Word: cimino
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...supposed to be a disaster movie. It was supposed to be a western. But when the New York critics saw Michael Cimino's $36 million Heaven's Gate at its first screening last Tuesday, they deemed it "an unqualified disaster." Executives at United Artists, who had bankrolled Cimino's eulogy to the Old West but never, until that moment, seen it in its final form, were scurrying to anxious meetings, acting out the rearranging-of-the-deck-chairs scene from The Titanic. Cimino must have wished he were in Airport-any airport. After all, his previous film...
Even before Cimino's spectacular immolation, the evidence on the screen portended commercial disaster. Heaven's Gate is a serious western, a genre that has not spawned a popular hit in more than a decade. The film's stars-Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken and French Actress Isabelle Huppert-have never provoked stampedes to the box office, and they light no sparks here. The film moves at a glacial pace toward degradation and death: when the cavalry rides to the rescue, it saves the bad guys. The movie's narrative is as incoherent, its plot points...
...there is grandeur in this folie. Cimino's voluptuous romantic imagination and the dusky imagery of Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond produced breathtaking panoramas of majestic landscape and milling hordes. A hundred happy couples waltz in circles within circles in Harvard Yard; 20 years later and 2,500 miles west, another hundred couples roller-skate to fiddle music in a cow-town grange hall. In Cimino's Wyoming, it is never high noon; everything happens in misty morning or dusty dusk, so the oblique, ruminative sunlight can memorialize every moment. Some viewers with educated eyes found scenes of beauty...
Perhaps lilies are more in order. "His life is on the line," said one U.A. executive of Cimino. "This is a tough town." Things may be tough for the U.A. brass too. The company has not had a single solid hit this year to erase the red ink from such bombs as Carny, Roadie and Those Lips, Those Eyes. Woody Allen's Stardust Memories, which cost $20 million, is a major box office disappointment. The studio's Christmas films were to have been Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull (which opened two weeks ago to strong critical...
...statement, Cimino admitted that "the missing step of public previews clouded my perception of the film" and had made him "unable to benefit and learn from audience reaction." Now he has learned, but the lesson was prohibitive. Including advertising and interest costs, U.A. spent close to $50 million for the industry's most disastrous sneak preview...