Where Angels Fear to Tread: Heaven’s Gate and the Sinking of United Artists

Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the making of Heaven’s Gate, the film that sank United Artists

Looking to prevent your movie from becoming a runaway production? Read Final Cut by Steven Bach and you will learn a great many lessons on what not to do.  This book is a brilliant account of how a film becomes a runaway production and ultimately comes to resemble more The Money Pit than say what was promised in the original contract.  Final Cut is a book about a great many things.  Mainly it demonstrates how one film sank a production company (United Artists).  Woven within this story is dialogue about artistic integrity, money, loss of history, and corporate influence.

Heaven’s Gate was directed by Michael Cimino.  A temperamental artist of the most extreme kind, Cimino was well known for The Deer Hunter, a powerful film that examined the effects the Vietnam War had on small town U.S.A.  Heaven’s Gate was to be an ambitious project that took a massive production team to the wilds of Montana in an effort to accurately re-create the Johnson County War.  In the end of what seemed like a never-ending debacle, Cimino eventually delivered Heaven’s Gate a year and a half later.  It cost five times more than original budgeted for and the final cut of the movie was five and a half hours long, which was eventually cut down to two and a half.

Final Cut is thorough.  Bach guides the reader through every aspect, decision, and private meeting that involved the production of Heaven’s Gate.  The emotional stress suffered by Bach and his fellow United Artist co-workers makes the story almost a cautionary tale.  Bach wants the reader to see how big egos, poor management, and a lack of supervision can ruin the creation of a film and how the need for discipline may not be an altogether stifling action.  The author is very candid about how the making of Heaven’s Gate got out of hand.  As Bach documents his unpromising meeting with Transamerica’s stuffed suits the reader sees how his passion for filmmaking and maintaining history (of United Artists) is so articulate, yet in the Transamerica building way up on the twenty-sixth floor he can’t get the conglomerate to understand.  Bach becomes a very understandable and a very sympathetic character in this tale of woe.  A brilliant, if not frustrating read as one sees how everything falls apart; Final Cut is a perfect book for any film history buff.