Heaven's Gate (film)
Heaven's Gate is a 1980 American epic Western film written and directed by Michael Cimino, and starring Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, John Hurt, Sam Waterston, Brad Dourif, Isabelle Huppert, Jeff Bridges, and Joseph Cotten. Loosely based on the Johnson County War, it revolves around a dispute between land barons and European immigrants in Wyoming in the 1890s. Cimino's follow-up to his critically acclaimed film "The Deer Hunter" (1978), "Heaven's Gate" was shot on location in Montana and Idaho. The production faced numerous setbacks, including cost overruns, significant retakes, bad press (including allegations  of animal abuse on set) and rumors about Cimino's allegedly authoritarian directorial style. Cimino had an expensive and ambitious vision for the film, pushing the film nearly four times over its planned budget. After its premiere in November 1980, the film received significant critical backlash, prompting United Artists to pull it from theaters. In April 1981, a truncated re-cut version of the film was released, though it remained a financial failure, earning only $3.5 million against its $44 million budget, and was subsequently condemned as one of the worst films ever made. According to some film  historians, such as Peter Biskind, the film's financial failure resulted in the demise of director-driven film production in the American film industry, steering back toward greater studio control of films. In the decades since the release, however, general assessment of "Heaven's Gate" has become more favorable. The 1980 re-edit has been characterized as "one of the greatest injustices of cinematic history", while later re-edits have received critical acclaim. In 2015, BBC Culture ranked "Heaven's Gate" 98th on its list of the 100 greatest American films of all time. Plot. In 1870, two young men , Jim Averill and Billy Irvine, graduate from Harvard College. The Reverend Doctor speaks to the graduates on the association of "the cultivated mind with the uncultivated" and the importance of education. Irvine, the class orator, 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. Twenty years later, Averill is passing through the booming town of Casper, Wyoming, on his way north to Johnson County, where he is now a marshal. Poor European immigrants new to the region are in conflict with wealthy, established cattle  barons organized as the Wyoming Stock Growers Association; the newcomers sometimes steal their cattle for food. Nate Championa friend of Averill and an enforcer for the stockmenkills a settler for suspected rustling and dissuades another from stealing a cow. At a board meeting, the head of the Association, Frank Canton, tells members, including a drunk Irvine, of plans to kill 125 named settlers, as thieves and anarchists. Irvine leaves the meeting, encounters Averill, and tells him of the Association's plans. As Averill leaves, he exchanges bitter words with Canton. Canton and Averill quarrel, and Canton is knocked to the  floor. That night, Canton recruits men to kill the named settlers. Ella Watson, a Johnson County bordello madam from Quebec, who accepts stolen cattle as payment for use of her prostitutes, is infatuated with both Averill and Champion. Averill and Watson skate in a crowd, then dance alone, in an enormous roller skating rink called "Heaven's Gate," which has been built by local entrepreneur John L. Bridges. Averill receives a copy of the Association's death list from a baseball-playing U.S. Army captain and later reads the names aloud to the settlers, who are thrown into terrified turmoil . Cully, a station master and friend of Averill's, sees the train with Canton's posse heading north and rides off to warn the settlers but is murdered "en route". Later, a group of men come to Watson's bordello and rape her. Averill shoots and kills all but one of them. Champion, realizing that his landowner bosses seek to eliminate Watson, 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 leaving a cabin with Champion and his friend Nick inside, and  a gunfight ensues. Attempting to save Champion, Watson arrives in her wagon and shoots one of the hired guns before escaping on horseback. Nick is killed before Canton's men push a burning cart towards the cabin, setting it on fire. Champion writes a last letter to Ella. Champion emerges from the burning cabin shooting at Canton's men but is killed by a hail of bullets. Watson warns the settlers of Canton's approach at another huge, chaotic gathering at "Heaven's Gate." The agitated settlers decide to counterattack; Bridges leads the attack on Canton's gang. With the  hired invaders now surrounded, both sides suffer casualties (including a drunken, poetic Irvine) as Canton leaves to bring help. Watson and Averill return to Champion's charred and smoking cabin, and discover his corpse, along with a handwritten letter documenting his last minutes alive. The next day, Averill reluctantly joins the immigrant settlers, with their cobbled-together siege machines and explosive charges, in an 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 Watson's cabin, Bridges, Watson, and Averill prepare to leave for good, but they are ambushed by Canton and two others. Averill and Bridges shoot and kill Canton and one of his men but both Bridges and Watson are killed. A grief-stricken Averill holds Watson's body in his arms. In 1903, about a decade later, a well-dressed, beardless, but older-looking Averill walks the deck of his yacht off Newport, Rhode Island. He goes below, where an attractive middle-aged woman is sleeping in a luxurious boudoir. The woman, Averill's old Harvard girlfriend  (perhaps now his wife), awakens and asks him for a cigarette. Silently he complies, lights it, and returns to the deck. Cast. In addition, musician Ronnie Hawkins appears in the first of his few acting roles, as Major Wolcott, while future Golden Globe winner and Academy Award nominee Mickey Rourke appears in his second-ever screen role as Nick Ray, and future multi-Academy Award nominee Willem Dafoe makes his first, uncredited, screen appearance as Willy. Production. Historical basis. The basic plot elements of the film were inspired by Wyoming's 1892 Johnson County War, the archetypal cattlemen-homesteaders conflict , which also served as the background for "Shane" and "The Virginian". Most of the film's principal characters bear the names of actual key figures in the war, but the events portrayed in "Heaven's Gate" bear little resemblance to actual historical events. While homesteaders did begin to settle northern Wyoming in the 1890s, claiming land under the newly enacted Homestead Acts, there were no hordes of starving European immigrants, killing rich men's cattle to feed their families, as depicted in the film. Nate Champion, who is portrayed as a murderer and "enforcer" for the stockmen, was actually a  popular small rancher in Johnson County, nicknamed "king of the rustlers" by the stockmen because he resisted their tactic of claiming all unbranded young cattle as their own. Jim Averell was another homesteader who lived about southwest of Johnson County. Two years before the invasion began, he and his common-law wife Ella Watson were murdered by stockmen, who falsely accused Watson of exchanging sexual favors for stolen cattle. There is no evidence that Watson was a bordello madam, as portrayed in the film, nor that Watson or Averell ever knew Nate Champion. Screenplay. In 1971, film director Michael Cimino  submitted an original script for "Heaven's Gate" (then called "The Johnson County War") but the project was shelved when it failed to attract big-name talent. His directorial debut, "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot" (1974), was a hit. In 1979, on the eve of winning two Academy Awards (Best Director and Best Picture) for 1978's "The Deer Hunter," Cimino convinced United Artists to resurrect the "Heaven's Gate" project with Kris Kristofferson, Isabelle Huppert, and Christopher Walken as the main characters. He was given an initial budget of $11.6 million, but was also provided with "carte blanche". Filming. Principal  photography began 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. Shooting also included the town of Wallace, Idaho. Harvard University refused to allow the film to be shot there, reportedly because of Cimino's excessive demands for the film set, and the film's prologue was instead shot at the University of Oxford. The project had a December 14 projected release date and $11.6 million budget, and promptly fell behind schedule. According to legend , by the sixth day of filming the project was already five days behind schedule. As an example of Cimino's fanatical attention to detail, a street built to his 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 in Oxford, England where the Harvard 1870 graduation scene was shot. Cimino had an irrigation system built under the land where the major battlefield scene would unfold, so that it would remain vividly green, to contrast with the red color. Cimino shot more than 1.3 million feet (400,000 metres; nearly 220 hours) of footage, costing the studio approximately $200,000 per day in salary, locations and acting fees. Privately, it was joked that Cimino wished to surpass Francis Ford Coppola's mark of shooting one million feet of footage for "Apocalypse Now" (1979). Cimino's obsessive  behavior soon earned him the nickname "The Ayatollah". Production fell behind schedule as rumors spread of Cimino's 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 delays, several musicians originally brought to Montana to work on the film for only three weeks ended up stranded, waiting to be called for shoots to materialize. 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. As production staggered forward, United Artists seriously considered firing Cimino and replacing him with another director, implied in the book "Final Cut" to be Norman Jewison. Actor John Hurt reportedly spent so long waiting around on the production for something to do that he went off and made "The Elephant Man" (1980) for David Lynch in the interim, and then came back to shoot more scenes on "Heaven's Gate". "Heaven's Gate" finished shooting in March 1980, having cost nearly $30 million. Reportedly, during  post-production Cimino changed the lock to the studio's editing room, prohibiting executives from seeing the film until he completed his cut, although Cimino disputed this story. Working with Oscar-winning editor William H. Reynolds, Cimino worked doggedly over his project. Post-production. On June 26, 1980, Cimino previewed a workprint for executives at United Artists that reportedly ran five hours and twenty-five minutes (325 minutes), which Cimino said was "about 15 minutes longer than the final cut would be." The executives flatly refused to release the film at that length and once again contemplated firing Cimino. However , Cimino promised them he could re-edit the film and spent the entire summer and fall of 1980 doing so, finally paring it down to its original premiere length of 3 hours and 39 minutes (219 minutes). The original wide-release opening on Christmas of 1979 had come and gone, so UA and Cimino finally set up a release date of November 1980. Release. Box office. Following a brief theatrical release in November 1980, during which the film was poorly received by critics, United Artists decided to pull the film from theaters, re-releasing it in April 1981 in a  truncated cut. Despite the efforts to capitalize on the film with a re-release, it was a significant financial failure, earning $3.5 million domestically against its $44 million budget. The film is considered one of the biggest box office bombs of all time. Critical response. During an intermission at the film's November 19, 1980 premiere at the New York Cinema 1 theater, the audience was so subdued that Cimino was said to have asked why no one was drinking the champagne. He was reportedly told by his publicist, "Because they hate the movie, Michael." The initial critical  reception to the film was almost universally negative. "The New York Times" critic Vincent Canby panned the film, calling it "something quite rare in movies these days - an unqualified disaster," comparing it to "a forced four-hour walking tour of one's own living room." Canby went even further by stating that "[i]t 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." After a sparsely attended one-week run, Cimino and United Artists quickly pulled the film  from any further releases, completely postponing a full worldwide release. On April 24, 1981, the film opened in 810 theatres in a "director's cut", a two-hour-and-twenty-nine minute (149 minute) version that Cimino had recut for a third time. Reviewing the shorter cut in the "Chicago Sun-Times", Roger Ebert criticized the film's formal choices and its narrative inconsistencies and incredulities, concluding that the film was "[t]he most scandalous cinematic waste I have ever seen, and remember, I've seen "Paint Your Wagon"." He also called the film one of the ugliest films he'd  ever seen. Kevin Thomas of the "Los Angeles Times" issued a dissenting opinion when he reviewed the shortened film, becoming one of its few American champions and calling it "a true screen epic" while stating that in two decades as a critic, he had never felt "so totally alone." The film grossed $1.3 million in its opening weekend and closed after the second week, having grossed only $3.5 million against its $44 million budget. In 1999, "Time" placed the film on a list of the 100 worst ideas of the 20th century. Writing in "The Guardian" in  2008, Joe Queenan declared "Heaven’s Gate" the worst film made up to that time. “This is a movie that destroyed the director's career,” he wrote. “This is a movie that lost so much money it literally drove a major American studio out of business. This is a movie about Harvard-educated gunslingers who face off against eastern European sodbusters in an epic struggle for the soul of America. This is a movie that stars Isabelle Huppert as a shotgun-toting cowgirl. This is a movie in which Jeff Bridges pukes while mounted on roller skates. This is a  movie that has five minutes of uninterrupted fiddle-playing by a fiddler who is also mounted on roller skates. This is a movie that defies belief.” The Verge said that "Based on 30 years of critical assessment, Heaven's Gate stands as one of the worst movies ever made. That's not an exaggeration". Reassessments. In subsequent years, some critics have come to the film's defense, beginning with European critics who praised it after the film played at the Cannes Film Festival. Robin Wood was an early champion of "Heaven's Gate" and its reassessment, calling it "one of  the few authentically innovative Hollywood films ... It seems to me, in its original version, among the supreme achievements of the Hollywood cinema." David Thomson calls the film "a wounded monster" and argues that it 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  has many overlooked virtues. Some of these critics have attempted to impugn the motives of the earliest reviewers. Robin Wood noted, in his initial review of the film, reviewers tended to pile on the film, attempting to "outdo [one an]other with sarcasm and contempt." Several members of the cast and crew have complained that the initial reviews of the film were tainted by its production history and that daily critics were reviewing it as a business story as much as a motion picture. In April 2011, the staff of "Time Out London" selected "Heaven's Gate" as the 12th greatest  Western of all time. While Peter Biskind covered the many excesses and problems with the movie in his book "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls", he also noted that "Heaven's Gate" was not dissimilar to other big-budget, troubled projects of the late 1970s and early 1980s (such as Steven Spielberg's "1941" and Warren Beatty's "Reds"), and that the backlash against "Heaven's Gate" could have easily been directed elsewhere. Biskind speculated that Michael Cimino's personal unpopularity was the main reason this film became so widely reviled. Philip French praised the film in his original review. In the  fall of 2012, the film was re-released to "soak up acclaim" as a 216-minute "director's cut" at the 69th Venice Film Festival. on August 30 in the presence of Cimino, followed one month later by screening at the New York Film Festival in the "Masterwork" lineup, along with Laurence Olivier's "Richard III" and Frank Oz's director's cut of "Little Shop of Horrors". It was then shown at the Festival Lumière in France, where Venice Festival director Alberto Barbera described the film as an "absolute masterpiece" that had disappeared, and whose 1980 cutting was characterized  as a "massacre" by nervous producers and had been "one of the greatest injustices of cinematic history" that had destroyed careers (Cimino and Kristofferson) following "annihilat[ing]" critical reviews. In March 2013, the new director's cut was again featured back in New York City in a week-long run screening at the Film Forum. A major article by "New York Times" critic Manohla Dargis opined that the film's "second coming ... brightens a murky, legendary work of art" in a restoration that also "reveals the contradictions of a great flop." An article by Nicholas Barber on the BBC website in  December 2015 traced the history of the critical reception of "Heaven's Gate" and concludes: "so much of "Heaven's Gate" is patently splendid that it is mind-boggling that anyone could pronounce it an 'unqualified disaster'. And the scenes which were slammed in 1980 as being symptomatic of waste and excess – the Harvard waltz, the massed rollerskating – are the scenes which take your breath away." Reflecting on the depicted negative attitudes to immigrants, he writes: "However unwelcome "Heaven's Gate" may have been in 1980, there hasn't been a more urgently topical film in 2015." The film holds  a 59% score on Rotten Tomatoes based on 46 reviews with an average rating of 6.7/10. The website's critical consensus reads, ""Heaven's Gate" contains too many ideas and striking spectacle to be a disaster, but this western buckles under the weight of its own sprawl." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 57 out of 100, based on 15 critics, indicating "average or mixed reviews". Controversies. Effect on the U.S. film industry. The film's $44 million cost ($ million in dollars) and poor performance at the box office ($3.5 million 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 to abandon film production altogether. In 1981, Transamerica sold United Artists to Kirk Kerkorian, who also owned Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which effectively ended United Artists' existence as an independent studio. United Artists has since been a subsidiary of MGM. 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. On the  other hand, UA was already struggling after the executive walkout in 1978 and several other major box office flops in 1980, including "Cruising", "Foxes" and "Roadie". The fracas had a wider effect on the American Western film industry. During the 1970s, relatively young directors such as Coppola, Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, George Lucas, William Friedkin, and Steven Spielberg had been given large budgets with very little studio control (see New Hollywood). However, the directors' power lessened considerably as a result of disappointing box-office performers such as Friedkin's "Sorcerer" (1977) and "Cruising" (1980), Coppola's "One from the Heart" and  Cimino's "Heaven's Gate". The studios ultimately shifted focus from director-driven films and adopted high-concept features, epitomized by "Jaws" and "Star Wars" (both of which came before "Heaven's Gate"). As the new high-concept paradigm of filmmaking became more entrenched, studio control of budgets and productions became tighter, ending the free-wheeling excesses that had begotten "Heaven's Gate". Accusations of cruelty to animals. The film was marred by accusations of cruelty to animals during production. The American Humane Association (AHA), barred from monitoring the animals on set, issued press releases detailing the abuses and organized  boycott picket lines. 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 afterward. One assertion was that steer 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 AHA asserted that four horses were killed and many more injured during a battle scene. It was claimed that one of the horses was blown up with dynamite. This footage is  claimed to have been included in the final film. 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 film 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. The UK Blu-ray release from Second Sight Films removes about a minute of footage relating to the cockfights and animal cruelty. Prior video releases removed about a minute and fourteen seconds of the cruelty. Versions of the film. There are several different versions of the film: Workprint cut, premiere cut and an alternative cut. Notwithstanding the 325-minute "workprint" cut shown to executives in June 1980, Cimino had rushed through post-production and editing in order to meet his contractual requirements to United Artists, and to qualify for the 1980 Academy Awards. The version screened at the  November 1980 premiere ran three hours and 39 minutes. Bridges joked that Cimino had worked on the film so close to the premiere that the print screened was still wet from the lab. After the aborted one-week premiere run in New York, Cimino and United Artists pulled the film; Cimino wrote an open letter to the studio that was printed in several trade papers blaming unrealistic deadline pressures for the film's failure. United Artists reportedly also hired its own editor to try to edit Cimino's footage into a releasable film with no real success. Ultimately, Cimino's  second edited version, a 149-minute version, premiered in April 1981 and was the only cut of the film screened in wide release. The original negative for the longer version no longer exists because it was directly edited on for the 149-minute version (YCM separation masters of the longer version were used as the source for the Criterion Collection release). This cut of the film is not just shorter but differs radically in placement of scenes and selection of takes. This version, after leaving theaters, was not released on home video of any kind in the United States, but  was later released on DVD in France ("la Porte du Paradis"). This version has also aired on the MGM HD cable channel and was available free-with-ads on US streaming provider Tubi from March to November 2017. In 1982, Z Channel aired the 219-minute 1980 premiere version of the film on cable television – the first time that the longer version was widely exhibited – and which Z Channel dubbed the "director's cut." As critic F.X. Feeney noted in the documentary "", Z Channel's broadcast of "Heaven's Gate" first popularized the concept of a "director's cut." When  MGM (which acquired the rights to United Artists's catalog after its demise) released the film on VHS and videodisc in the 1980s, it released Cimino's 219-minute cut with the tagline "Heaven's Gate... The Legendary Uncut Version." Subsequent releases on LaserDisc and DVD have contained only the 219-minute cut. Due to the wide availability of the 219-minute 1980 premiere version of "Heaven's Gate" and its frequent labeling as either "uncut" or the "director's cut," Cimino insisted that the so-called "original version" did not fully correspond to his intentions, and that he was  under pressure to bring it out for the predetermined date and did not consider the film ready, making even the 219-minute version essentially an "unfinished" film. The 216-minute version shown in Venice is quite similar to the 219-minute version, but with no intermission. Some shots in the second part are slightly shorter and a shot with a single line has been cut (just after John Hurt is beaten by Sam Waterston). 149-minute cut. In the 149-minute version of "Heaven's Gate" released in 1981, the following scenes are cut: 2005 radical cut. In 2005, MGM  released the film in selected cinemas in the United States and Europe. The 219-minute cut was reassembled by MGM archivist John Kirk, who reported that large portions of the original negative had been discarded, making this an all-new radical version using whatever alternative available scenes that could be found. The restored print was screened in Paris and presented to a sold-out audience at New York's Museum of Modern Art with a live introduction by Isabelle Huppert. Because the project was commissioned by then-MGM executive Bingham Ray, who was ousted shortly thereafter, the budget for the  project was cut and a planned wider release and DVD never materialized, and probably never will. 2012 digitally restored Director's Cut. In 2012, MGM released yet another version, digitally restored and 216 minutes long. It premiered at the 2012 Venice Film Festival as part of the Venice Classics series. The Criterion Collection released the restored 216-minute version on Blu-ray Disc and DVD on November 20, 2012. This "Director's Cut" was personally supervised by Michael Cimino and Joann Carelli. Cimino explains in the special features portion of the DVD that this is his preferred version of the  film, and he feels it is the complete version he intended to make.