Movies - Heaven's Gate

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	Movies - Heaven's Gate

Heaven's Gate (1980) is a big-budget western movie, depicting a fictionalized account of the Johnson County War between land barons and European immigrants in 1890s Wyoming. The biggest Hollywood flop of the 1980s, Heaven's Gate became synonymous with troubled and overbudget film disasters.

Directed by Michael Cimino (who received a Golden Raspberry for worst director for this film), it starred Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, Isabelle Huppert, Jeff Bridges, John Hurt, Sam Waterston, Brad Dourif, Joseph Cotten, Geoffrey Lewis, Richard Masur, Terry O'Quinn, Mickey Rourke, and Willem Dafoe.

The film opens in 1870 as Kris Kristofferson's character graduates from Harvard University and makes his way West. The epilogue takes place in 1903.

Cimino had just won an Academy Award for directing The Deer Hunter
, so United Artists had every reason to believe he was creating magic on location in Wyoming. After months of delays, last minute changes, and cost overruns, Cimino finally delivered his masterpiece—a 5 hours and 25 minutes version of Heaven's Gate. The studio balked and sent him back to re-edit it to a more manageable length. His recut version was still 3 hours and 40 minutes long. Cimino personally pulled that version from release after only one screening: its premiere in New York City on November 19, 1980. A subsequent review by veteran New York Times critic Vincent Canby called Heaven's Gate "an unqualified disaster," comparing it to "a forced four-hour walking tour of one's own living room." It surfaced six months later with 70 minutes cut by the studio in a desperate attempt to recoup some of its losses, but to no avail. Adverse publicity is widely thought to be largely responsible for a dismal box-office take.

One of the primary complaints about the film is its soundtrack: even though Cimino uses subtitles for non-English dialogue, some of the English dialogue is obscured by blaring music or sound effects.

The movie's unprecedented $40 million cost and extremely poor performance at the box office ($3,484,331 gross in the United States) are generally believed to have sent United Artists into bankruptcy and eventually led to its purchase by MGM. This is only true indirectly. While the money loss was considerable, United Artists was still a thriving studio with a steady income provided by the James Bond franchise. However, the Heaven's Gate fiasco generated more negative publicity than actual financial damage, causing Transamerica Corporation (United Artists's corporate owner at the time) to become anxious over its own public image and withdraw from film production altogether. This in turn caused United Artists to be sold to MGM.

The fracas had a wider effect on the American film industry. During the 1970s, relatively young directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg were given large budgets with very little studio control. This trend was already ending by the early 1980s, but Heaven's Gate is viewed by many as its definitive conclusion. Cimino has remarked that Final Cut, a popular 1985 book about the making of the film by former United Artists executive Steven Bach, "should be classified as fiction. made money off my blood, my work, for 20 years." Bach stated in his foreword to the book that Cimino had been unresponsive to requests for interviews.

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