Tar And Feathers! Heaven's Gate, Part 3
Michael Cimino went over schedule and over budget. his film came out over long and underwhelming. For United Artists, it was all over and they went under.
Glacier National Park, Montana. April, 1979. Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate was six days into production and already five days behind schedule. That’s quite a feat! Back in Hollywood, warning bells were going off up and down the corridors of the films' studio, United Artists. In response, United Artists did... nothing. After all, it was 1979, the height of New Hollywood, which began back at the dawn of the decade with Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider and saw an era where directors held unparalleled power. In that context, one can see why the suits at UA did not want to be seen second-guessing the man whose previous film, The Deer Hunter, had just swept the Academy Awards.
Michael Cimino, flexing to the utmost on his Oscar high, was not about to sacrifice even a smidgen of his vision for his western saga. An entire frontier town had been built in the city of Wallace, Idaho. Inspecting the massive set, Cimino felt that a particular street was too narrow and told his production designer that it needed be six feet wider. The designer began making plans to (expensively) move one side of the street six feet. Not so fast. Cimino insisted that each side of the street be moved three feet, doubling the time and expense for no visible benefit. A scene that was supposed to take place at Harvard University was shot in nearby, convenient…. Oxford, England. A tree Cimino wanted in the shot was excavated, cut up, shipped to Oxford and reassembled
The film went catastrophically over schedule, wrapping one month shy of a full year in production. Cimino shot about 220 hours’ worth of footage, with some scenes requiring up to fifty takes before the director was satisfied. On one occasion, filming was delayed for several hours until a cloud Cimino liked rolled into frame. British actor John Hurt had time to go off in the middle of production, star in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man, and then return to his role in Heaven’s Gate, which was still shooting. The schedule blew the budget, naturally, with the original $11 million figure quadrupling to $44 million before all was said and done.
Once shooting finally wrapped, rumor has it Cimino changed the locks on the editing room to prevent studio executives from seeing the film until he was finished. The first cut came in at a jaw-dropping five and half hours. At the screening, Cimino confidently announced he could cut fifteen minutes.
The suits at UA huddled and came back with a resounding “Enough's enough,” and flatly refused to release a five hour movie. If Cimino didn’t want to cut it down, they would happily fire him and find someone who would.
The release date was scuttled and Cimino spent the summer whittling away at his epic. Eventually, he emerged from the editing bay with a three hour and thirty-nine minute version. That was the short version, mind you. A new release was announced for November of 1980, eleven months after the originally planned release date.
The late 70's / early '80's were rife with big name directors making big films that went over over budget and over schedule only to underperform at the box office.
By now, of course, everybody in the business knew about Heaven’s Gate and everybody had heard a horror story or two. Cimino was due for a drubbing. Show business likes to follow up every build up with a tear down and Michael Cimino went from being the Golden Boy of 1979 to The Icarus Of 1980. He flew too close to the sun and now he was going to pay.
I point this out to put the film’s early reviews into context. It was hardly an impartial jury of critics that first sat down to watch Heaven's Gate. They came loaded for bear and the bloated Heaven’s Gate provided a ripe, juicy target. Vincent Canby of the New York Times said, “it fails so completely that you might suspect Mr. Cimino sold his soul to the devil to obtain the success of the Deer Hunter and the devil has just come around to collect." Roger Ebert called it, “the most scandalous cinematic waste I have ever seen.” Word of mouth on Heaven’s Gate wasn’t just bad, it was toxic. The film, with a total budget of $44 million, grossed $3.5 million and closed after its second week.
Neither UA nor Michael Cimino would ever recover. For the studio, the financial drubbing was significant and painful, but it was the negative publicity that bothered its parent company, TransAmerica Corp. They did not want to be associated with something that quickly became shorthand for “disastrous failure” and the following year sold United Artists to media baron Kirk Kerkorian, who also owned MGM. UA was quickly enveloped into the larger company, ending its existence as an independent studio. It had been in business since 1919.
The early 1980s was also the end of Hollywood’s love affair with the auteur theory, with many of its highest profile directors going fabulously over schedule, over budget and then underperforming at the box office. Steven Spielberg’s 1941 and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now to name just two. The New Hollywood, as it was so dubbed, was over, and studios shifted their mentality away from autonomous directors to high concept, blockbuster-or-bust entertainment. In other words, “the eighties.” This belief still runs Hollywood today.
Next - Who needs you? I’ll do it myself! Francis Ford Coppola’s One From The Heart.