AHC: Save the Heaven's Gate movie (and United Artists)

I don't know about saving UA, but the studio breaking Cimino during this project could keep it from being such an albatross and herald the general end of boundless auteurism in the US. Make it a modest thing that is modestly good or modestly bad (doesn't really matter) that performs modestly at the box office and let Cimino rail to the heavens about his lost vision.

As an aside, as a board of history fans, let's point out that Cimino never let whether a thing actually happened or not get in the way of him telling a story. Whether it's Russian roulette clubs in Saigon or honestly most of the events of Heaven's Gate. Maybe he's interested in verisimilitude in the sense of accessing true emotions from his performers, or even in getting the right kind of craftsman to make his characters' cowboy boots, but he never really cared what actually happened. And that's fine! He's a storyteller.

Incidentally I hear his big unrealized project was...was it the Fountainhead? Something by Rand. If you did find a way to keep his career on track we could've had that pop up during the Reagan years, appropriately enough.
 
Oh, okay, makes sense. With the thread drift about The Deer Hunter, I kinda wasn't thinking about the main topic of the thread. Thanks.
The main thing is that Michael Cimino is someone who has great ideas for scenes but does not know how to make a coherent story from them, he needs other writers to turn his ideas into a screenplay that can be filmed.
He had that with The Deer Hunter he did not have that with Heaven's Gate.
So to save United Artists from Heaven's Gate you need three things.
First there should have been a script that was basically locked down before filming with only minor rewrites on the set needed.
Second there should have been a realistic budget and schedule made, the original budget and schedule was far too optimistic and that caused costs to spiral out of control.
Third there should have been a strong independent line producer to keep Camino in line.
Other things include is not using the money for the film to pay for everyone's cocaine on the set, and starting the editing process before the film wraps up, that is what saved Jaws Spielberg had the editor Vrena Fields fly out to cut the film that had already been shot and that helped shaped the movie.
 
Had this film been saved Hollywood would have likely been very different. As a result of this film's failure directorial freedom was curtailed in favor of greater studio control, and a number of big budget flicks that were passed over might have been made

Eh... I am usually not one for determinism, but given the atmosphere of the time (look how out of control the production of Apocalypse Now became - that became the subject of an entire documentary in itself), I really think that had Heaven's Gate been a success, a different auteur would have just blown a similarly gigantic stack of money on a bomb that wrecks a whole studio a few years down the line. Now, we might have gotten a New Hollywood period that extends slightly further into the early 1980s, and the trajectory of Cimino's career would have been radically different, but the broad strokes of Hollywood history would remain unchanged. The industry was due for a course correction.
 
This is a stretch, but would it be possible for Clint Eastwood to produce Heaven's Gate? Eastwood had given Cimino has first big break by having him direct Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, and restricted him to three takes. It seems he could help keep Cimino from going overboard.
 
Deer Hunter was based on the screenplay The Man Who Came to Play set in Las Vegas, which is where the Russian Roulette scene comes from.

Can you expand on how you can get Arthur Krim & co to stay on? I'm guessing the POD would involve the feud with the Transamerica brass not happening or something similar.

Sure, Transamerica agrees in 1977 to spin out UA. Probably in the form of a management buyout. Looks something like a combo UA/Orion line up with Bond and Rocky being the money earners.

However if Orion is formed and Heaven’s Gate is only a moderate loss/success you get Transamerica Films alas, so keep that in mind if you want the UA name still around.
 
Deer Hunter was based on the screenplay The Man Who Came to Play set in Las Vegas, which is where the Russian Roulette scene comes from.



Sure, Transamerica agrees in 1977 to spin out UA. Probably in the form of a management buyout. Looks something like a combo UA/Orion line up with Bond and Rocky being the money earners.

However if Orion is formed and Heaven’s Gate is only a moderate loss/success you get Transamerica Films alas, so keep that in mind if you want the UA name still around.
Thanks, this makes a lot of sense. My best-case scenario for this is Heaven's Gate being lukewarmly received when it's released, but for it to later be rehabilitated by cinephiles, similar to Leone's Once Upon A Time in the West (probably my favorite film of all time, by the way).
 
I have in my unfinished Timeline, Step by Step, notes on a Version of Heaven Gate which was made in place of "The Deer Hunter".
Clint Eastwood is casted in place in the place of Kris Kristofferson. He does not tolerate the multiple takes . Cimino behavior get so bad that Eastwood takes over the film as a uncredited Director.
The Film is much tighter. It run less then 2 hours and you can see the events of the final fight.
 
Cimino films the roller-disco scene first, the investors are like WT absolute F?!! and kill the project. Later on, someone sane picks up the script and red-pencils it into a watchable movie...
 
I've read Final Cut, and there's a short vignette where the writer has a meeting with a Famous Director and asks him for advice - the plan was to sound out the idea of him taking over the film, but in a polite way. The book doesn't identify the director but I always assumed it was David Lean, who was then going through a long fallow patch, although Wikipedia argues strongly that it was Norman Jewison.

The idea obviously went nowhere and by that point the film was beyond recovery, even assuming it was possible to switch directors without having the unions shut down the production. I can't think of a way to save Heaven's Gate in the form envisaged by Michael Cimino. As a small-scale Western it might have been on a par with Walter Hill's contemporary The Long Riders, e.g. good, cheap, unpopular, in which case Cimino's career would have probably carried on as before while UA would have been in a stronger financial position.

As it stands the fundamental problems with Heaven's Gate as an epic for the ages are that the script is no good, the story is unengaging, the cinematography is out of proportion to the drama, the acting is flat, it says nothing that hadn't been said by Robert Altman in McCabe & Mrs Miller for much less money at the beginning of the decade, and as mentioned up the thread it was full of supporting actors without a strong lead. It can't be saved short of rewriting it from scratch.
 
I have in my unfinished Timeline, Step by Step, notes on a Version of Heaven Gate which was made in place of "The Deer Hunter".
Clint Eastwood is casted in place in the place of Kris Kristofferson. He does not tolerate the multiple takes . Cimino behavior get so bad that Eastwood takes over the film as a uncredited Director.
The Film is much tighter. It run less then 2 hours and you can see the events of the final fight.

And if you guys remember my TL American Magic, Ted Turner buys UA before the original Rocky came out. A year later, Donald Trump buys MGM and options Heaven's Gate. That led to Turner acquiring MGM in the early 80s.
 
My own feelings on Heaven's Gate are this: what Cimino really needed on location was a strong executive producer to keep him in line and also keep an eye on the schedule and budget and also limit the amount of takes necessary per scene. Another factor was Cimino's fragile ego. Nobody in UA was going to tell him "No Michael, you cannot have a thousand extras when you promised us a hundred for this scene!" or "No Michael, you cannot change the set that way when it was already planned to be this way!" The one key line in Stephen Bach's memoir on the film is this: "What you read in a Michael Cimino script is not necessarily how he actually sees it".
 
. . . and starting the editing process before the film wraps up, that is what saved Jaws Spielberg had the editor Vrena Fields fly out to cut the film that had already been shot and that helped shaped the movie.
I’m amazed that Jaws needed something like this, for it’s a great yarn with suspense and adventure:

Human vs. Beast, the Quest, and a core of main characters you can count on the fingers of one hand.

What’s not to work out?

—————-

PS The heart of any great story is that someone wants something badly and has a hard time getting it (and what they want can change, modify, etc, giving character arc and everything else)
 
I’m amazed that Jaws needed something like this, for it’s a great yarn with suspense and adventure:

Human vs. Beast, the Quest, and a core of main characters you can count on the fingers of one hand.

What’s not to work out?

IIRC the problem was the mechanical shark, which gave them other problems throughout the shoot, looked really bad.
 
See, I kinda absolutely love the roller disco :p

I do too, I just re-watched it and in some universe somewhere, it's constantly cited as one of the best scenes ever in American cinema.

Bach put it best in his book. It had just too much of everything. Too many gorgeous shots. Too many gorgeously shot scenes that went on for way too long. And - I remember this phrase vividly - too many "caterwauling peasants."

Still, at heart, it was a violent Western drama that tried to say something about America. If they'd indeed kept a rein on Cimino from early on - no wasting an afternoon getting fifteen shots of an extra cracking a whip - they'd have gotten a pretty good two-hour version. It probably would be forgotten today but it would've made back its money.
 
One key as to why there were so many takes per filming a scene lies in the ego and personality of Michael Cimino. His most famous comment, which sums up his entire personality, is "If you don't get it right, what's the point?"
Another factor is that Cimino did not have too much experience as a director of movies, having started out as a director of tv commercials, which is very different from directing films, and as a screenwriter for the classics Silent Running and Magnum Force. He was not really a big name legend but garnered some respect as the director of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and The Deer Hunter. His approach to filming a scene was more or less artistic, given his background. Directors of the New Hollywood era such as Lucas, Spielberg, Kubrick, Scorsese and Coppola were technical directors, having started out as cameramen or film editors. Their approach was "Let's make sure this is done right or correctly" whereas Cimino would say "Let's see how this looks right".
 
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