'' (
1980 ) is a big-budget
Western Movie , depicting a fictionalized account of the
Johnson County War between land barons and European immigrants in
1890s Wyoming . The biggest
Hollywood Flop of the
1980s , ''Heaven's Gate'' became synonymous with troubled and overbudget film disasters. It resulted in a significant shift in the
American Film Industry , especially on how much control
Studios exercised on films.
Directed by
Michael Cimino (who received a
Golden Raspberry for worst director for this film), it starred
Kris Kristofferson ,
Christopher Walken ,
Isabelle Huppert ,
Jeff Bridges ,
John Hurt ,
Sam Waterston ,
Brad Dourif ,
Joseph Cotten ,
Geoffrey Lewis ,
Richard Masur ,
Terry O'Quinn ,
Mickey Rourke , and
Willem Dafoe .
''
The film opens in
1870 as Kris Kristofferson's character graduates from
Harvard University and makes his way West. The epilogue takes place in
1903 .
Cimino had just won an on
November 19 ,
1980 .
A subsequent review by veteran ''
New York Times ''
Critic Vincent Canby called ''Heaven's Gate'' "an unqualified disaster," comparing it to "a forced four-hour walking tour of one's own living room." It surfaced six months later in a 149 minute version in a desperate attempt to recoup some of its losses, but to no avail. Adverse publicity is widely thought to be largely responsible for a dismal box-office take.
One of the primary complaints about the film is its soundtrack: even though Cimino uses
Subtitles for non-English dialogue, some of the English dialogue is obscured by blaring music or
Sound Effects .
Although the film is praised by some today, it received universally poor reviews and a number of Razzie awards upon its first release:
:
Worst Picture
:
Worst Screenplay
:
Worst Musical Score
:
Worst Actor (
Kris Kristofferson )
The movie's unprecedented $40 million cost and extremely poor performance at the box office ($3,484,331 gross in the United States) are generally believed to have sent United Artists into
Bankruptcy and eventually led to its purchase by
MGM . This is only true indirectly. While the money loss was considerable, United Artists was still a thriving studio with a steady income provided by the
James Bond franchise. However, the ''Heaven's Gate'' fiasco generated more negative
Publicity than actual financial damage, causing
Transamerica Corporation (United Artists' corporate owner at the time) to become anxious over its own public image and withdraw from film production altogether. ''This'' in turn caused United Artists to be sold to MGM.
The fracas had a wider effect on the American film industry. During the
1970s , relatively young directors such as
Francis Ford Coppola ,
George Lucas , and
Steven Spielberg were given large budgets with very little studio control. This trend was already ending by the early 1980s, but ''Heaven's Gate'' is viewed by many as its definitive conclusion. Cimino has remarked that ''Final Cut'', a popular 1985 book about the making of the film by former United Artists executive
Steven Bach , "should be classified as fiction.
has made money off my blood, my work, for 20 years." Bach stated in his foreword to the book that Cimino had been unresponsive to requests for interviews.
Despite these setbacks, the movie was salvaged by an unlikely source. The
Z Channel , a cable TV channel that in its peak (mid-1980s) served 100,000 of Los Angeles's most influential film professionals, was the only network showing uncut movies on television. After the failed release of the re-edited and shortened ''Heaven's Gate,''
Jerry Harvey , the channel's programmer, decided to play Cimino's 219 minute cut. The re-assembled movie received admiring reviews and coined the term "
Director's Cut ."
When MGM home video released the film on VHS in the 1980's, they released Cimino's 219 minute cut, using the tage line "Heaven's Gate...The Legendary Uncut Version". Subsequent releases on
Laserdisc and
DVD have been the 219 minute cut. The 149 minute cut has never been released on home video.
"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 US and Australia, along with ''Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession'', a
Documentary about the film. In 2005, the original uncut version of ''Heaven's Gate'' was re-released in Paris. It was also shown to a sold out audience at New York's
Museum Of Modern Art .
In 1990,
Kevin Costner made the very long, shot-on-location Western film ''
Dances With Wolves ''. Comparisons to ''Heaven's Gate'' were easy to make, and the film became known as "Kevin's Gate," but the film was a huge box-office smash. Nominated for several
Oscars , it won
Best Picture . The phrase "Kevin's Gate" was revived in
1995 with Costner's long, expensive fantasy epic ''
Waterworld '', which, unlike ''Dances With Wolves'', was a critical disaster, only recouping costs through worldwide release.
