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Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven's Gate
Final Cut Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven's Gate Author:Steven Bach "Heaven's Gate" is probably the most discussed, least seen film in modern movie history. Its notoriety is so great that is has become a generic term for disaster, for ego run rampant, for epic mismanagement, for wanton extravagance. It was also the watershed film of the decade -- not for its cinematic qualities, but for its effect on Hollywood a... more »nd the way movies will and will not be made in the future. For Michael Cimino's "Heaven's Gate" did not merely fail (failure is forgivable, sometimes even embraced in the strange labyrinths of the Hollywood psyche), "Heaven's Gate" did the unthinkable: It sank a studio. Less than a month after the picture's second release, United Artists -- the company founded by Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin -- for all practical purposes ceased to exist. What happened? Why? How?
How does a movie budgeted for $7.5 million end up costing $36 million? How does one begin to coordinate an enterprise when decisions, often mutually exclusive, are made simultaneously behind different sets of closed doors, thousands of miles apart, by people who are not speaking to one another? How does a director succeed in withholding his film from the people who paid for it, so that not one single executive of United Artists has seen the finished picture before its disastrous opening night?
In answering these questions "Final Cut" gives a rare, inside look at modern moviemaking, its recent past and its foreseeable future, post "Heaven's Gate". Combining wit, extraordinary anecdote and historical perspective, Steven Bach has produced a landmark book on Hollywood and its people and in doing so tells a story of human absurdity that Chaplin would have been proud of.
At the time of the filming of "Heaven's Gate" Steven Bach was the senior vice-president and head of worldwide production for United Artists. He has been associated with such productions as "Sleuth", "Parallax View", "The Taking of Pelham One-Two-Three", and "The French Lieutenant's Woman", among many others. Apart from the director and the producer, Bach was the only person to witness the evolution of "Heaven's Gate" from beginning to end.« less