Salem Press

The Eighties in America
Heaven's Gate

Identification: American film
Director: Michael Cimino (1939- )
Date: Released in 1980

Significance: Heaven's Gate became one of the most famous box-office flops in film history. The film's well-publicize demise helped end the 1970's trend of young directors being given significant control of their films. It also contributed to the demise of the United Artists studio.

Heaven's Gate dramatized the 1892 Johnson County, Wyoming, range war, in which rich cattle ranchers, with the alleged approval of the U.S. government, hired a mercenary army to kill immigrant farmers homesteading on their grazing lands. Kris Kristofferson played Jim Averill, a Harvard-educated marshal vainly trying to prevent the bloodshed. With a cast featuring Christopher Walken, John Hurt, Sam Waterston, Jeff Bridges, and French actress Isabelle Huppert, the gritty and violent film discarded many standard Western conventions yet featured breathtaking sequences like the Harvard graduation ball, a frontier dance on rollerskates, and the climactic battle between immigrants and mercenaries. Director Michael Cimino, who had won an Academy Award for The Deer Hunter (1978), was obsessed with detail, sending production costs soaring to $36 million and triggering prerelease press denouncing the large amount of money being spent on a single film.

When the film finally premiered, American critics condemned the three hour, thirty-nine minute epic as pretentious, overlong, incoherent, self-indulgent, and even un-American. United Artists, which had financed the film, immediately withdrew it from release. While Cimino reedited the film in an attempt to salvage it, the print and television media relentlessly ridiculed him and his movie, creating a permanent impression in the public's mind that it was one of the worst films ever made. Rereleased in early 1981 in a 2 and one-half hour version, Heaven's Gate earned only $1.5 million at the box office and made Westerns unfashionable for a decade.

By 1981, Americans, deflated by recession and the scandals of Watergate and Vietnam, no longer wanted films that questioned the myths that had built America. Escapist hits like Star Wars (1977) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) presented a more appealing and comforting world of clear good and evil, presaging the jingoistic machismo and outsized patriotism of the Reagan era.

Impact
The failure of Heaven's Gate prompted Transamerica, United Artists' parent company, to sell the studio to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which incorporated the studio's properties but did away with with its name, thus creating a myth that one film had destroyed a movie studio. It also ended the so-called second golden era of Hollywood filmmaking, during which directors were allowed to make big-budget films with minimal studio interference. Instead, movie companies shifted creative control away from directors and toward studio executives, who were often less willing to produce films whose subject matter was either unfamiliar or controversial.

Further Reading
Bach, Steven. Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of "Heaven's Gate," the Film That Sank United Artists. New York: Newmarket Press, 1999.

Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

Richard Rothrock

See Also
Bridges, Jeff; Epic films; Film in the United States.