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Tony Taylor
Tony Taylor
2 years ago

It has always puzzled me that Heaven’s Gate has such a horrendous reputation. Okay, so it sunk a studio. But it’s an okay film, not great or anything, just okay, if a bit boring; it also has a good cast. But it is far better than many films released around the same time. It’s not as good as undisputed classics like Caddyshack, Flying High (what you in the revolted colonies call Airplane), The Blues Brothers, The Big Red One (not the director’s cut), Breaker Morant and The Empire Strikes Back, among others. But I certainly prefer it to the very ordinary Ordinary People, and the over-raised Raging Bull, and a host of other slop released at the time.
PS: I sometimes imagine that Heaven’s Gate ended up as the TV series Deadwood.

Last edited 2 years ago by Tony Taylor
Andrea X
Andrea X
2 years ago
Reply to  Tony Taylor

Oh, I LOVE ordinary people.

Francis MacGabhann
Francis MacGabhann
2 years ago

In the seventies, the studios were all on the point of collapse for various historical reasons. Giving total control to the young lions wasn’t an artistic decision, it was a counsel of desperation — everything else has failed, might as well try this. It kind of worked, although nothing was ever the same afterwards. Cimino wouldn’t have got lunch money in any other period of Hollywood history, never mind the budgets he did get. He forgot — if he ever knew — the guiding philosophy of the movies: there’s no business like show business like no business I know. You will notice that in this equation, the word “business” appears three times.

Benjamin Greco
Benjamin Greco
2 years ago

What probably happened to Cimino was drug addiction.
Heaven’s Gate has some of the most astonishing sequences in cinema history, but Cimino thought that would be enough, that he didn’t need a script. It is as if he had a vision of a few spectacular scenes in his head, but nothing tied them together. It is impossible to know what is going on unless you know the history of the Johnson County war, and few people did. If he had taken the time to write a screenplay it would have been the masterpiece he envisioned.

Last edited 2 years ago by Benjamin Greco
James Anthony Seyforth
James Anthony Seyforth
2 years ago
Reply to  Benjamin Greco

Exactly, faux artists have there best days when on the new arms of intoxication, but when they cross the threshold of no return into rampant dependent addiction, they move towards insanity and either they double down and fade away or they give it up but give up there creativity too.

I’ve seen musicians like that. Basically an autistic wreck until they encounter weed, smoke for years, learn how to write music somehow, have a good go and then crumble to pieces when their twisted mind gives up on them. It’s partly to blame for the 27 club. Ultimately nothing lasts forever, especially drugged up lunatics. As much as I love say Hendrix or Cobane they were all mad and their exploration of drugs was a blessing and a curse: revelling madness for a moment in the big lights. There’s no escaping chaos and disorder, it will eat you.

Chauncey Gardiner
Chauncey Gardiner
2 years ago

Well, Bret —
Thanks for taking time to craft and tell an engaging story. It’s not the kind of thing I had planned to read about today, but I read the piece to the end. Your writing made it easy to follow the path … and to be curious enough to follow it all the way…

Dustshoe Richinrut
Dustshoe Richinrut
2 years ago

Very enjoyable read.

The November 19th, 1980 premiere in New York for Heaven’s Gate must have been an excruciating experience for Cimino. “Packed with celebrities”, yet a pall of gloom had descended on the lobby during the intermission. At 3 hours 39 minutes-long, refusing the champagne to avoid drinking on an empty stomach, I imagine, while wondering how to get home after midnight, probably, were not conducive to a good night-out.
Had the premiere been a glamorous swords-and-sandals epic, and not a western, staged in the summer, then a very long premiere might have been more tolerable.

It’s amazing the amount of footage that does not make it to the final cut, especially prevalent, I imagine, in these latter-day auteur-movies. Perhaps such movies, on set, on location, slow and time-consuming, are prone to becoming depressing experiences: do many of the aspiring actors, who have a scene or two, wonder if they’ll ever pop up in the final cut? So they can prove to their friends and families that they did something worthwhile? Their morale must get easily sapped. Come the premiere, they or their friends with bigger roles, may take it out a little on the director: at least the mood at the reunion, as it were, is going to reveal its own verdict.

I can well believe that serious directors are vexed by clouds. I think many directors just give up. From every film from the early days on, it’s kind of dark when shot one way, and in the same shot or scene, unbelievably bright the other way. You see clouds, then the clouds suddenly scatter. Two actors are talking to each other. It’s horribly unreal.

Back to that November 19th premiere: the painful occasion it sounds like it was might in and of itself be a subject for a movie script. Re-imagined, perhaps, as in dramatised and “based on” and turned into a black comedy. Cimino had probably felt he was suddenly persona non grata at his own creation. Could something similar occur to the author of the Harry Potter series of books at a premiere for one of them today? For different reasons? There’s material right under the movie industry’s noses that is ripe for turning into something entertaining today, I would guess. That industry, as the prevailing winds of change imperiously implore it, needs to take a good look at itself.

Perhaps it’s easier with time having passed to look back and laugh a little.

One final thought: The Deer Hunter movie is a great movie. I’ve only seen it once, a long time ago. But “just one shot” turned out to be multiple shots – a long, long film. That’s just a dig. I think the movie spoke well to the widest possible audience: and that seems to happen very rarely, even in the best of times, but increasingly so in movies made these days.

Back in the 1980s, when reading the Guinness Book of World Records, I would have skipped through the pages, and I have always somehow recalled an entry for Heaven something. I think it was for Warren Beatty’s Heaven Can Wait (for a comedy with the most Oscar nominations ever?). It must have been that rather than Heaven’s Gate. The entry for the movie that had suffered the greatest money loss was Raise The Titanic, I’m quite sure. Perhaps, until now, on reading this very essay, I had never really heard about Heaven’s Gate. If I had read of it, and its having been made in 1980, I must have associated it with Heaven Can Wait. And it is true that every time I came across the Beatty movie, that is when it was mentioned in print or a snippet was advertised on TV, I have always in my mind associated his movie with a great financial loss. It can’t have been though, as it won so many Oscar nominations. The mists of time, the mists of time.

Dustshoe Richinrut
Dustshoe Richinrut
2 years ago

I’ll just add that one can, to a lesser or greater degree, be the author of one’s own fall. The grim reality is that Hollywood wasn’t completely mean or unreasonable.

Mike Fraser
Mike Fraser
2 years ago

I agree. A well-written and engrossing read.

Colin Elliott
Colin Elliott
2 years ago

While reading your post, I was wondering what director would wait all day for the right kind of cloud, only to find he needs to reshoot it, and I then remembered that he might shoot a scene 50 times. I doubt the clouds were as patient as the actors.

Geoffrey Simon Hicking
Geoffrey Simon Hicking
2 years ago

Executives at Universal, the studio which had bought the film before production and were releasing it in the United States, were not so enthusiastic.”

One day someone should actually name these executives. They have power but are never named. Even journalism names the writers of the articles that so shape our lives.

Kudos to Unherd for doing that here with Michael Deeley at least.

William Hickey
William Hickey
2 years ago

“Heaven’s Gate” was bad, but it was no “Ishtar”

Joe Donovan
Joe Donovan
2 years ago

“Free rein.” Sorry; otherwise good.

Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
2 years ago

He was a monster of egotism. The arts are full of them.

Adrian Maxwell
Adrian Maxwell
2 years ago

What a super fascinating look into the world of Hollywood and an important life in art. Thank you BEE and Unherd, This is the sort of fare for which I joined Unherd, rather some of the navel gazing sub A level guff of recent months. If Hollywood allowed free rein (on the sole basis that the director is a sure fire money maker) the institution only has itself to blame for financial loss. For me Cimino remains a genius because of this one movie. Genius is not constrained, or defined by, further, repeated success. In my view the standout performance was that of John Savage, I can see Cimino in Savage’s every moment, and the ending God Bless America is a profound moment in cinema precisely because we dont know, or cannot be sure, what Cimino meant. As far as I know none of the actors in that scene have spoken about the director’s point. I compare it with Lean’s direction of Alec Guniness at the end of Bridge over the River Kwai. What, indeed, was the madness?

James Watson
James Watson
2 years ago
Reply to  Adrian Maxwell

Yes, this is why I joined. However the sub a level guff recently caused me to cancel my subscription just a few days ago. More articles like this might cause a reconsideration. I’m not hopeful

Last edited 2 years ago by James Watson
Andrea X
Andrea X
2 years ago

“…someone who “loved blondes, Thelonious Monk, and drinking, preferably vodka”.”
I have to ask, why the Oxford comma? I thought that Thelonious monk was one of the “blondes” but when I looked him up I realized that was unlikely; but then I couldn’t make much sense of the sentence until I realized it was employing an Oxford comma 😀

Anyway, engrossing read, thank you.

Last edited 2 years ago by Andrea X
Ian Stewart
Ian Stewart
2 years ago
Reply to  Andrea X

Very funny! Thelonious Monk a blonde – that reading didn’t even occur to me.

Bill Wainwright
Bill Wainwright
2 years ago

For a deeper dive into the business and debauchery of New Hollywood, I highly recommend the autobiography of Julia Phillips, who died in 2002.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/You'll_Never_Eat_Lunch_in_This_Town_Again

John DuBos
John DuBos
1 year ago

John Savage wasn’t nominated for an Oscar for Deer Hunter, but the script was.

Brett H
Brett H
1 year ago

This essay seems so typical of what we have to read today. It seems to me that Cimino contributed towards his own demise because he was an “artist”. He took the money and did what he wanted but clashed with those who had the money. That’s an oldHollywood story.
Most of this essay is about what he did. But Bret doesn’t go on to explain, as he suggests he will, just who Cimino was and what he was, what made him tick. Near the end he begins to address it then closes off by saying he sounds like an “artist”. So, what is that? I’d hoped Bret might address that. Otherwise it’s basically a Wikipedia read.