The Making and Unmaking of Heaven's Gate

Directed by Michael Epstein
Written by Michael Epstein
Based on the book by Stephen Bach
Producer Michael Epstein
Producer Caroline Suh
Producer Rachael Horovitz
Associate Producer Erika Frankel
Associate Producer Jeremy Rocklin
Editor Penny Elliott Hays
Cinematography Joel Shapiro
Music Joel Goodman
Visual Effects Mark Thompson

Michael Cimino began principle photography on Heaven's Gate on April 16th, 1979, one week to the day after he won the Academy Award for Best Director on The Deer Hunter. Six days into production Cimino was five days behind schedule. He had shot close to 60,000 feet of film for approximately a minute and a half of usable footage. For the next six months Cimino shot dozens of takes for each scene--53 alone of Kris Kristofferson brandishing a bullwhip. Thousands of extras were employed; hundreds of horses. Days, then weeks, and eventually months were spent waiting for the sun to set, so that Cimino could get just the right light for his film. By the time production wrapped Cimino had exposed 1.5 million feet of film, 1.3 million of which he printed. He was six hundred percent over budget, and a year-and-a-half late.

And yet, despite this massive expenditure, Vincent Canby in the New York Times dubbed the film an "unqualified disaster." Canby wrote that Heaven's Gate was "like a forced, four-hour walking tour of one's own living room." United Artists, the studio that financed the picture, pulled the film after only a one-week run in a few New York City theaters. They re-cut it and released a shorter version six months later. It didn't matter; Heaven's Gate was, in the public's mind, a flop. A few days after this second release United Artists, the studio founded by Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith, ceased to exist. The unthinkable had happened: a single movie had sunk a studio.

Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven's Gate is a riveting account of ego run rampant, of epic mismanagement, and wanton extravagance--a cautionary tale of the rise and fall of a Hollywood wunderkind, the demise of a great studio, and a look into the strange logic of Hollywood movie-making.

Available film excerpts:

"Camp Cimino"

Introduction

Final Cut Reviews:

Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven's Gate is a documentary 10 times as engrossing as the film that is its subject.
  --Anita Gates, The New York Times

Artfully entwining outtakes, production stills, film clips and newly filmed interviews with executives, actors and crew, Epstein methodically charts stormy progress of the initially promising project. . . slickly and smartly made Final Cut could be an invaluable teaching tool in any film studies course that focuses on halcyon era of '70s cinema.
  --Joe Leydon, Variety