Heaven's Gate (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.

Plot

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.

Reception

Cimino had just won an Academy Award for directing The Deer Hunter, so United Artists had every reason to believe he was creating magic on location in Montana and Wyoming. After months of delays, last minute changes, and cost overruns, Cimino finally delivered his version which ran 3 hours and 39 minutes long. Cimino personally pulled that version from release after only one screening: its premiere in New York City 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.

Awards and nominations

Although the film is praised by some today, it received universally poor reviews and a number of Razzie awards upon its first release:

• Golden Raspberry Awards

Won: Worst Director (Michael Cimino)

Nominated: Worst Picture

Nominated: Worst Screenplay

Nominated: Worst Musical Score

Nominated: Worst Actor (Kris Kristofferson)

• '''Academy Awards

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

American film industry

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.

Director's cut

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 tagline "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 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.

Comparisons

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, whilst not getting trashed by the critics was simply ignored and only recouped costs through worldwide release.

External links

1980 films | Western films | Idaho films | Montana films | Worst Picture Razzie Nominee | United Artists films | Entertainment flops | Films over three hours long

Heaven's Gate (Film) | Heaven's Gate | Heaven's Gate (filme) | Врата рая (фильм)