Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven's Gate

Having never seen the movie Heaven's Gate itself, I've always been fascinated by the tale of woe concerning the studio involved-United Artists-and especially the director who made it-the now-late Michael Cimino. He declined to an interview here so what we see of him is from his interview with Gene Shalit on the "Today" show. Among the actors interviewed from the movie are Brad Dourif, Kris Kristofferson, and Jeff Bridges who now owns some of the sets from the Montana location. Willem Dafoe made his debut (uncredited) in the movie and does the narration here. Of the UA executives interviewed, the most fascinating was from Steven Bach who eventually wrote the book about the thing called Final Cut which I read and thought was fascinating if longish. Of Cimino's other films, I've seen and liked The Deer Hunter and Year of the Dragon. I also have a DVD of Thunderfoot and Lightfoot which I hope to watch and review next...

Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven's Gate (2004)

**** (out of 4)

Jeff Bridges, Brad Dourif, Kris Kristofferson and Vilmos Zsigmond are just some of the people involved with HEAVEN'S GATE who are in this documentary to discuss the making of the movie. In case you're not familiar, United Artists pretty much gave director Michael Cimino everything and anything, which ended up costing a lot of people their jobs when the budget went out of control and this was followed by some very bad press and even worse box office.

This documentary does a fantastic job at discussing one of the biggest disasters in Hollywood history. Thankfully it does feature interviews with so many people involved with the production so this gives a terrific look at what was going on behind-the-scenes and what Cimino was actually doing. It rather remarkable to hear this story because it's just shocking to think that there was a time when something like this could have happened. Various options are discussed about what the studio could have done to the director or should have done to it and the reasons why nothing happened.

If you're a film buff then you'll certainly love this documentary because it's perfect at showing what can go wrong when a director is given full control of everything on a film. There are some great archival materials dealing with the release of the picture and how everything pretty much fell apart until the studio was left with a disaster. The only negative thing is that Cimino refused to be interviewed for the film as it would have been great getting his side of everything.

I have never seen Ishtar. I have not seen Gigli or Hudson Hawk either. I haven't even seen Battlefield Earth. I have stayed away from many of the great flops successfully. But above all those, and the many other classic failures that have come before and since, I have never seen Heaven's Gate. I should state that at the beginning.

Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate should stand alongside The Birth of a Nation, Bonnie & Clyde, Pulp Fiction and a short list of other films that have changed the way cinema operates. Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven's Gate is a bombastic, cutting, and thorough look at the long evolution and quick death of a film that murdered a motion picture studio.

It is understandable, yet disappointing, that Cimino would not discuss the film that ruined him. Instead, the filmmakers employ the help of assorted actors and crew members to discuss the plight. But most interesting is the inclusion of two United Artists executives, both of whom were inexperienced at film-making at the time of shooting Heaven's Gate. They discuss their faults as well as the director's honestly and often humorously.

The audience for documentaries are often small, but this one is different. Even for those of you who do not care much for film or film history; even for those of you who have never seen Heaven's Gate and never want to; the film is about failure, personal and financial, on a grand scale. Though seeing someone flounder miserably is not often fun, shaking your head in hindsight can be. ***.5 out of ****

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.

An absorbing chronicle of the fabled history of the landmark film, HEAVEN'S GATE. The documentary is fairly well researched and clever in its technique (particularly the imaginative use of the extensive production stills taken - most never seen before.) The interviews with two of the film's stars (Kristofferson and Bridges) are great in that they are still on good terms with and champion Michael Cimino. Interviews with cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond and Penelope Shaw are also wonderful and give you a taste of what it must have been like to work alongside Cimino. Even the interviews with former UA executives, Bach & Field - who hired and later rued the day they engaged Cimino are fascinating and surprisingly balanced. One major disappointment is that of the hundreds of hours of film that was shot - and which is talked about and discussed extensively - no actual rushes or outtakes are shown (The terrible rumor is that they were scrapped at some later point.) Also - it's maddening for a fan of this film to hear Steven Bach speak of the 5+ hour rough cut that Cimino originally showed him - and that this version is unavailable for screening or study (if it even still exists.) Interestingly, the second cut of the film, released in 1981 is not just shorter but markedly different in many places (placement of scenes - different takes, etc.) and is now very hard to see or get access to (a little known DVD of this version is available in Europe and is well worth tracking down -- the transfer has a very different look and a much clearer dialog mix.)