Turkey Week

Continuing from last week's Wired, I'm trying to watch a feature film nightly. Again, these are films that have caught my interest for one reason or another, be it from the story, actors, director, or a recommendation. I've seen some solid films, some criminally underrated titles, a few that were as dopey as I'd imagined, and some titles that didn't make it into wide release, but are absolutely well worth watching. But really, this exercise was to watch those rubbernecker films; those unqualified disasters that bring Hollywood to its knees once in a while, and whose titles live on as shorthand for "bad movie," long after the film has been forgotten.

Into the breach, I finally cleared a full afternoon and watched Heaven's Gate (1980), arguably one of Tinseltown's most notorious failures, a film whose lessons singlehandedly changed how movies are made, ended the burgeoning "auteur" movement, killed the western as a genre, and bankrupted a major studio. In reality, I knew more about the legends surrounding the movie itself than I did about the plot, so I bit the bullet, and watched it-- all 3 hours and 29 minutes of it.

Director Michael Cimino was coming off the success and acclaim of The Deer Hunter and was itching to make his script about the little-known Johnson County Wars in 1890's Wyoming. United Artists bankrolled him for $7.5 million dollars ($19.3M in today's dollars), about average for the time. The finished product ended up well past schedule (it was written that by day 6 of shooting, they were already 5 days behind), and cost the studio an unheard of $40 million (almost $103M today). More than a million feet of raw film was shot, and the original length edit given to the studio bosses came in at over 5 hours-- the battle scenes alone allegedly ran for well over 90 minutes. When it was trimmed down to its current 209 minute (3 hours 29 minute) length, the critics savaged it, and the public stayed away. Cimino then re-edited the film further down to "only" 149 minutes but by then the damage was done. Heaven's Gate grossed less than $3.9M in the States upon its release, by far the biggest money loser to date in Hollywood history. The fallout was immediate and predictable: Transamerica Corporation sold off its interest in United Artists Pictures, closing it down. For film buffs, this also signaled the end of a heady time, the Director-driven picture. This was how the giants made their bones-- Scorsese, Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg-- all flourished during this time of calculated risk-taking, and big payoffs for the studio's support (compare that to today, where there exist 6!! Beethoven the Saint Bernard movies). Michael Cimino's reputation never recovered and he has directed only 4 movies in the intervening 30 years.

Over the years, a bit of a cult has formed around Heaven's Gate, and modern day critics have not been nearly as nasty-- it seems that all the contemporary accounts at the time of the 1980 release were obsessed with the budget, and the stories about Cimino's perfectionism (50 takes for a single scene was not uncommon, and I've even read accounts where he held up shooting for hours just because he was waiting for a certain far away cloud formation to come into the frame). In fact most modern day critics reviewing the DVD releases actually have put this in a good light. So I decided to roll the dice and check it out. In the end, it came off as a sloppy and unfocused mess some of the time, but had moments of genuine brilliance. And as far as that bloated budget, every single penny was there on the screen. The look of the film is gorgeous-- every frame looks like a postcard. But... hanging two thin storylines (the real life story of the powerful and connected cattleman's association hiring killers to remove the immigrant population from Johnson County with the tacit support of the Wyoming Governor and President of the US is mixed with the tale of the local sheriff and one of the hired killers competing for the affections of the local bordello madam) in the space of an epic-length film is a lot to ask. But overall, I liked it, and I don't feel like I wasted my time at all. Worst film of all time? Hardly. Misunderstood, flawed masterpiece? Not quite. Cimino had a lot of huevos to bully the studios into acquiescing to his every whim, and there was little market for a bleak "anti-western" with no discernible good guy and a surprising amount of bloodshed. But it does stand as a unique film, and I'm glad I finally watched it.