Can a single film ruin the career of a director at the peak of his career, nearly bankrupt a multimillion-dollar studio with a long history, and also mark the end of a golden era for the industry? The answer is yes. Heaven's Gate was probably the biggest economic disaster in Hollywood history, without a doubt the film that had the worst consequences. A curious sum of factors that resulted in the total catastrophe. Stay until the end of the video because this story is not wasted. Let us begin. Michael Chimino, after making The Deer Hunter, or El Francotirador as it was called in Latin America, positioned himself as one of the best directors of the moment. This was the first Hollywood film to criticize the Vietnam War, a clearly anti-war work. Released in 1978, it featured performances by Christopher Walken, John Cazale, Meryl Streep and the legendary Robert DeNiro, winning five Oscars: Best Picture, Best Director for our friend Michael Chimino, Best Supporting Actor for Christopher Walken, Best Editing and Better Sound. This film was a total success, it raised more than triple what it spent and critics positioned it as one of the best of the last century. And to think that this was only the young director's second work. His future looked quite encouraging. The company that produced The Deer Hunter was none other than Universal Paintings, but for the next film United Artists was the one who signed the director. After seeing such success, the executives of this company wanted him on their team. And the truth is that Universal didn't do much to retain him... after working with him they realized what a difficult person he was to work with. United Artists is a production company founded by none other than Charles Chaplin and other figures of the moment back in 1919, and its main objective has always been to support creators without taking into account the typical demands of such a voracious, raw industry. and commercial like that of cinema. They produced incredible and iconic films, such as Chaplin's The Great Dictator, Dead End with an outstanding Jack Nicholson, Rocky, among others. And at that time they were about to release Raging Bull and Apocalypse Now... pieces of masterpieces. And with Cimino they followed their philosophy to the letter : they gave him free rein to carry out his project, blindly trusting him. And this was the beginning of the disaster. Cimino was a monkey with a knife, threatening the economy of a giant company. Or perhaps the monkeys with knives were the executives themselves, accepting the director's every proposal. Cimino had the same obsession that other industry greats such as Kubrick or Francis Ford Coppola have had . But, unlike these monsters, the move didn't turn out so well for him. We have a video where we talk about the wildest filming of all time, that of Apocalypse Now, where the topic of Coppola's obsession with achieving one of his best films is touched upon. We recommend you see it. Returning to Heaven's Gate, we can say that they spared no expense: they built a city of the style they needed, completely real. The train seen in the film had to be transported from a museum in Colorado to Montana, where the film was filmed, for the simple reason that the director did not like the train that the production company had gotten him . 2,500 extras were hired, and hundreds of actors and actresses entered what they called 'Camp Cimino'... which we can say was a several-week long training where they were taught skills that were supposedly important for filming, such as horse riding, carriage driving, shooting, roller skating, etc. The director's obsession was on another level. Not only did I want the actors to be skilled in those things to have superior realism, but I also wanted nature to be in their favor. I literally waited for the sky to have the right clouds when it was time to shoot. These hundreds of actors with all the equipment waited hours and hours to shoot a scene, simply because the cloud that Cimino wanted was in a place where it had no place. to be It was crazy. One day it was 3pm and they had been waiting for perfect weather since morning. One of the actors asked if they could have lunch, to which the director angrily told him that the movie was much more important than lunch. But who do you think you are, Cimino? As we said, the directors of United Artists allowed this to happen, but it was not all that simple. It turns out that two weeks after filming started, they went to see what was happening because they knew that Cimino was making everything tremendously slow and expensive, much more expensive than expected. Out of 12 days, he was 10 days late. At that point they simply wanted to fire him. After the director did not want to talk to the businessmen and took them off the set, they insisted and Cimino relented. But they didn't talk almost at all, instead he took them to a room where he showed them some of the shots from the film. After seeing those images, they were so impressed that their position changed radically: they went from wanting to fire him to thinking that they were in front of a masterpiece. “The clouds in the exact places, as if drawn, the pink skies, the group scenes, the West as it had never been seen. That was American Poetry” was what Steven Bach, one of the executives, said. How did all this end? A monumental delay, an impressive expense and hundreds of hours of recording, of which basically had to be cut to make it a film. Before starting filming, they had agreed on a maximum budget of about $7 million. But that number was far exceeded. And they did not spend 2 or 3 million more, but rather the initial figure was multiplied by 7. Currently the expense would be around 130 million dollars. Finally Cimino presented a 5 and a half hour long film to United Artists executives. After the surprise of the executives and the request that he shorten the film, the director ended up locking himself in and worked for days and days, almost without sleeping, to end up delivering a film that was 3 hours and 49 minutes long. And that was the cut that ended up being released in theaters. At the premiere with artists and critics, the cold and almost mute applause left the actors, the director, and mainly the businessmen of United Artists, who were about to face their biggest blow, frozen. "Heaven's Gate," opening today at Cinema One, fails so miserably that one might suspect that Mr. Cimino sold his soul to the Devil to make "The Deer Hunter" a success, and the Devil has just arrived to collect. yours. The grandeur of the Vietnam film's vision became pretentious. Feeling for the character has faded, and Mr. Cimino's approach is so predictable that watching the film is like walking around my living room for four hours. Nothing in the movie works properly. Despite all the time and money invested, it's a sloppy boat that slides straight to the bottom. They pulled the film just 8 days after its theatrical release. Cimino locked himself up to work again and a year later they released Heaven's Gate with one more hour cut, but it was not successful at all. Of the 44 spent, they only recovered 3 million. Heaven's Gate was more of a financial disaster than anything else, because it's not a bad movie. Despite its duration of more than 3 and a half hours, and knowing that I was probably not in front of a masterpiece, I decided to watch it. And the truth is that I really liked the film, aesthetically it is beautiful, the performances are very good, you can see the dedication of the director and the script work he had. In my opinion it is a good western, aesthetically superior. The film is set in the 19th century and is based on the confrontation between the locals against the European immigrants who are coming to live on their lands. We see everything from the point of view of a powerful and educated sheriff, who stands against his colleagues and in favor of the marginalized. The film shows a complicated stage of the country in a quite precise and particular way, a stage that many of us did not know. It is very far away From what the critics did with it, in my opinion it was an injustice towards the director, or perhaps there were other reasons to boycott it, reasons that we do not know. Perhaps it polarized the American critic a lot because it touched on more than controversial topics at that time. And perhaps also because of its extremely slow pace. Heaven's Gate was one of the many misunderstood victims at the time, which over time was valued a little more. Not on the level of Fight Club, The King of Comedy or American Psycho... but you get the point. There were some mistakes, bad management on the part of the director, the production company, poorly done marketing and ruthless criticism at the beginning that caused a snowball to be created that grew as the days went by, until it was demonized and classified as one of the worst films of all time, when in reality that was not the case. Logically , people weren't going to spend their money and time going to see it, and the cinemas weren't going to show it because they weren't selling tickets either. It was checkmate for Cimino, and mainly for United Artists, a company that was absorbed in 1981 by MGM. And above all things, it was the end of the iconic 'New Hollywood' movement, a time where directors ruled, where they practically did what they wanted, where they could spend whatever they wanted and make blockbusters that today are resolved with good CGI, unless you're Christopher Nolan. Martin Scorsese himself confessed that this episode weakened all the directors, and Francis Ford Coppola declared that what happened after Heaven's Gate was like a coup d' état from the studios towards the directors. Productions such as Apocalypse Now, Alien, Taxi Driver, Dead End, A Clockwork Orange, Planet of the Apes, The Godfather, Chinatown, Raging Bull or The King of Comedy were just some of the bastions of the New Hollywood. After this, Cimino's career was in total decline... he directed Footloose in 1984... bah, he directed it for only 4 months, because as soon as he started asking and spending much more than Paramount wanted, They kicked him out because they considered that if they continued like this they would have a new Heaven's Gate. After this, the big Hollywood production companies understood that Cimino had not learned his lesson, and they turned their backs on him. His last film was The Sunchaser, in 1996, starring Woody Harrelson. And things were terrible: after being released it had bad reviews and was never released in theaters, it was only sold on DVD. It cost 31 million dollars and raised only 21 thousand. There is an interview he did in 2007, where he preferred not to talk about what happened with Heaven's Gate due to the pain those memories caused him. In 2012 Cimino presented his uncut version at the Venice Film Festival, and the audience applauded him. The video you are watching is of an ovation he won in Switzerland in 2014. Two years later, in 2016, he died. Like and subscribe is your way of thanking us for our work. It's free and takes a second to do. Pay attention to Vito Corleone: Until next time!
