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During an idle bit of YouTubing, I stumbled across this documentary on the making of the Emperor of All Flops:
Director Michael Cimino set out to make the Gone With the Wind of Westerns. It certainly seemed he could do so - Cimino had won five Academy Awards for his previous film, The Deer Hunter. Yet Heaven's Gate's budget ballooned to extraordinary proportions and production stretched months beyond the intended wrap. Soon, the media was filled with stories of an incompetent, disastrous production taking place under the auspices of UA. While this was not, in fact, true, (production was a tightly-run ship, even if it was horrifyingly overbudget and behind schedule), it already had the public talking.

After an intial release, United Artists pulled the film at Cimino's request to be re-edited. The film failed on its second release, and made only a fraction of its budget back ($1.5 million out of a $40+ million production, though I need to check this). Infamously, the failure of the film sunk the already ailing United Artists.

Could this film have been saved, or even be the masterpiece Cimino and UA were sure it would be? Based on the information presented in the doc, I think the potential was there. Once David Field put his foot down and forced Cimino to be on time and on budget for the filming of the prologue, the production went just as they had hoped. I can't help but think that if UA had made it abundantly clear that Cimino had to achieve perfection without breaking the bank, things could have gone so much better. UA should never have allowed Cimino to bully them into casting a French actress he liked that they couldn't understand and knew audiences wouldn't either. Allowing Cimino to make his friend (with no experience producing films) to be the producer, was a terrible mistake, one that effectively allowed him to run production as a perfectionistic autocrat.
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