The audience of celebrities, journalists and filmmakers who met at New York's Cinema One on the evening of November 18, 1980, could expect nothing less than a masterpiece.
Hollywood's Oscar-winning new director Michael Cimino presented his latest litter: "Heaven's Gate", a monumental western about the struggle between ranchers and poor European settlers in Wyoming at the end of the 19th century.
The story set against the historical backdrop of the Johnson County War, in which wealthy cattle farmers in Wyoming hired killers to kill impoverished settlers who sometimes stole their cattle to survive and fought over land with the cattle farmers.
Before that, Cimino staged the story of two Harvard graduates who found each other on both sides of the conflict.
And a tragic love triangle between a brothel manager, a killer and a marshal.
It was a superlative production: the film devoured a budget of 44 million dollars.
Up to the supporting roles he was cast with stars such as Mickey Rourke, Jeff Bridges, Christopher Walken, Isabelle Huppert, Kris Kristofferson, John Hurt and Willem Dafoe.
What could go wrong there?
As good as anything.
Because what many viewers of the premiere night could not have suspected: The detail-obsessed Cimino had got so lost that he had only cut a film from the mountains of material at the last minute - for more than three and a half hours.
The guests at the premiere reacted so horrified and bored by the result that the filmmakers were flown straight back to Hollywood, where the employees of the production company refused to collect them at the airport or even to talk to them.
"Heaven's Gate" was to become notorious as one of the worst films in film history;
as a million-dollar bankruptcy that heralded the end of Cimino's career, the end of United Artists - and a change in the way Hollywood made films.
Slap over the face
All signs had been pointing to success: It was not until 1979 that Cimino's second film, the Vietnam War homecoming drama "Those Going Through Hell", won five Oscars.
Sure, it was somewhat irritating that Cimino gave the impression that the film was based on his own experience as a member of the elite Green Berets unit in Vietnam - even though he had actually only served as a reservist in the United States for six months.
But all in all, it seemed like the forty year old former commercial filmmaker was about to become the next big star director.
Accordingly, Cimino had no problems finding sponsors for »Heaven's Gate«: With a budget of around ten million dollars, he and his team moved to rural Montana in April 1979 to film.
And the chaos took its course.
Accustomed from his work on short, highly polished commercials to composing every shot down to the last detail, the successful Cimino turned out to be an incredible pedant.
"It was an ordeal," remembered leading actor Kris Kristofferson in 2004 in the Los Angeles Times.
In one shot, his character, Marshal James Averill, was supposed to be woken up in bed with a slap.
Cimino turned - and had it repeated.
And repeat.
And repeat.
"We got it right," says Kristofferson, but there was always something wrong with Cimino in the background: "Some guy didn't do it exactly correctly."
Weeks of roller skate training
Within the first six days of shooting, Cimino was five days behind schedule and had spent $ 900,000 - usable footage for a minute and a half.
After two weeks he was ten days behind schedule and had missed two hours of film, only three minutes of which he found acceptable.
Rumors soon spread around the set that the production company wanted to pull Cimino off the project and send a replacement.
But nothing happened.
And so he continued to work as if in slow motion: for example, he let his actors practice roller-skating for hours every day for weeks - for a single festival scene on a roller-skating rink.
And Cimino not only strained the time budget: in the middle of nowhere, he had a complete western town built, and a historically correct costume was made for each of the 1200 extras for crowd scenes.
United Artists kept increasing the budget - until after seven arduous months ten million had become 44.
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With elaborate crowd scenes, Cimino continued to strain the budget
Photo: United Artists / Everett Collection / ddp images
A worthwhile investment if you believed Cimino, who steadfastly spread what a masterpiece he was creating.
Unfortunately, however, reporter Les Gapay snuck in as an extra and covered the disastrous course of the shoot undercover.
The image of the director prodigy was cracking.
Part of the problem, said Clint Eastwood, who was involved in Cimino's directorial debut in 2010, "Vanity Fair", was probably at the end: "If you consider yourself the king of the world, everyone hopes you will fall."
»The end of the director's cinema«
The then United Artists employee Steven Bach later wrote an entire book about the film project: »Final Cut.
Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the Film that Sank United Artists ”.
In it he describes the moment when Cimino's dream burst in the late evening of November 18, 1980 at the New York premiere: During the break in the middle of the marathon film, the audience came out so quietly that they were only “speechless with astonishment or comatose with boredom «.
Cimino asked him why nobody drinks the champagne.
He only said: "Because you hate the film, Michael".
Indeed: Vincent Canby, head of the "New York Times" film review, compared "Heaven's Gate" with a "ship that slips straight through to the bottom of the sea when it is baptized."
The film is as exciting as a »forced four-hour hiking tour through your own living room«.
The debacle was even commented on in Germany - for example by SPIEGEL, who wrote on December 1, 1980 that the film was a “failure” and the “long-overdue confirmation of the old recognition that equipment and atmosphere alone do not help if the story is poorly built is. ”The article predicted that the bankruptcy would be“ possibly the end of directorial cinema in Hollywood ”.
For those involved in the film things went steeply downhill after “Heaven's Gate”: United Artists took the film out of the cinemas after a week and shortened it by 70 minutes - but when the second version came out in April 1981, hardly anyone wanted to see it either .
The film grossed only 4.5 million.
Serious damage to the studio: United Artists was sold to MGM in 1981, which only reactivated the brand years later.
For many, “Heaven's Gate” marks a point in Hollywood's history at which creative control was taken out of the hands of the filmmakers and the studios took over to make box office success the measure of all things.
"The business side of Hollywood," said Willem Dafoe in the 2004 documentary "Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven's Gate," "has overwhelmed everything else, and it's hard to see how it made the films better."
33 years of rejection
But in addition to big business, personal careers were also attached to the film: Isabelle Huppert, who was on the move to Hollywood at the time, could not gain a foothold in the US film business, went back to France and became a star of European art house cinema.
Kris Kristofferson said he was "unmarketable for a while".
But the hardest hit was director Cimino.
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Michael Cimino (2nd from left) on the set of "Heaven's Gate"
Photo: interTOPICS / mptv / ddp images
It became very quiet around him.
He tried unsuccessfully on a number of films, from the Mario Puzo adaptation of "The Sicilian" (1987) to his last film, the mystical road movie "Sunchaser" (1996).
Then he left the film business behind.
He was burned for Hollywood.
He withdrew, gave no more interviews, did not allow himself to be photographed, did not even let friends into his Los Angeles property.
Editor Joe D'Augustine, “Vanity Fair,” described how bizarre working with Cimino on his last film was: “It was scary, crazy.
I was taken into that dark editing room with black velvet curtains and there was this man bent over.
I was led into his room as if he were the Pope.
Everyone spoke very softly.
He had something over his face, a handkerchief. "
Cimino changed his appearance in such a way that even close friends no longer recognized him: after hair coloring, fasting cures, jaw operations and a rhinoplasty, at the end of the nineties he was no longer the stocky, black-haired man with the strong nose who was involved in the shooting of Heaven's Gate The director's chair.
But a dainty, androgynous, strangely ageless creature with blonde hair and filigree facial features.
Rumors circulated that he was preparing for a sex change.
It was as if he wanted to become a different person.
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Michael Cimino 2014 at the Festival Lumière in Lyon
Photo: Starface / imago images
Cimino reacted accordingly defensively when MGM finally asked him if he would be prepared to make a revised Director's Cut for a DVD release of Heaven's Gate: "I've had enough rejection for 33 years." But he changed his mind , Luckily.
When the film premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in 2012 and was shown at the New York Film Festival, there were no reviews: The Independent and the Financial Times wrote about a “masterpiece”.
In 2015, the BBC finally compiled a list of the “100 best American films”.
"Heaven's Gate" was in third place, just above "Gone with the Wind".
Just a few months later, on July 2, 2016, Michael Cimino died at the age of 77 in his mansion in Beverly Hills.
The New York Times called him in its obituary "one of the most daring directors in Hollywood."
Icon: The mirror
