The Books: Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven’s Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists, by Steven Bach

Moving on to my next “genre”, which is a bit of a mish-mash. I refer to it as my “Making Of” section, books about the makings of different movies. But for the purposes of the blog, it will go under the broad category of Hollywood. Hollywood, in all its glamour, intrigue, finance, and gladiatorial combat. Art and commerce.

The first book on the Hollywood shelf is Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven’s Gate, the Film that Sank United Artists, by Steven Bach

A classic, Final Cut tells the harrowing story of how Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate caused the downfall of United Artists, the company created in 1919 by D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. The biggest stars of the day, they created United Artists as a joint venture (each held 20%, with the final 20% held by their lawyer) in order to exert more creative control. It was a studio/distribution company, and each of the artists would distribute their work (which increased the demand for “product” from them) through United Artists. Almost immediately, they ran into trouble in keeping up with their own terms. Pictures were getting more expensive to make. Product had to be GOOD, and therein lies the issue. You can’t just foist stuff onto the public in order to keep up with your numbers and your bottom line. (The story of United Artists is endlessly fascinating – and you get a lot of it in Steven Bach’s book.)

United Artists evolved over the years, which is one of the reasons why it survived for as long as it did. While the original founders could not keep up with their own terms of each making five pictures a year, they eventually hired a president – Joseph Schenck – who then began distributing pictures through UA, and by the end of the 30s, it was a dominating distribution company in over 40 countries. It was always a struggle, though. It was a struggle to keep alive, to make money, to keep up with production, to keep the flow of product moving. As the 50s and 60s went on, the industry went through its greatest period of upheaval since the introduction of sound. Television was exploding as a mass medium, and the anxiety about what it would mean for the studios and the movies in general was intense. (Kent Adamson and I talked about this peripherally in our conversation about Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley’s years in Hollywood, and it also comes up in my post about Hal Wallis and Elvis Presley.) Elvis Presley is a big part of the story of the downfall of the studio system. He may have been one of its most talented victims, because his films represented the last gasp of what had been an institution for 50 years.

In the 50s, United Artists was run by two lawyers, Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin, and under their direction, UA acted as a backer of films. It was a studio without an actual studio. (The wave of the future, really.) Because they didn’t have to run a studio, they were able to operate at a very low cost. They attracted some good projects, African Queen being one of them. (Hey, have you read my review? Well, now you can.) What started to happen as the 50s progressed, and the studio system started slowly (almost inviisbly) to crack – is that big names were released from their studio contracts, and were suddenly free to work elsewhere. This would be one of the death knells of the studio system, as stars and directors and writers started to be able to negotiate their own deals. United Artists was a big part of helping foster that new independent environment (which would, eventually, help crash the studio system, and help create someone like Michael Cimino).

And so, in the late 50s, as the other studios started to struggle, UA flourished. It was an improbable story, and I suppose if you were on the ground at the time it would have been hard to realize what was happening. If Elvis Presley had had a crystal ball, and if money hadn’t been so much the bottom line for him (he was unembarrassed about that), maybe he could have gone freelance too, developed his own projects, etc. As it was, the studio system poured its last dying gasp of energy into creating The Elvis Movie for him, which would be a slam-dunk at the box office, for 10 years – when all the studios were collapsing. Crazy. Again: you’d need a crystal ball in 1957 to see which way the wind was blowing, and to predict the future and how it would trap Elvis.

UA racked up a bunch of hits over the next couple of decades, and won Oscars. It was a reputable organization. They diversified into soundtracks and television, overseas distribution, the whole deal. Again, their overhead was low. It gave them freedom that the other giant studios with huge crowded (and yet increasingly empty) backlots to pay the rent on. I hope I am getting all of this right. It’s been a while since I read the book, although much of its disaster is emblazoned in my mind.

The 70s was a time of great tumult in Hollywood. The studio system was dead. Easy Rider had been the nail in the coffin. So for a while, in the wake of the old studio heads, truly creative people (some of them legitimately nuts) started running things. (Peter Biskind tells this story in his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.) It was the heyday of American film, another Golden Age. UA had relationships with Woody Allen, Mike Nichols, Robert Altman, Sylvester Stallone (Rocky was a United Artists picture), and the product from UA had integrity.

Even now, when I see the logo, I feel pangs of nostalgia. Some of my favorite movies started with this logo.

In the late 60s, Krim and Benjamin sold control of UA to Transamerica (which will be very important in the story of Heaven’s Gate). The corporatization of Hollywood (which was always a corporate environment, but the difference here is when corporations that have nothing to do with entertainment suddenly become in charge of an artistic venture. It would change the entire business. Speaking of which, if you have not watched the two-part “review” of Adam Sandler’s Jack and Jill by the awesome Half In the Bag guys, I highly recommend it: Part 1 and Part 2. It is a blistering critique of the situation as it stands, and is one of the results of having businesses that are not in “show business” helping dictate PRODUCT. It’s disgusting, vile, and yes, perhaps good business – but that review of Jack and Jill shows what happens when corporate values trickle down, pour down, into the product itself.)

Transamerica was skittish about some of UA’s movies (the X-rated Midnight Cowboy being one of them – speaking of Elvis – which, of course, we always are), and there was a battle about the logo, and this resulted in Krim and others walking out and immediately forming Orion Pictures. Eff you guys, basically.

At this crucial and fragile moment for UA, with brand-new leadership eager to prove their mettle, and a nervous parent company, comes Heaven’s Gate. The story of Heaven’s Gate, which is now a byword in Hollwyood for “Giant Motherfucking Catastrophe”, is what Steven Bach (who was senior vice-president and head of worldwide productions for UA – so his book is an insider’s account) covers in his book. How did this happen? How did one movie sink a reputable company? The irony is that, in the end, Heaven’s Gate itself is not half bad. It’s quite beautiful in parts, actually: but its reputation as a runaway production has followed it now for 30 years. It’s an insane story, of greed, ego, fear, and business, all told in an immediate fashion by Steven Bach, who was there at all of the important moments. Cimino emerges as an egomaniacal brat, who realized that UA would cave to all of his demands, but also that UA had created a bullshit schedule that they couldn’t possibly believe in – so Cimino didn’t take them seriously and went about doing what he wanted to do, it was HIS movie, and fuck them, and he would shoot as much film as he wanted to, and they couldn’t make him do anything he didn’t want to do. Deer Hunter, from the year before, had given Cimino tremendous power. UA certainly wanted to cash in on that, but they expected him to meet deadlines, and honor his contract, etc.

There are many sides to any story. This is Steven Bach’s side. His book is a classic Making Of story, and reading it is almost akin to participating in an accident in real-time. I winced reading the book. I wondered myself at what point did things really go off the rails? Like: what was the defining moment. HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?

Of course there isn’t a simple answer. Some movies just explode into chaos, not for one reason, but for a multiplicity of reasons, a perfect storm of good intentions run amok (everyone starts with good intentions: nobody went into making Heaven’s Gate thinking: “Hey, let’s just make a huge motherfucking catastrophe and destroy United Artists!” – although sometimes I think Cimino’s attitude was just that). Untangling that web is part of what Bach takes on in his book. There was the Transamerica factor. There was the Cimino factor. There was the combat going on in the board rooms. There was tremendous pressure on everyone. There was the problem with the cast (the casting of poor Isabelle Huppert caused a shitstorm). There were the challenges of a daunting location shoot in a day and age before cell phones or instantaneous communication, so the folks back at UA were like, “We haven’t heard from Cimino in 2 weeks – what the hell is going on out there in Montana?” Producers were flown out to check on progress, and Cimino refused to speak to them. UA was completely shut out of the movie they were backing. It’s infuriating to read, but it’s riveting as well.

It’s a cautionary tale, sure. It’s a great business book.

Here’s an excerpt about a fateful meeting had before the film started shooting.

Excerpt from Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven’s Gate, the Film that Sank United Artists, by Steven Bach

Cimino was first approached about the possibility of a Christmas 1979 release for Heaven’s Gate at about the time the picture acquired its new title, in late january. He was at first dubious that a picture (still unofficially) scheduled to begin shooting on April 2 could be ready in time for Christmas but was cautiously willing to discuss the possibility without committing himself. If The Deer Hunter should not win awards (it was a 6 to 5 favorite in Las Vegas to win Best Picture), he would have another chance one year later. Still, there were serious practical pitfalls.

There were two parts to the question: Could a Christmas release be physically affected, and at what cost? Cimino requested a meeting to discuss these questions, a meeting of the greatest possible breadth, one which would have the aura of a summit meeting. David Field dutifully assembled, on February 8, himself, Claire Townsend, Jerry Paonessa, and Derek Kavanagh from production (Lee Kazt was in Auckland with David Lean); Leon Brachman, recently appointed West Coast head of business affairs; and Al Fitter from domestic, who brought with him from New York both Hy Smith and Ed Siegenfeld of advertising and publicity. Also sitting in were Skip Nicholson and Jay Cipes, executives from Technicolor, the company which would manufacture the release prints.

Both feasibility and cost were technical questions, requiring documentation of a timetable for completion of the various production stages, working backwards from a hypothetical release date of December 14. Gary Gerlich, UA’s executive for postproduction on the West Coast, had drawn up for Field a preliminary calendar based on Cimino’s own shooting schedule. Gerlich’s calendar was an interoffice confidential memo which allowed for two weeks’ overschedule during production itself. Cimino was not to be told this. UA regarded the two weeks’ allowance as a necessary and comfortable cushion for internal discussion purposes, but not one which should be acknowledged and, therefore, become inadvertently formalized. Nevertheless, it was. In the spirit of full disclosure in which the meeting was conducted, a “worst case theory” was proposed, which was meant to say that the December 14 premiere could not take place if the picture was more than two weeks over schedule but which instead implied the acceptability of the two weeks in question. Admitting to the two weeks was supposed to show UA’s savvy and its reasonable approach to production. It was also supposed to clarify for Cimino that if he found Gerlich’s postproduction schedule tight, he could loosen it up by two weeks merely by finishing production on the schedule that he had himself proposed but that he now knew UA didn’t believe in.

What might have been a routine meeting became psychologically decisive. Not only had UA tipped its hand, but it had utilized heads of production, domestic sales, publicity, and advertising, vice-presidents of production management and business affairs, and two additional vice-presidents of production to do so, and it had done the tipping with the two relevant executives from Technicolor as witnesses. The presence of such a comprehensive assembly invested the meeting with its quality of summitry and invested the project with an importance that had not been there before – not only to Cimino, but to most of those present as well. Jerry Paonessa quipped, “It had to be important because all of us were, right?”

In spite of the budget’s escalation by $2 million since September, in spite of there being as yet no approved schedule and no formal declaration that UA was going to make the picture, this assembly, these rows of attentive faces – six of them vice-presidents, two of them senior vice-presidents – the very composition of the group made clear to both sides UA was going to make this picture … and was already assuming that it would go two weeks over schedule.

Cimino knew that pay-or-play contracts did not automatically guarantee anything but fees. He knew that Cuba was being made at least partly because the company did not want to “eat” its pay-or-play obligations, but Cuba, even with Sean Connery, was $8 million, far less than Heaven’s Gate now promised to cost. The near $2 million of pay or play on Heaven’s Gate plus the additional $1 million spent on preproduction – with more committed – would not force production if UA decided at the last minute to pull out. In fact, Cimino must have known that his frequent assertions that Warner Brothers or EMI would take the picture could have backfired and inadvertently increased the chances of a UA cancellation if UA got cold feet and thought Warner’s or EMI would assume not only the picture but the accumulated UA costs as well. Certainly something of the kind had occurred to UA, and it served as partial rationale for entering into the preproduction commitments for design, construction, and hiring of personnel that had been under way since October.

But the orderly progression of preproduction planning was a judgment call by the production and legal departments and could be reversed or halted. On February 8, however, production and legal were joined by sales, advertising, publicity, postproduction, and printing faculties, all working to coordinate plans for release of a picture that had not even been approved, all committing plans and energies to their self-generated Christmas notion. From that date, from that meeting on, it was to be psychologically more difficult – if not impossible – for the company to brake the momentum it was busily self-inducing. This kind of inertia could only benefit the picture. Changing to Warner’s or EMI, after all, at whatever point, would cost valuable time, add new elements (and overheads) to the equation, and could also affect Kristofferson’s cooperation or, worse, his availability.

Some within the company were to look back on that February meeting as the moment in which the relationship between Cimino and UA altered irrevocably, attributing to Cimino a conspiratorial maneuvering of the company into a position that had the gravest eventual effects. But eager as Cimino may have been to encourage the company’s spinning its wheels on his behalf, he calmly resisted the notion of a Christmas release, resisted being rushed, resisted committing himself to a schedule which he knew could prove unrealistic (and which UA must have seemed all too ready to ignore), resisted responsibility for the possibility of failing to meet hypothetical dates. Still, he was willing to listen to UA’s wheels as they spun on, his attitude less conspiratorial than garden-variety shrewd. UA was doing all the talking; Cimino was listening. What he heard was Gary Gerlich’s schedule. It set out the following dates:

Start of Production April 2
Completion of Photography June 22
First Cut July 20
Final Cut September 4

Scoring, titles, opticals, negative cutting, recording, and rerecording were set out in detail and to be completed by October 31. A preview was scheduled for November 2. Changes subsequent to the preview and final printing by Technicolor would take the month of November. This would mean Technicolor’s setting aside the time and facilities early, shutting out other pictures, other companies also looking to Christmas releases. Adhering to this – or some very similar schedule – would make Heaven’s Gate available for a December 14, 1979 premiere.

Gerlich’s schedule assumed that editing would commence at the beginning of production, directly behind shooting, so that an editor’s cut would be available a week or so after the end of photography. Four additional weeks were allowed for the director’s first cut, with an additional six weeks for fine-tuning the picture, a total of ten editing weeks from editor’s cut to director’s fine cut.* The laying of sound effects and dialogue tracks would be in work from the end of photography in June, allowing a full three months before the tracks were mixed together in October. Routine, almost all of it, which is not to say predictable, any more than any creative process is, even a highly industrialized one. Gerlich’s schedule allowed for the normal complement of ordinary glitches and presented no unreasonable pressures, and none at all on the production period itself, which was Cimino’s own, plus the two weeks of cushion.

The composer was to have six weeks in which to prepare the music; the rerecording (in which music, dialogue, and sound effects are joined and perfected) was allowed five weeks, including a week of predub (a rough blending of these elements), all of which were more or less standard time periods. A tight area was previewing, with only one contemplated public preview and three days allowed for any resultant changes.

For all the routine adequacies of the schedule, it had nothing whatever to do with Heaven’s Gate, and I think no one at the meeting (except possibly sales or Technicolor) thought it did. It was both cynical and naive.

It was cynical in its attempt to manipulate Cimino’s schedule using Christmas as a pretext and naive in its failure to see where that pretext would lead. UA wanted to accelerate production and postproduction less to achieve a Christmas release than to avoid another protracted Apocalypse (or Deer Hunter, for that matter) completion period. If Cimino had a definite release date, one that played to his ego with academy statuettes dangling as golden carrots, a prolonged postproduction period might be averted. It was unlikely a film somewhere between two and two and one-half hours’ playing time could be prepared on this schedule without exceptional diligence; but Montana was not Southeast Asia, Cimino was more experienced than when he began The Deer Hunter, he would not have a “perfectionist” star like Robert De Niro or strange, inscrutable governments making ominous sounds in funny languages. There was reason to believe that this schedule might accelerate production, too, and the fact that UA was manipulating and only half believed in it didn’t have to be communicated to Cimino (though it was)if he agreed to live with it because there was always the chance he would stick to the numbers on the calendar.

Cimino was calm, cool, reasonable. He pointed out freshly the difficulties of his shooting schedule (though rejecting Katz’s skepticism – and, later, Katz as well), but he admitted that a December date appealed to him, had been lucky for him this year, and there was no reason to reject a proposal which could position the picture well commercially and demonstrate his own cooperation and enthusiasm.

The editing schedule did not unduly worry him and had no precedent in The Deer Hunter, on which he had had to wait until the end of photography even for viewing of the dailies shipped back to California for processing. The composing schedule might be tight because he wanted John Williams, then hugely in demand after Star Wars and Jaws, but that could be handled. One preview was no concern; he didn’t dote on previews anyway. All they had done on The Deer Hunter was demonstrate to Universal that he had been right and it had been wrong. All in all, though he carefully couched the ifs, he rejected nothing. He also accepted nothing. He would think it over.

* Or five months, if one dates the editing process from the beginning of production.

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6 Responses to The Books: Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven’s Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists, by Steven Bach

  1. ted says:

    Oh my gosh, it looks like I have to see this. We missed you last night. Hope I get to see you soon in 2012!

  2. sheila says:

    Do you mean Heaven’s Gate?

    I know, I’m bummed. I was sick. I’m going to Graceland on Tuesday and I just don’t want to be sick during my trip!! I missed you too – let’s please get together when I get back!

  3. It was a Hal Wallis star from the previous generation, Burt Lancaster, who helped build up United Artists, and paved the way for other actors to have greater control over their careers. Even if it didn’t work, like The Devil’s Disciple, Lancaster still had the opportunity to stretch himself they way he couldn’t as a studio player, and could go back to work for Wallis in something like Gunfight at the O.K. Corral as well. Lancaster’s example is one that Elvis should have followed. It payed off big time for Elvis’ idol, Tony Curtis.

    Have a good time at Graceland. I was there on 4th of July weekend, 2004. Stayed at the Heartbreak Hotel, and visited Sun Records, as well as Stax-Volt. Make sure to have at least one meal at Marlowe’s.

    • sheila says:

      Peter – Yes, from very early on Presley was getting offers for more wild-card types of projects. Robert Mitchum wanted him to play his brother – this was in 1957 – they sat in Elvis’ hotel room, this was when an individual could still get to Elvis – and they hung out and Elvis asked Mitchum about his chain gang experience – he was Mitchum’s first choice to play his brother – but the Colonel nixed it. He just wasn’t in a freelance independent type of career. Who knows: it may not have suited him, although there are so many missed opportunities – to think of him and Mitchum onscreen together??

      The Colonel saw the movies as just another arm of promotion of his product.

      Nobody wanted to mess with a good thing (and I think, on some deep level, Elvis felt the same way. He was unhappy – but not unhappy ENOUGH to shake things up entirely.)

      I love the story of Lancaster and Curtis with Sweet Smell of Success.

      And can’t wait for Graceland! It’s Elvis’ birthday this week so it’s gonna be nuts. Yes, Sun Records and Stax. Graceland itself. I’m going to a gospel brunch. I can’t wait.

  4. mutecypher says:

    I just spent the last 40 minutes watching various Half In The Bag reviews. Thanks for pointing out those guys.

    And have a great time at Graceland.

  5. sheila says:

    Mutecypher – aren’t they great? Very funny, but very smart.

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