Heaven's Gate (film)

Heaven's Gate
Theatrical release poster by Tom Jung
Directed by	Michael Cimino
Produced by	Joann Carelli
Written by	Michael Cimino
Starring	Kris Kristofferson Chris Walken Isabelle Huppert Jeff Bridges John Hurt
Music by	David Mansfield
Cinematography	Vilmos Zsigmond
Editing by	Lisa Fruchtman Gerald Greenberg William Reynolds Tom Rolf
Studio	Partisan Productions
Distributed by	United Artists
Release date(s)	November 19, 1980 (1980-11-19)
Running time	149 minutes 219 minutes (Director's cut) 229 minutes (Original release) 325 minutes (Complete)
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	US$44 million
Box office	$3,484,331

Heaven's Gate is a 1980 American epic Western film based on the Johnson County War, a dispute between land barons and European immigrants in Wyoming in the 1890s. The cast included 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, in his first film role.

There were major setbacks in the film's production due to cost and time overruns, negative press, and rumors about director Michael Cimino's allegedly overbearing directorial style. It is generally considered one of the biggest box office bombs of all time. It opened to poor reviews and earned less than $3 million domestically (from an estimated budget of $44 million), eventually contributing to the collapse of its studio, United Artists, and effectively destroying the reputation of Cimino, previously one of the ascendant directors of Hollywood owing to his celebrated 1978 film The Deer Hunter, which had won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director in 1979.

Cimino had an expansive and ambitious vision for the film and pushed the film far over its planned budget. The film's financial problems and United Artists' subsequent demise led to a move away from director-driven film production in the American film industry and a shift toward greater studio control of films.

Plot

In 1870, two young men, Jim Averill (Kris Kristofferson) and Billy Irvine (John Hurt), are graduating from Harvard University. The Reverend Doctor (Joseph Cotten) speaks to the graduates on the association of "the cultivated mind with the uncultivated," and the importance of "the education of a nation." Irvine, brilliant but obviously intoxicated, follows this with his opposing, irreverent views. A celebration is then held after which the male students serenade the women present, including Averill's girlfriend.

20 years later, Averill is now a Marshal in the booming region of Johnson County, Wyoming, where European immigrants are in conflict with wealthy ranch owners belonging to the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, sometimes stealing their cattle for food. Nate Champion (Christopher Walken) – a friend of Averill and an enforcer for the landowners – kills a settler for suspected rustling and dissuades another from stealing a cow. At a meeting, the head of the Association, Frank Canton (Sam Waterston), tells members, including a drunk Billy, of their plans to kill 125 named settlers, or "thieves and anarchists" as Canton calls them. Irvine leaves the meeting and encounters Averill, telling him of the Stock Growers' "Death List". As Averill leaves, he exchanges bitter words with Canton. The Association begins hiring men to kill the settlers named on the list.

Ella Watson (Isabelle Huppert), a bordello madam who accepts stolen cattle as payment for use of her prostitutes, is in love with both Averill and Champion. Averill gets a copy of the Association's death list from a U.S. Army Captain and later reads the names on the list to the settlers, who argue about what to do, one becoming enraged enough to shoot the mayor in the ear. Cully (Richard Masur), a station master and friend of Averill's, sees the train containing Canton's posse and rides off to warn the settlers, but is murdered by the posse. Later, a group of men come to Ella's bordello and rape her. All but one are shot and killed by Averill. Champion, realizing that his landowner bosses seek to eliminate Ella, goes to Canton's camp and shoots the remaining rapist, then refuses to participate in the slaughter.

Canton and his men encounter one of Champion's friends (Geoffrey Lewis) leaving a cabin with Champion and his friend Nick (Mickey Rourke) inside, and a gun battle ensues. Attempting to save Nate, Ella arrives in her wagon and shoots one of the hired guns before escaping on horseback. Champion and his two friends are killed, while Ella warns the settlers of Canton's approach. They decide to fight back, with local leader John Bridges (Jeff Bridges) leading the attack on Canton's gang. Both sides suffer casualties (including a drunken Billy Irvine) as Canton leaves to bring the army to relieve them. Ella and Averill return to the cabin and discover Nate's body.

The next day, Averill leads the settlers, with cobbled-together siege machines and explosive charges, in their attack against Canton's men and their makeshift fortifications. Again there are heavy casualties on both sides, before the U.S. Army, with Canton in the lead, arrives to stop the fighting and save the remaining besieged mercenaries. Later, at Ella's cabin, Bridges, Ella and Averill prepare to leave for good. They are ambushed by Canton and two others who shoot and kill Bridges and Ella. After killing Canton and his men, a grief-stricken Averill holds Ella's body in his arms.

Thirteen years later, a well-dressed, mustachioed Averill walks on the deck of his yacht in Newport, Rhode Island. He goes below, where an attractive middle-aged woman is sleeping. Averill looks at her, saying nothing. The woman, Averill's old Harvard girlfriend, awakens and asks him for a cigarette. Silently he gives her one, lights it, and leaves.

Cast

• Kris Kristofferson as James Averill
• Christopher Walken as Nathan D. Champion
• Isabelle Huppert as Ella Watson
• Jeff Bridges as John L. Bridges
• John Hurt as William C. "Billy" Irvine
• Sam Waterston as Frank Canton
• Brad Dourif as Mr. Eggleston
• Joseph Cotten as The Reverend Doctor
• Paul Koslo as Mayor Charlie Lezak
• Geoffrey Lewis as Trapper Fred
• Richard Masur as Cully
• Ronnie Hawkins as Major Wolcott
• Terry O'Quinn as Captain Minardi
• Mickey Rourke as Nick Ray
• Tom Noonan as Jake
• Willem Dafoe (uncredited)

Production

In 1971, Michael Cimino submitted the original script for Heaven's Gate, then called The Johnson County War, to United Artists executives; the project was shelved when it failed to attract big name talent. In 1979, on the eve of winning two Academy Awards (Best Director and Best Picture) for The Deer Hunter, Cimino convinced UA to resurrect the project with Kris Kristofferson, Isabelle Huppert, and Christopher Walken as the leads. The film began shooting on April 16, 1979, in Glacier National Park, east of Kalispell, Montana, with the majority of the town scenes filmed in the Two Medicine area, north of the village of East Glacier Park. The film had a projected December 14 release date, and a budget of $11.6 million.

The project promptly fell behind schedule. According to legend, by day six of filming it was already five days behind schedule. As an example of his fanatical attention to detail, a street built to Cimino's precise specifications had to be torn down and rebuilt because it reportedly "didn't look right." The street in question needed to be six feet wider; the set construction boss said it would be cheaper to tear down one side and move it back six feet, but Cimino insisted that both sides be dismantled and moved back three feet, then reassembled. An entire tree was cut down, moved in pieces, and relocated to the courtyard where the Harvard 1870 graduation scene was shot. Cimino shot more than 1.3 million feet (nearly 220 hours) of footage, costing approximately $200,000 per day. (Cimino had expressed his wish to surpass Francis Ford Coppola's mark of shooting one million feet of footage for "Apocalypse Now".) Despite going over budget, Cimino was not financially penalized because he had a contract with United Artists to the effect that all money spent "to complete and deliver the picture in time for a Christmas 1979 release shall not be treated as overbudget expenditures." In the book "The Hollywood Hall of Shame," it is alleged that drug use on the set may have contributed to the excessive demands of the shoot. According to an unnamed production insider, "People wonder how a movie like Heaven's Gate could cost forty million dollars. I'll tell you. Twenty million for the actual film, and another twenty million, you can bet, for all that cocaine for the cast and crew." Cimino's obsessive behavior soon earned him the nickname "The Ayatollah." The film finished shooting in March 1980, having cost nearly $30 million. Production fell behind schedule as rumors spread of Cimino demanding up to 50 takes of individual scenes and delaying filming until a cloud that he liked rolled into the frame. As a result of the numerous delays, several of the musicians that were originally brought to Montana for three weeks ended up stranded there for six months; the experience, as the Associated Press put it, "was both stunningly boring and a raucous good time, full of jam sessions, strange adventures and curiously little actual shooting." The jam sessions served as the beginning of numerous musical collaborations between Bridges and Kristofferson; they would later reunite for the 2009 film Crazy Heart and for Bridges's eponymous album in 2011.

As production staggered forward, United Artists seriously considered firing Cimino and replacing him with another director. Norman Jewison was reportedly asked if he would take over, but he rejected the job. It is also heavily implied in the book Final Cut that David Lean was also approached to take over directorial duties.

During post-production, Cimino changed the lock to the studio's editing room, prohibiting studio executives from seeing the film until he completed the editing. Working with Oscar-winning editor William Reynolds, Cimino slaved over his project. Reynolds complained how much of his work would later be undone by the director, convinced that his Western epic would be a masterpiece. According to an anonymous studio insider, "The level of pretension in that editing room was only matched by the level of disaster later on." Finally, after months of delays, last-minute changes, and cost overruns, Cimino delivered his version which ran 5 hours and 25 minutes (325 minutes); UA executives forced Cimino to edit the film to 3 hours and 39 minutes (219 minutes). Cimino pulled that version from release after its premiere in New York City on November 19, 1980. That cut of the film ran for one week at New York's Cinema 1 theater.

Reception

The premiere was, by all accounts, a disaster. During the intermission, the audience was so subdued that Cimino is said to have asked why no one was drinking the champagne. He was reportedly told, "Because they hate the movie, Michael," according to the book Final Cut, authored by one of the studio's executives, Steven Bach.

A subsequent review by The New York Times critic Vincent Canby called Heaven's Gate "an unqualified disaster," famously comparing it to "a forced four-hour walking tour of one's own living room." Canby went even further by stating that "It fails so completely that you might suspect Mr. Cimino sold his soul to obtain the success of The Deer Hunter and the Devil has just come around to collect." Roger Ebert quipped in The Chicago Sun-Times: "The most scandalous cinematic waste I have ever seen, and remember, I've seen Paint Your Wagon." In 2008, film critic Joe Queenan of The Guardian named Heaven's Gate the worst film ever made.

Heaven's Gate resurfaced six months later in a 2 hour and 29 minute (149-minute) version attempting to recoup some of its losses. But negative publicity had already damaged the film's reputation and this version quickly disappeared from theatres.

Some European film critics were less harsh toward the film, with one calling it a "tainted masterpiece". Critic Robin Wood ranked Heaven's Gate at number three of his ten favorite films of all time. David Thomson calls the film "a wounded monster" and argues that the film takes part in "a rich American tradition (Melville, James, Ives, Pollock, Parker) that seeks a mighty dispersal of what has gone before. In America, there are great innovations in art that suddenly create fields of apparent emptiness. They may seem like omissions or mistakes at first. Yet in time we come to see them as meant for our exploration." Martin Scorsese has said that the film had many overlooked virtues.

The film has a 45% 'rotten' rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

In February 2010, the readers of Empire voted Heaven's Gate the 6th worst film of all time. In April 2011, the staff of Time Out London selected Heaven's Gate as the 12th greatest Western.

Accolades

• Academy Awards

Nominated: Best Art Direction-Set Decoration (Tambi Larsen, James L. Berkey)

• Cannes Film Festival, 1981

Nominated: Palme D'Or (Michael Cimino)

• Golden Raspberry Awards

Won: Worst Director - Michael Cimino

Nominated: Worst Picture

Nominated: Worst Screenplay

Nominated: Worst Musical Score

Nominated: Worst Actor - Kris Kristofferson

Controversy

Impact on the U.S. film industry

The film's unprecedented $44-million cost (equivalent to about $120 million as of 2006) and poor performance at the box office ($3,484,331 gross in the United States) generated more negative publicity than actual financial damage, causing Transamerica Corporation, United Artists' corporate owner, to become anxious over its own public image and withdraw from film production altogether.

Transamerica then sold United Artists to MGM, which effectively ended the existence of the studio. MGM would later revive the name "United Artists" as a subsidiary division. While the money loss due to Heaven's Gate was considerable, United Artists was still a thriving studio with a steady income provided by the James Bond, Pink Panther and Rocky franchises. Many movie insiders have argued that United Artists was already struggling at the time with the box office flops of Cruising and Foxes, both released earlier in 1980 (the former film was not even produced by UA).

The fracas had a wider effect on the American film industry. During the 1970s, relatively young directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and William Friedkin were given unprecedentedly large budgets with very little studio control (see New Hollywood). The studio largesse eventually led to the new paradigm of the high concept feature, epitomized by Jaws and Star Wars. But it also led to less successful films as Friedkin's Sorcerer (1977), and Cruising (1980), and culminating in Coppola's One from the Heart and Cimino's Heaven's Gate, among other money-losers. As the new high-concept paradigm of film-making became more entrenched, studio control of budgets and productions became tighter, ending the free-wheeling excesses that begat Heaven's Gate.

The very poor box office performance of the film had an impact on Western films, which had enjoyed a revival in the late 1960s. From this point on, very few Western films were released by major studios, save for a brief revival thanks to the Oscar-winning hits Dances with Wolves and Unforgiven.

Accusations of animal rights abuse

Heaven's Gate was marred by accusations of animal rights abuse during production. One assertion was that live horses were bled from the neck without giving them pain-killers so that their blood could be collected and smeared upon the actors in a scene. The American Humane Association (AHA) asserted that four horses were killed and many more injured during a battle scene. One of the horses, who was allegedly killed, and its rider (Ronnie Hawkins, who survived), were claimed to have been blown up by dynamite, the footage of which appears in the final cut.

The AHA was barred from monitoring the animal action on the set. According to the AHA, the owner of an abused horse filed a lawsuit against the producers, director, Partisan Productions, and the horse wrangler. The owner cited wrongful injury and breach of contract for willfully depriving her Arabian gelding of proper care. The suit cited "the severe physical and behavioral trauma and disfigurement" of the horse. The case was settled out of court.

There were accusations of actual cockfights, decapitated chickens, and a group of cows disemboweled to provide "fake intestines" for the actors. The outcry prompted the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) to contractually authorize the AHA to monitor the use of all animals in all filmed media.

Heaven's Gate is listed on AHA's list of unacceptable films. The AHA protested the film by distributing an international press release detailing the assertions of animal cruelty and asking people to boycott it. AHA organized picket lines outside movie theaters in Hollywood while local humane societies did the same across the USA. Though Heaven's Gate was not the first film to have animals killed during its production, it is believed that the film was largely responsible for sparking the now common use of the "No animals were harmed..." disclaimer and more rigorous supervision of animal acts by the AHA, which had been inspecting film production since the 1940s.

Director's cut

When MGM released the film on VHS and videodisc in the 1980s, they released Cimino's 219-minute cut, using the tagline "Heaven's Gate… The Legendary Uncut Version." Subsequent releases on laserdisc and DVD have been the 219-minute cut. The 149-minute cut, released in 1981, has never been released on home video in the United States and is now very difficult to see or get access to. This cut of the film is not just shorter but differs in placement of scenes and selection of takes.

"The whole idea of a director's cut being something you could actually market came out of Jerry Harvey's rescue of Heaven's Gate," notes F.X. Feeney, a film critic who contributed heavily to Z Channel's programming guide. "It's an important measure, because home video, home viewing via pay TV, these things have really revolutionized how we perceive movies."

In October 2004, an uncut version of the film was again shown in selected art-house cinemas in the U.S. and Australia, along with Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession, a documentary about Z Channel. In 2005, the original uncut version of Heaven's Gate was re-released in Paris. It was shown to a sold out audience at New York's Museum of Modern Art with a live introduction by Isabelle Huppert.

In popular culture

Since the film's debut, the term Heaven's Gate has become synonymous with complete failure, financially and critically. Examples include:

• The financial and on-set troubles of the films Dances with Wolves and Waterworld, which both starred Kevin Costner, somewhat mirrored those of Heaven's Gate; they were also referred to by critics as "Kevin's Gate". Dances with Wolves was a critical and commercial success, while Waterworld eventually broke even at the box-office.
• In Albert Brooks's 1981 film Modern Romance, after foleying a scene on the film Brooks' character is editing, the sound engineers mention that, later, they will be working on "the short version" of Heaven's Gate.
• Former UA executive Steven Bach wrote Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists chronicling his involvement in the film's production, which became a 2005 documentary.
• In an episode of Animaniacs titled "Video Review", a video copy of Heaven's Gate is used as a weapon, an exploding "bomb" (along with fellow "bombs" Dune, Leonard Part 6, Mac and Me, Ishtar, and Howard the Duck). This is a tribute to the early Warner Bros. Cartoons such as Book Revue in which the inventory of a store spring to life.
• In an episode of Spitting Image, Steven Spielberg is wondering what to do with all his "extra money." He has a flash of insight and suggests Heaven's Gate II.
• In 1982, the BBC Radio 4 panel game I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue had a game called "Heaven's Gate" in which the panelists had to come up with ideas for films which would be an even bigger flop than Heaven's Gate.
• In the 2011 ESPN based book These Guys Have All the Fun, Pardon the Interruption host Tony Kornheiser, objecting to Mark Shapiro's desire to make the show an hour long, calls Shapiro and says, "We're not doing an hour! We're doing half an hour on the first show! If we do an hour, you're like Michael Cimino making fucking Heaven's Gate!" Similarly, on an episode of PTI dated August 6, 2010, Kornheiser, while wishing director M. Night Shymalan "Happy Birthday," compared the director's career after The Sixth Sense to Cimino "making The Deer Hunter, and then making Heaven's Gate"- a comparison noted by many others.

See also

• Cleopatra
• Cutthroat Island
• Caligula
• Isabelle Huppert filmography
• List of biggest box office bombs

References

Bibliography

• Bach, Steven (September 1, 1999). Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists (Updated ed.). New York, NY: Newmarket Press. ISBN 978-15570437440.
• Biskind, Peter (1998). Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock-'n'-Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-80996-6.
• Hughes, Howard (2009). Aim for the Heart. London: I.B. Tauris. ISBN 9781845119027. 

External links

• Heaven's Gate at the Internet Movie Database
• Heaven's Gate at AllRovi
• Heaven's Gate at Box Office Mojo
• Heaven's Gate at Rotten Tomatoes
• Review of Heaven's Gate at TVGuide.com
• Trailer for Heaven's Gate on YouTube