Was “Heaven’s Gate” the Worst Movie Ever Filmed in a National Park? | National Parks Traveler Was “Heaven’s Gate” the Worst Movie Ever Filmed in a National Park? By Bob Janiskee on September 1st, 2009 Heaven's Gate set in Glacier National Park. Jim Burnett photo. The 1980 movie Heaven’s Gate, a mega-flop filmed in Glacier National Park , was so wretched that it destroyed the director’s reputation, helped extinct United Artists, and sent Hollywood westerns to the doghouse. As the saying goes, it seemed like a pretty good idea at the time. Back in 1978, director Michael Cimino talked United Artists studio into producing a major western film based on the Johnson County War, a late frontier era (1892) range war in which struggling immigrant ranchers fought an uphill battle against powerful cattle barons and their hired killers in Wyoming’s Powder River Country. It was David vs. Goliath with rustling, lynching, a sheriff’s posse, the Sixth U.S. Cavalry Regiment, and scenic grandeur thrown in for good measure.

Cimino would direct this big-budget epic, and boy, did he ever look like a sure thing. Everything was breaking right for him. His 1978 movie The Deer Hunter, now a classic, would walk away with the 1979 Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. He was a man with the Midas Touch. With a big story, a big director, and a big budget, it wasn’t hard to sign up actors who could carry the weight. The leading roles went to Kris Kristofferson, Isabelle Huppert, and Christopher Walken. The large supporting cast included such notables as Jeff Bridges, Joseph Cotten, Sam Waterston, John Hurt, Mickey Rourke, and Willem Dafoe. Shooting got underway in April 1979 at Glacier National Park, a location that Cimino chose for scenic values, and despite terrible logistical problems (such as the lack of nearby housing for the cast and film crew). Things did not go well from the very outset. Early misgivings gave way to growing despair as the production assumed the tell-tale appearance of a slow-motion train wreck. “Slow” is the key concept.

The production fell seriously behind schedule almost immediately and never achieved a comfortable stride. Cimino’s overbearing style angered and frustrated the cast members, yielding an atmosphere in which finely-tuned teamwork became impossible. The filming was much more than routinely difficult, and production costs skyrocketed to around $200,000 a day. This led United Artists bigwigs to rue the fact that they had given Cimino what amounted to a blank check. When the last of the film was finally in the can, a production that was originally budgeted for $11.6 million cost nearly $30 million to shoot and racked up another $10 million or so in other expenses. The final production cost amounted to over $120 million in today’s money. Cimino seemed to lose his sense of “enough” while making this film. He shot an astonishing 220 hours of film to create a movie he first whittled to a hideously long 5 ½ hours and then to a studio-ordered 3 hours and 39 minutes. United Artists released Heaven’s Gate in November 1980, but the studio might as well not have bothered.

Getting theater audiences to sit through a very long film is one thing, but getting them to fork over their hard-earned money to sit through a very long and very bad film is quite another. Well before the long-overdue film premiered, word had gotten around that it was a stinker. Film critics savaged it, and the only buzz the movie ever got was bad. The box office in the U.S. was less than $3.5 million, making Heaven’s Gate one of the worst flops in moviemaking history. The aftermath was not pretty. Michael Cimino’s reputation was ruined; Heaven’s Gate even earned the poor guy a Golden Raspberry Award (Razzie) for Worst Director (1982). United Artists, though not financially ruined, ended up being sold off and obliterated for reasons that included being responsible for the Heaven’s Gate fiasco. The western movie genre, which Hollywood had been resurrecting in the 1970s, was dealt a blow from which it has not yet fully recovered. Studios, appalled by the freewheeling spending of Cimino, Francis Ford Coppola, and some other directors, tightened budget controls and looked much closer to the bottom line.

To prevent the sort of flagrant animal abuse that occurred during the filming of Heaven’s Gate, the movie industry struck a deal with the American Human Association to have the AHA monitor animal use in all filmed media. Heaven’s Gate has been variously called a complete failure, a cinematic waste, an unqualified disaster, and the worst movie ever made. On the strength of this we think it’s fair to say that it was the worst movie ever filmed in a national park. 10 stories of excess from the production of Heaven's Gate | Den of Geek Search 10 stories of excess from the production of Heaven's Gate We look back at one of the most infamous film productions in history. Here are 10 stories of excess from Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate... j In 1979, director Michael Cimino was at the height of his powers. Having just won five Oscars for his finely-honed, controversial Vietnam film The Deer Hunter, Cimino suddenly found himself in the enviable position of being able to make just about any project he wanted.

The film he chose to pursue was based on the Johnson County War, a moment in 19th century American history where the conflict between settlers and wealthy landowners was at its height. United Artists, with a reputation for fostering creativity and Oscar-winning films, eagerly agreed to make what would become Heaven's Gate, and set aside a generous budget of $11.6m to make it. Anxious to have the film in cinemas by the winter of 1979, making it legible for Academy Award nominations the following year, UA tried to have it written into Cimino's contract that Heaven's Gate had to be ready in time for Christmas. Instead, Cimino managed to get UA to agree to a more complicated contract, and one that the studio would come to regret. The director pledged to make every effort to make Heaven's Gate in the allotted time. In return, any overspends Cimino incurred in his attempt to get Heaven's Gate ready for Christmas would be paid by United Artists, and would not be regarded as going over budget. Further, Cimino wouldn't be held responsible if, despite his best efforts, Heaven's Gate still missed its Christmas 1979 release date.

In effect, Cimino had coaxed United Artists into giving him almost complete creative and financial control over the project. The following article provides a brief insight into the legendary spending and excess that occurred, as related by United Artists' former vice-president Steven Bach in his 1985 book, Final Cut, and the 2004 documentary of the same name. Both they and dozens of other articles printed 34 years ago chart the fitful progress of Heaven's Gate, from the pursuit of perfection to its infamous premiere in November 1980. United Artists may have wanted Oscars, but what they got was a nightmare. 1. The cast spent at least six weeks learning to roller skate Before a frame of film was shot, Heaven's Gate's cast (which included Kris Kristofferson, Jeff Bridges, Christopher Walken and Isabelle Huppert) had to go on some extensive training courses, what Jeff Bridges later called "Camp Cimino". Lessons ranged from shooting to horse riding to cock fighting lessons to Yugoslavian dialect coaching. One early scene would see several prominent members of the cast dancing on skates, which required actors Kris Kristofferson, Jeff Bridges and Brad Douriff to spend hour after hour in training.

"They had to skate for a couple of hours a day, prop master Robert Visciglia said told the makers of the Final Cut documentary, "for maybe a week or two weeks." Brad Douriff puts the length of time spent training at a much longer six weeks - enough time for the cast to become adept at waltzing around on skates for Cimino's lengthy scenes. Deflatingly, for the actors involved, the roller skate waltzing scene was one of many, many sequences that ended up on the cutting room floor in the 149 minute 'directors' cut' of Heaven's Gate released in 1981. 2. Cimino would pick and arrange his extras one at a time - for every scene Although films told on an epic scale are by no means unusual in Hollywood history, Cimino's obsessive attention to detail certainly was. Cimino spent huge amounts of time planning and creating every single shot, as he chose each individual extra - from a line-up of dozens - and arranged them around the set depending on their look and height. "He would actually paint by selecting extras and putting them in the right place," recalls Vilmos Zsigmond, Cimino's cinematographer.

"Pretty much like a painter would paint. He'd paint by picking people up and dropping them into place." This process was made more laborious because of the sheer scale of the film - some scenes required 50 or more extras, all personally selected by Cimino. "It took time," Visciglia remembers. "Maybe a couple of hours to pick 50 people." The end results are undeniably beautiful, with individual shots composed like Renaissance oil paintings. But the cost to United Artists, as Cimino single-mindedly pursued perfection, would soon add up to terrifying sums - it's estimated that, in the first week of shooting, just one and a half minutes of film had been racked up. The cost? An estimated $900,000. 3. Cimino would order "a minimum of 32 takes" for certain shots Certain directors are famous (or infamous) for asking for multiple takes - Stanley Kubrick was but one such exacting filmmaker. But Cimino was unusual even by the standards of someone like Kubrick, as he not only demanded multiple takes for certain scenes, but also takes of the same few lines of dialogue delivered in multiple ways.

"I'm not used to doing 57 takes, I'm really not," Brad Douriff says. "I'm not used to doing a minimum of 32 takes. It was like workshopping on film - we did the happy version, we did the crying version, we did the furious version." An entire day was spent shooting more than 50 takes of Kris Kristofferson drunkenly cracking a whip in a hotel room. The shot in the finished film is over in a matter of seconds. With Cimino demanding absolute creative freedom to make Heaven's Gate, the production quickly went behind schedule; within the first five days of filming, the film was already five days behind its target. 4. Cimino insisted on shooting his battle sequence in a field three hours' drive from the production's base of operations Heaven's Gate's grandest set piece was - and is - its battle sequence between settlers and mercenaries. Requiring dozens of horses, extras, wooden wagons and explosions, it took weeks of planning and around a month of arduous filming. Just to make things even more difficult, Cimino had chosen for his battle location a field located some three hours' drive from his base of production in Kalispell, Montana.

Cast and crew were bundled into vans at 3:30 each the morning, still clutching their pillows so they could catch a bit more sleep as they were ferried to the location. When they finally got there, the day's filming was long and potentially even dangerous, as Cimino whipped up a dervish of dust, wagons and gunfire. "I don't know how long we shot those battle scenes," Bridges remembers, "But it was frightening, some of it. Each time I'd pray to God that none of us got hurt. We'd just keep doing it over and over." "We would ride around in a circle for three or four minutes at a gallop", recalled extra Eric Wood. "You've got wagons in the mix. Dust so you can hardly see." Still, if the actors and extras were getting tired and frustrated, some of the crewmembers didn't seem to mind. "Hell, this picture can go on forever as much as I care," horse wrangler told Steve Bach. "My boys and I have never been paid like this. I looooove Montana!" 5.

A gigantic irrigation system was installed to grow grass The problem the producers faced was that, as well asfrom Cimino's award-winning stature, the actual footage he was producing looked spectacular - when Cimino begrudgingly showed off a few minutes of finished film a few weeks into the shoot, the producers were taken aback at how beautiful it looked. Cimino may have been taking a painfully long time to shoot even one page of his script, but at that point, UA were still convinced they could have a hit on their hands - an expensive one, admittedly - but a hit nevertheless. It was when UA execs David Field and Steven Bach visited the set of Heaven's Gate that alarm bells started to ring again. The field Cimino chose for his climactic battle sequence? Not only was it costing a fortune to hire (from a tribe of native Americans, according to producer Joann Carelli), but it was also costing a fortune to irrigate. Cimino, in his wild perfectionism, had decided that his battlefield had to be covered in lush, green grass. This meant that the land had to be cleared of rocks and an irrigation system had to be installed to encourage the grass to grow - meaning yet more expense.

"He's talking about hundreds of people and horses and wagons and explosives," Bach reasoned. "Who the hell is going to see grass?" Any suggestions to Cimino that the grass was unnecessary - or that the battlefield location could, perhaps, have been a bit nearer to home - fell on deaf ears. It was all, he said, "part of the poetry of America". If Cimino wanted grass, then grass he would have. 6. Cimino made his cast and crew wait for the right clouds to roll over One of the more celebrated stories from Heaven's Gate's oral production history is of Cimino's insistence on the right light and ambience while filming on location. Key grip Richard Deats remembers it this way: "We'd started work at four in the morning with a dawn shot. We shot in the morning and the dawn was there. Then the clouds came in and we lost the light until it was totally overcast. And we waited. And we waited and we waited and we sat and we sat..." "Michael was waiting for this weather to clear, and it was three o'clock in the afternoon and we hadn't had lunch yet", recalled key costumer Sandra Jordan.

When someone finally plucked up the courage to ask whether it wasn't time the crew took a break to have a bite to eat, the director reportedly said, "Lunch? This is bigger than lunch!" 7. A train was rerouted especially for the production When it came to Cimino's exacting methods - and his lack of interest when it came to lunch breaks - assistant editor Penelope Shaw summed it up best. "He thinks, there's that beautiful cloud. That'll be there for an eternity if I get it on film. Nobody will care about lunch 20 years from now, but they'll be able to see that visual I've created forever." The problem was, Cimino's determination to craft the great American movie was resulting in some quite bizarre directorial choices. Legend has it that a tree was chopped down and relocated to improve the composition of a solitary shot. A gigantic set - of a Wyoming street circa 1892 - was built, torn down and completely rebuilt again because the director wanted the gap between the houses to be six feet wider.

Actor John Hurt spent so long waiting around on the production for something to do, he went off and made The Elephant Man for David Lynch in the interim, and then came back to shoot more scenes on Heaven's Gate. Then there was the vintage locomotive Cimino wanted for the film. Too large to fit through modern railway tunnels, the thing had to be placed on the back of a truck and driven from its original resting place in a Denver, Colorado museum to Montana at presumably huge expense. The train appeared in the film for a matter of minutes. 8. There were reportedly on-set 16 accidents in one day By the time Heaven's Gate had gone 200 percent over its originally estimated budget in July 1979, United Artist's bosses had lost their patience. With other solutions to the Gate problem proving impossible to pursue - EMI turned down the offer to buy the production from UA, while firing Cimino could have caused the film to break down altogether - UA decided to fire Cimino's producer Joann Carelli instead. With the studio now in control as producers, Cimino effectively forced to work as the company's employee.

The message was clear: stick to the budget and the schedule for the remainder of the shoot, or you'll lose the right to final cut. Then, just as Cimino finally began to get Heaven's Gate back on schedule, the production's reputation in the eyes of the world's press took a major blow. A journalist named Les Gapay, having been refused a request to visit the set of Heaven's Gate, got a job as an extra on the set. Gapay spent two months getting paid $30 a day on Cimino's secretive production, and emerged with a story of obsession and excess that was quickly picked up by newspapers all over the world. Gapay told of the chaos that ensued during the shooting of that colossal battle scene, where he claimed that extras had been "doing things that stunt men should do", and that 16 of them had been injured as a result. "Because of the mad rush," Gapay wrote, "there are several injuries as the scene is filmed over and over for several days. Some of the immigrants, mostly extras, are brushed by horses and knocked into the mud. One minor actor has both feet stepped on by horses.

Several persons tumble out of lurching wagons." These and numerous other snippets from Gapay's expose were circulated in the news. Before production had even wrapped, Heaven's Gate would have to fight an uphill battle to prove to the public that it was a masterpiece and not an expensive catastrophe. 9. Cimino shot 1.3 million feet of film by the time filming ended When the cameras finally ceased rolling in 1980, Heaven's Gate was about a year behind its original schedule - filming was supposed to have been over by June 1979, with a final cut delivered by September that year. Instead, Cimino had gone vastly over budget and schedule, and in his pursuit of perfection, had compiled an estimated 1.3 million feet of film - a staggering amount, and considerably more than the million feet of film said to have been shot during the troubled production of Apocalypse Now. The problem Cimino and his team of editors now faced was a daunting one: they had approximately 220 hours of footage to comb through in order to compile their finished film. That finished film, as defined by Cimino's contract with United Artists, had to be three hours in length, or preferably shorter.

Imagine the studio executives' horror, then, when Cimino presented them with a work print that weighed in at an eye-watering five hours and 25 minutes. "It's a little long," a hollow-eyed and visibly exhausted Cimino conceded. "I can lose maybe 15 minutes..." 10. Cimino turned his editing room into a fortress Having viewed the incredibly lengthy early cut of Heaven's Gate, United Artists remained adamant about two things: one, they wanted a version short enough to be commercially viable, and two, they wanted the film out by Christmas 1980. They may have missed the 1979 festive slot they'd optimistically planned about 18 months or so earlier, but they were still determined to pull Oscar glory out of what threatened to become a public debacle. Cimino was equally determined to get the final cut he wanted. With pressure mounting and the Christmas deadline looming, Cimino spent 18 hour days holed up in his editing room - and went to drastic measures to keep his precious footage away from the eyes of meddling executives. "It's quite funny actually," recalls assistant editor Penelope Shaw.

"He had bars put on the cutting room windows, and he had all the locks changed, so that nobody could come in. He said, 'I'm not showing it to them until I'm ready.'" One report even suggests that, just to be on the safe side, Cimino also had an armed guard blocking the entrance. The cut of Heaven's Gate that emerged in the autumn of 1980 weighed in at three hours and 39 minutes - considerably slimmed down from the work print, but still far longer than United Artists wanted. If executives were angry at this still ungainly duration, it was far too late to do much about it - delay the production further, and they ran the risk of missing another Christmas release window, and with it any possibility of a golden statue at the Oscars. Aftermath The toxic reaction by critics at the Heaven's Gate premiere on the 19th November 1980 has since passed into legend. Vincent Canby's review for the New York Times quickly became one of the most quoted pieces of film criticism of all time; the words, "unqualified disaster" were repeated by news anchors and reprinted in newspapers worldwide.

Canby's statement that Heaven's Gate "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," summed up the air of overwhelming negativity surrounding not only the film itself but its director. If the Hollywood film industry can turn a director into a star and a celebrated artist overnight - as it had when Cimino won five Academy Awards for The Deer Hunter - then it can also turn against them just as quickly. Cimino's secrecy and perfectionism while making Heaven's Gate were regarded as arrogance by the press; his huge expenditure on the production angered some fellow filmmakers. When reviews and articles about Heaven's Gate proliferated, its fate was sealed. After just one week, United Artists pulled the film and cancelled its wider release. Cimino wrote an open letter, published in trade papers, stating his intention to re-cut the film and release it in a tighter form. This shorter, two hour 29 minute cut surfaced in April 1981, but the poor reviews persisted, and audiences stayed away. Heaven's Gate became a salutary lesson in Hollywood, as its failure ultimately saw investment corporation Transamerica sell United Artists to MGM.

In the wake of other high-profile box-office failures, like Martin Scorsese's New York, New York and Steven Spielberg's 1941, Heaven's Gate was seen as the end of an era of director-driven productions. Thirty-four years on, and Heaven's Gate has enjoyed a certain amount of critical reassessment, yet its title is still a byword for vast expenditure. But as well as a tale of excess and financial disaster, Heaven's Gate is also the story of a director seduced by his own grand vision. A crewmember once said that Cimino had fallen in love with his own movie. That adoration in turn led to an obsessive pursuit of what he thought was perfection. Little could Cimino have known that his love affair with Heaven's Gate would not only jeopardise his career, but also change the American film industry forever. Horses and Wagons and Hats Horses and Wagons and Hats February 14th, 2010 · 11 Comments Heaven’s Gate (1980) Running time: 219 minutes (original cut) Should I Care?

As the 1970s came to a close, five runaway film productions loomed on the horizon, piling up doom and gloom courtesy of the mainstream news media. Suffering from fiscal recklessness at best, studio mismanagement at worst, if the poor buzz was to be believed, these five big budget movies were determined to bankrupt Hollywood: Apocalypse Now, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, 1941, The Blues Brothers and Heaven’s Gate. Four of these would-be disasters quickly recouped their heavy costs at the box office. The one that didn’t make it into the black seems to have been conveniently lost in time along with its infamous director. That would be Michael Cimino and the movie would be Heaven’s Gate, a 3 ½ hour western of pictorial brilliance, almost unparalleled scope, outstanding performances and haunting grandeur. For all his excesses and notoriety, Cimino captures a certain lyrical beauty missing in epic filmmaking since the passing of David Lean. It’s time to call Heaven’s Gate what it is: the last great American film of the 1970s.

Cimino’s screenplay not only paints the Old West with the contours I imagine actually existed there — crowdedness and expanse, serenity and violence, beauty and ugliness – but fills that landscape with intriguing characters and dialogue of surprising depth. Kris Kristofferson leads a fairly overlooked cast of talented character actors, all of whom are elevated above the din and clamor of the massive production and are enabled to deliver excellent performances. Few movies recreate a bygone era with the detail of this one, with Vilmos Zsigmond overseeing the majestic cinematography and David Mansfield composing a staggering musical score. Unlike so many turkeys that truly qualify for “worst ever” status, the craftsmanship here is never in question. For all the money spent on Heaven’s Gate, we can see exactly where the bucks ended up and why. So, What’s This About? In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Harvard College graduating class of 1870 — which includes James Averill (Kris Kristofferson) — assembles to hear their class orator Billy Irvine (John Hurt) speak.

Irvine rejects the high-minded ideals sewn by the reverend doctor of the university (Joseph Cotten), and advises his fellow classmates to merely rise no further than each of them is capable. 20 years later, Averill arrives by train in Casper, Wyoming after transporting an immigrant woman to St. Louis to be hanged. Averill is sheriff of Johnson County, pristine territory which more Polish, German and Ukrainian immigrants seem to be pouring into every day. By the time Averill visits a saloon operated by his friend John Bridges (Jeff Bridges) in the town of Sweetwater, the sheriff learns that the local cattle association, led by the unscrupulous Frank Canton (Sam Waterston) has drawn up the names of 125 settlers suspected of cattle rustling or troublemaking and put them on a death list. The most efficient assassin on the cattleman’s payroll is Nathan Champion (Christopher Walken), who roams Johnson County executing immigrants who’ve stolen livestock. Meanwhile, Averill returns to his pastoral home and to his girlfriend Ella Watson (Isabelle Hupert), who operates a bordello and accepts stolen cattle as payment.

After adjourning to the town reception hall — Heaven’s Gate, which hosts music and roller skating — Averill asks Ella to leave the county, not wanting to tell her that her name is on the death list. Champion, who in addition to being one of Ella’s customers is also in love with her, offers to take her away under the protection of his men (Geoffrey Lewis and Mickey Rourke). She rejects both offers and chooses to stay in Sweetwater. Three mercenaries intercept Ella at her place of business and attempt to scratch her name off the death list. Standing behind Averill and Champion, the rest of the town elects to stay their ground and attempt to repel the invaders. Who Should Be Held Responsible? In 1971, a filmmaker no one in Hollywood had heard of — putting his pictorial eye and camera skills to use in New York directing commercials for Kodak, Pepsi and United Airlines — wrote a screenplay titled The Johnson County War. The screenwriter was Michael Cimino and his script was loosely based on a range war that took place in 1892 between cattle ranchers and settlers, many of them immigrants, who flowed into Johnson County, Wyoming after passage of the Homestead Act.

Producer David Foster set the project up at Fox, only to have production head Jere Henshaw put it into turnaround in 1972. Henshaw later told American Film, “It looked to us like a pretty downbeat story at a pretty heavy cost.” An idiosyncratic caper Cimino wrote titled Thunderbolt and Lightfoot fared much better, with Clint Eastwood enjoying the script enough to gamble on the first time director. Co-starring Jeff Bridges, the picture was very favorably reviewed and a modest box office hit in the summer of 1974. Four years later, Cimino was riding a tidal wave of industry buzz for his second film, an ode to brotherhood and sacrifice set against the Vietnam War titled The Deer Hunter. Among those in Hollywood who were high on the movie was David Field, a production executive for United Artists, who later recalled, “We saw an advanced print of Deer Hunter — I don’t know how many weeks before it was released — and we were blown away.” Cimino’s agent submitted a package for his client’s next film — The Johnson County War — to United Artists.

The studio’s head of production Danton Rissner read the script in August 1978 and responded coolly it. His story department concluded: “If it were not for Cimino, I would pass.” What distinguished the script from the typical western was its assertion that the United States government had sanctioned the range war in what amounted to ethnic genocide. Rissner remained dubious that theater exhibitors would welcome such liberal revisionism of a fading genre. But by September, UA agreed to a pay-or-play package of $1.7 million for The Johnson County War: $250,000 for Cimino’s script, $500,000 for Cimino’s directing services, $100,000 for Cimino’s producing partner Joann Carelli and $850,000 for Kris Kristofferson to star, all to be paid whether the movie was made or not. Cimino continued to tune his script. He inserted a prologue introducing the characters of Averill and Billy Irvine at Harvard 20 years before the events in Wyoming, and added a brief epilogue, taking place 10 years after the range war.

Averill is moored in a yacht off the coast of Rhode Island, still haunted by the events of the film. The script concluded with the quote, “What one loves about life are the things that fade.” Cimino had also arrived on a new title, and in April 1979, one week after The Deer Hunter won five Academy Awards including Best Picture, principal photography began on Heaven’s Gate. Glacier National Park in Kalispell, Montana had been selected as a filming location and a release date of December 1979 set. The accelerated schedule dictated a budget of $11.5 million, $15 million at most. Recalling Cimino’s exacting work methods, director of photography Vilmos Zsigmond stated, “It was very unusual the way he worked. He would actually paint by selecting extras and put them in the right place in a set. It was like a painter would paint them. He painted by picking up people and put them into the right place. Then, once we started to shoot, you know, sometimes we would go for three takes, sometimes you would go for ten takes.

And many, many times you had to go for forty takes.” In the first six days of shooting, Cimino had fallen five days behind schedule, with roughly 90 seconds of usable footage in the can. After 12 days, Heaven’s Gate was 10 days behind schedule. In his book Final Cut, Steven Bach recounted the expenses that began accumulating: “It was true, as later press reports informed, that Michael Cimino was building sets and rebuilding them, hiring 100 extras, then 200, then 500, adding horses and wagons and hats, shoes, gloves, dresses, top hats, bridles, boots, roller skates, babushkas, aprons, dusters, buckboards, gun belts, rifles, bullets, cows, calves, bulls, trees, thousands of tons of dirt, hundreds of miles of exposed film, and all this mattered economically. But what mattered most was that what he was adding was takes and retakes and retakes of the retakes. And retakes of those. Michael Cimino was taking — and retaking — time.

Getting it right.” To get it right, Cimino was shooting as many as 30 takes of shots and printing nearly every one, burning through $200,000 a day and $1 million per week. Actor Brad Dourif recalled, “I’m not used to seeing fifty seven takes. I’m really not. I’m not used to doing a minimum of thirty-two takes. He wanted to try a bunch of different ways. It was like workshopping on film, you know, we did the happy version, we did the crying version, we did the furious version. I mean, each scene was taken to these degrees, beyond which you weren’t going for the ultimate take, you were going for a lot of choices.” At its current pace, Heaven’s Gate was on track to exceed its budget by 500% and end up costing United Artists a then stellar sum of $35 million. The studio got its first peek at Heaven’s Gate on June 6, 1979 when Bach and David Field made the trip to Kalispell to view about 30 minutes of the film. Bach recalled, “The footage was ravishing.

There was nothing that anybody on Earth could say to criticize the footage, so we knew it wasn’t the case of a production that was falling apart. We never thought it was a case of Michael sitting in his trailer eating chocolates and watching television when he should have been out on the set. That was never the issue. The issue was we didn’t agree that you could take this much time to achieve perfection. And if you continue to take this much time to achieve perfection, you’re going to break our bank and there’s not going to be any company to release the picture.” Jeff Bridges later offered his recollection of the production by stating, “From somebody on the outside it would look like it was almost too much, but it never appeared that way to me. It was like, this guy really cares.” But with John Hurt due to start work on The Elephant Man in October 1979 and the mountain roads in Montana closing for winter, Cimino heeded United Artists’ pleas to pick up the pace. UA pushed the release of the film back a year, settling on Christmas 1980. The studio planned exclusive reserved seating 70mm print engagements in New York, Los Angeles and Toronto for November 1980.

Heaven’s Gate would then expand to additional cities in December before a general release in February 1981 to benefit from the many Academy Award nominations the film industry would naturally bestow on the picture. On June 26, 1980, after eight months of editing, Cimino was ready to show United Artists the film. Studio executives assembled in Los Angeles for a private screening. Bach recalled, “I thought Michael looked exhausted, truly, truly depleted. I remember asking, ‘How close are we to a final cut?’ And he said, ‘It’s a little long. I can lose maybe fifteen minutes.’ And we sat down and we watched the movie. And the movie that we saw was five hours and 25 minutes long. The battle sequence alone was as long as most feature motion pictures. I was angry, I was angry, I was angry.

The company had been put through turmoil … And the internal hope that had kept us all going for those two or three years at this process now — which was that it was going to be a masterpiece, and that would justify everything that we had gone through — was suddenly gone.” By mid-October, Cimino had Heaven’s Gate down to 3 hours and 39 minutes. No one at United Artists bothered viewing his cut until its public unveiling in New York one month later. Jeff Bridges recalled, “I can remember going to the first screening, the premiere in New York, and we were all very excited and Mike was quite anxious because I don’t know if he even saw the film before it was shown, you know, it was wet right out of the soup. He had just put it together and just barely made the deadline to get it all together. And the movie comes on. I remember my first impression of seeing it was, you know, kind of the splendor of it was wonderful, but the rhythm of it was so unusual and so kind of slow and not what you expected to see that the audience certainly was frustrated. And you hear that [smattering of applause] terrible applause at the end.

Ugh, it was terrible.” The next morning, Michael Cimino, Joann Carelli and Bridges were on their way to Toronto for the next screening when they picked up a copy of the New York Times. The opening paragraph of Vincent Canby’s review read: “Heaven’s Gate fails so completely, 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.” Brad Dourif recalled, “Well I read Vincent Canby’s — I don’t read reviews, that’s the first thing — I read Vincent Canby’s because it actually had the line in it, ‘like being given a four-hour tour of your own living room’ and I just wanted to see how bad a review could be and it was really scathing. Angry review. I mean, basically, everything that people hated about the direction of film was piled onto Michael.” Interviewed by Jean-Luc Godard in 1982, film critic Pauline Kael defended the stoning Heaven’s Gate was given in the mainstream media. “I did think Canby’s review was rather brutal.

On the other hand, the fact is the picture does not have one good scene, or one good character, and it goes on for several hours. I think it’s very interesting visually, but there is nothing that can carry it with an audience. If the company had thought that the critics were wrong, they would have put in millions in advertising and they might have recouped on the picture. A lot of terrible movies get by if the companies believe in them … But they were dismayed because they could see the justice of what the reviewers were saying, that there was nothing there.” Steven Bach disagreed. “I think the critics were reviewing the production history. They were rewriting their reviews for The Deer Hunter, which they thought they had over praised. They were getting back at what they perceived as hostile treatment from the director. I think they were slapping United Artists for having allowed this to happen. But I never felt that there was a real serious attempt to see what is this picture trying to do and does it succeed on its own terms.

It didn’t succeed on the terms they wanted to lay on the picture and that was what they were writing about, was their terms for the picture, not the picture’s terms.” After playing for a week in New York, Cimino took out ads in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter asking UA to withdraw the film from release so he could rework his 219-minute cut. A 149-minute version of Heaven’s Gate opened in 810 theaters nationwide in April 1981. But audiences ignored it completely, buying $3.4 million in tickets in the United States. Tom Brokaw introduced a segment on Heaven’s Gate for the NBC Nightly News by proclaiming “a $40 million film from an Oscar winning director may be the biggest bomb in Hollywood history.” The loss to United Artists was tabulated at $44 million. Within a month, Transamerica decided it was done with the movie business and sold UA to rival studio MGM. Michael Cimino and Kris Kristofferson were at the Cannes Film Festival in May when the news broke.

UA’s new president Norbert Auerbach maintained that while Heaven’s Gate had not been directly responsible for the collapse of the prestigious 62-year-old studio, the movie hadn’t steered UA away from disaster either. Naturally, the first audiences to appreciate Heaven’s Gate were French. In December 1982, celebrated film magazine Cahiers du Cinema sponsored a screening of Cimino’s 219-minute cut in Paris. Word reached Los Angeles, where Jerry Harvey and Fred Grossbud of pay cable’s Z Channel persuaded MGM/UA to let them air the long version of Heaven’s Gate starting on Christmas Eve. It marked the first time a wide audience had been permitted to see the film at its original length.

In the Los Angeles Times — whose film critic Kevin Thomas had been one of the few to submit a rave review of Heaven’s Gate while it was in theaters — Charles Champlin wrote, “Not a damn thing was gained economically by forcing Cimino to eviscerate his work, but audiences were denied the chance to see fully whatever it was that Cimino had in mind.” In August 1983, England’s National Film Theatre booked the long version of Heaven’s Gate for six performances, with Cimino on hand to introduce the film. Derek Malcolm wrote in The Guardian: “The full version, I can assure you, is quite an experience – an extraordinary attempt to make a major American movie at a time when only the minors held sway.” The long version was released theatrically at the Plaza 2 theater in London, but its box office was so negligible that MGM/UA nixed plans to re-release the uncut Heaven’s Gate elsewhere.

Michael Cimino — who has not directed since 1996 and refuses requests to discuss his infamous magnum opus — had this to say in 1990: “I would respond to Heaven’s Gate the same way Jack Kennedy responded to the Bay of Pigs. I’d take full responsibility and all other questions are answered by the film itself.” Where Are You Getting This? Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven’s Gate by Steven Bach (1985) Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate (2004), directed by Michael Epstein

Question: To the nearest million, how mjch did Heavan's Gate lose for United Artists?
Answer: 30