion, leaving a young team desperate to prove it could land a prestige picture. Cimino, the hottest director alive, wanted to make an epic western about the Johnson County War — the 1890s Wyoming conflict in which cattle barons drew up a death list against immigrant settlers. UA agreed a budget of around $11.6 million. The final cost was approximately $44 million, plus tens of millions more in marketing and interest.
Perfectionism as pathology
The stories from the set have become industry folklore, and the best-documented ones need no embellishment. Cimino shot colossal amounts of film — figures north of a million feet are standard — printing take after take of trains, crowds and light. He had a full-scale frontier street built and then, dissatisfied with its proportions, ordered it altered at great cost. He rehearsed dozens of extras in period roller-skating for the film's most beautiful sequence, a waltz on wheels in a tent called Heaven's Gate. He reportedly delayed shooting while waiting for the right cloud. An entire irrigation system was installed to keep a battlefield suitably lush. Crew members later spoke of eighteen-hour days and a director who had, in the words of one executive's memoir, been handed the unlimited budget of the studio's fear. That memoir — Final Cut, by UA production chief Steven Bach — became the classic insider account of a studio watching itself drown. The production also left a darker mark: allegations of animal deaths and mistreatment during filming caused an outcry that helped push Hollywood towards the American Humane Association's now-familiar on-set monitoring and "no animals were harmed" certification.
Judgement day
The film UA finally received ran three hours and thirty-nine minutes. At its New York premiere in November 1980, the response was catastrophic; Vincent Canby of The New York Times called it an unqualified disaster and likened it to a forced tour of one's own living room. UA yanked the film from release within days — an almost unheard-of retreat — and Cimino recut it to about two and a half hours for a re-release in April 1981. Nobody came. Against total costs cited around $44 million, the domestic gross was in the low single millions. That year, Transamerica sold United Artists to MGM, and one of cinema's founding names was folded into a rival. The catastrophe also gave film culture a byword: when a studio now fears a runaway auteur project, someone in the room says "Heaven's Gate".
The industry drew a simple moral — never again hand a director the keys — and the era historians call New Hollywood, the decade of Coppola, Friedkin, Bogdanovich and Cimino running the asylum, is conventionally said to end here, with Star Wars-style producer-driven spectacle inheriting the lot. The film itself, though, has had the strangest afterlife of any flop: critics who revisited the restored 216-minute version, screened at Venice in 2012, found a flawed but genuinely majestic epic, and its reputation has been climbing ever since. Which leaves the neatest irony in the whole sorry ledger: the movie that killed United Artists eventually turned out to be the kind of ambitious, personal film United Artists was founded to protect.
Quiz nuggets
- Heaven's Gate (1980) was directed by Michael Cimino, who had just won Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for The Deer Hunter.
- The film dramatises the Johnson County War, an 1890s conflict between Wyoming cattle barons and immigrant settlers.
- Budgeted at around $11.6 million, it cost roughly $44 million and grossed only a few million domestically.
- United Artists — founded in 1919 by Chaplin, Pickford, Fairbanks and Griffith — was sold by Transamerica to MGM in 1981 in the flop's aftermath.
- UA executive Steven Bach chronicled the disaster in Final Cut, the definitive insider account of the production.