Apocalypse on the set, p.4
Apocalypse on the Set, page 4
The foundation of the palace sinks deep below the ground, with an enormous shelter sixty-five feet underground and a two-person railway specially equipped for Ceauescu and his wife. Above ground, the structure is twelve stories tall and has a total floor space of over 300,000 square feet. The main reception hall is the size of a football field. Opulent details abound, including threads of gold and silver woven into the curtains. Yet, while the dictator and his wife labored over the exactness of these details, the people of Romania grew resentful of their oppressive ruler. People began to starve as Ceauescu pumped nearly all of Romania’s agricultural production out of the country in an attempt to repay heavy debts accrued from borrowing money from the West. Timisoara, the country’s fourth-largest city, became the epicenter of the uprising that ultimately forced Ceauescu and his wife to flee Romania. Their escape was unsuccessful, and on December 25, 1989, both were executed by firing squad.
The construction was halted, and for the first time in years the vacant marbled rooms and endless hallways lay in darkness and silence. The palace became an unforgivable reminder of the man who brought starvation and desolation to Romania. There were many controversies and disagreements concerning what could be done with the immovable relic, now called the Palace of the Parliament, with an interior only 60 percent complete. One government official summarized the ultimate predicament, “It would probably cost more to pull it down than to finish it.”2 There was no option but to surrender to the truth; there are some ravages that remain permanent.
This truth became a devastating reality to another group during the same decade of Ceauescu’s rule. A man named Michael Cimino was a rising talent in Hollywood, promising to bring a new era of filmmaking to the studio machine. Fresh from his Oscar-winning picture The Deer Hunter (1978), he arranged to make his next movie with United Artists. He called his script Heaven’s Gate.
The production came to exhibit similar extravagances as seen during Ceauescu’s punishing administration. The budget almost immediately soared out of control, and the expenses of ego and frivolity began to reach insurmountable heights. Every desire of the director, no matter how frivolous, was to be met. He commanded control over all. The film became an exorbitant palace of its own as the feverish spending was outpaced only by its unending running time. Mismanagement and irresponsibility led to the collapse of the entire studio behind the film, and the very title Heaven’s Gate came to inspire trepidation throughout Hollywood.
The Wild West
French film critic and theorist André Bazin once wrote, “The western is the only genre whose origins are almost identical with those of the cinema itself.”3 In his essay “The Western: or The American Film par Excellence,” he regards this style of film as one that surpasses all others. For Bazin, “the American comedy has exhausted its resources,” and “From Underworld (1927) to Scarface (1932), the gangster film had already completed the cycle of its growth.” No other genre had the indomitable vitality of the western. “The western does not age,” Bazin proclaimed.
How can this be? It is a genre seldom seen today in American film, and yet Bazin insisted, “The western must possess some greater secret than simply the secret of youthfulness. It must be a secret that somehow identifies it with the essence of cinema.” If this analysis seems dated, it is likely because this essay was written several years before the ill-fated production of Heaven’s Gate began in 1979, a year that in some ways marks the passing of the western from youthfulness to infirmity.
The script, originally known as The Johnson County War, was the work of Michael Cimino, who was also to be the director. He wrote the epic in 1971, when the grandeur of the western spectacle could never satiate an audience always anxious for more. As Bazin wrote, “[The western’s] worldwide appeal is even more astonishing than its historical survival.”
Cimino’s script centered on three fictional characters in Wyoming at the beginning of the 1890s, during the Johnson County War. The war was the result of contentious turf disputes between European immigrants settling in the West and the cattle ranchers already established in the region. The bitter rivalry reached its pinnacle when the cattle ranchers hired mercenaries to kill the immigrants in retaliation for suspected theft of livestock. Cimino had already tried once to shoot the script before he was established in Hollywood or held any credits. These initial efforts were rebuffed by studios, given his then-unknown status in the industry.
But everything changed for Cimino after the success of The Deer Hunter, an affective story that follows a few young American men before, during and after their service in the Vietnam War. The brutality and poignancy of Cimino’s examination of the devastating effects of war on the mind and body earned the respect of numerous Hollywood executives. In 1978 the film won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Direction, Best Sound, Best Editing and Best Supporting Actor for Christopher Walken. The Deer Hunter showed that Cimino was a man of considerable talents, a director who could deliver an emotionally charged and cogent story. Yet, just as Ceauescu had to command that each room in his palace must be greater than the last, Cimino would have to exceed the now immense expectations of the audience and Hollywood. Much like Ceauescus young architect with her papier-mâché model, Cimino’s vision began in a relatively modest form: a script.
As venerated screenwriter William Goldman wrote, “There is no picture without a script.”4 He continued, “No one knows what a film will cost until there is a screenplay. A screenplay is gold.” It is likely that no one took this sentiment to heart as strongly as Cimino did when revisiting his script for Heaven’s Gate. The sprawl of the Wyoming landscape, where the epic would take place, was matched only by the enormous span of the thirty-three-year narrative. While Cimino enjoyed his new reputation in Hollywood, his script was still a relic from the past and would require rewrites. The reasons for its rejection in previous years were still valid even after his recent success. It was criticized early on for lacking a sense of pacing and presenting an obscure narrative. Among the studio’s trepidations was the growing fear that the era of the western was nearing its end. There were already signs that the viewing public was ready to move on from mountains and cowboys. Comes a Horseman, another western, was faltering at the box office while Heaven’s Gate made its way toward production. So Cimino faced the task of erasing from the script any strong implications that the film was, in fact, a western.
The solution to this problem was to begin and end the movie with nonwestern elements. A prologue and epilogue were applied to the screenplay, giving extra dimension to the story and elucidating the origins and fates of the characters. The prologue originally represented only nine pages of the script, and the epilogue was barely one page. Despite such modest lengths, these two sections eventually came to represent potentially substantial budget overages and became a bartering chip for the studio when the deadline began to deteriorate. Whether the prologue and epilogue actually changed the perceived genre of the picture remains questionable. But this change succeeded in allaying the fears of United Artists executives and led to the accelerated progress of the production. This screenwriting sleight of hand has been performed by many writers in the past, including William Goldman. He recalled, “I wrote the first draft of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1965 and showed it to a few people, none of whom was interested. I rewrote it, really changing very little, and suddenly, for whatever reason, everyone went mad for it.”5
As preproduction continued, Cimino selected Glacier National Park in Montana to be the predominant location for the shoot. In February 1979, a preliminary budget of $9.5 million was set; the shoot would last sixty-nine days. This supremely ambitious timeline targeted a Christmas release in 1979. These dates and numbers were almost immediately regarded with suspicion. Additional estimates anticipated at least a week or a week and a half of additional shooting time, which would increase the budget by roughly $1 million. Postproduction costs were predicted to reach $400,000 as a result of the accelerated Christmas deadline.
The Montana location presented its own challenges. Winter snowfall posed an enormous risk to the safety and efficiency of the production, as the park roads were frequently closed in the winter as a result of heavy accumulation. Aljean Harmetz, a Hollywood executive who turned down the picture at an early stage, recalled, “I asked if he mightn’t have a problem with snow drifts, and he said he was going to work around the weather.”6
And the central problem remained: How does one reconcile the ambition of the screenplay with a budget that seems fit for a more modest production? The discrepancy perhaps said more about the scale of the production than it did about the initial cost estimates, which, for their day, were not small. The motion picture industry was, and remains, a business fraught with risk. Perhaps Cimino, with his stunning Oscar victories, reduced some of this risk with his presumably marketable name attached to the picture. Many have speculated that Cimino was dealing with issues of self-aggrandizement, yet it also seems true that the studio became equally enraptured with the young talent. The script, which had been dismissed in his earlier days, suddenly had a new glow. But, even those enthralled with the script were obliged to surrender to the unabashed truth of the numbers, and as with all feature motion pictures, the numbers were daunting.
Entertainment lawyer Peter J. Dekom explained, “Everyone knows that the motion picture business is risky; shirts that people have lost in this industry would easily fill the entire Sears retail chain.”7 In the 1992 edition of the article “Movies, Money, and Madness,” Dekom revealed the cold facts behind the brutal returns of the movie business, warning that “the motion picture business generates internal rates of return of between 0% and 20% or more, with the average (and mean) somewhere in the 8%–15% area.”8 In the 2006 edition of the article, the numbers only became more intimidating, with “internal rates of return between -20% and 20% or more, with the average (and mean) over the last five years somewhere in the -5% area.” The sobering truth behind these numbers is the unique dilemma that a movie requires an enormous investment to be realized, and only when the picture is released will it be known if the product is truly marketable. Research on the market can be conducted and historical numbers can be evaluated, but just as a few slight changes to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid turned a once ignored script into a treasure to the studios, those same minor changes during the creation of a film can have powerful effects on the outcome.
While the marketability and expected return on the film remained murky, the proposed budget wasn’t much clearer. Cimino communicated to the studio that the budget for the picture would be $11,588,000, but this number didn’t really represent the anticipated total. A ruling from the director mandated that any additional cost incurred in an attempt to meet the Christmas 1979 deadline would not be included in budget outlays. The single sentence in his correspondence to the studio gave Cimino carte blanche to spend in any way he saw fit, without having to absorb the penalties usually levied against a director who failed to adhere to an agreed budget. Steven Bach, former senior vice president of United Artists and head of its worldwide production, summarized the inescapable problem of this conditional statement, “What no one asked was: How do we differentiate between cost overruns designed to meet the Christmas release and cost overruns stemming from other causes?”9 This arrangement established a professional climate in which Cimino was in control not only of the picture but also of the studio itself. It would later become clear that the odds of the budget remaining at $11,588,000 were as poor as the odds that they’d have a completed picture for the Christmas season.
Power Play
For all practical purposes, Cimino commanded a limitless budget, but his reach for power didn’t end there. He collected $2,000 a week in expenses in addition to his $500,000 salary. He also retained the publication and editing rights, as well as the advertising approvals for the promotion of the film. Bach recalls one of the director’s more avaricious demands that came in the form of a clause in his contract, stating, “Mr. Cimino’s presentation credit shall be in the form ‘Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate”’ (or in such other forms as [Cimino] may designate); Mr. Cimino’s name in such credit shall be presented in the same size as the title, including all artwork titles, and on a separate line above the title, and shall appear in the form just indicated on theater marquees.”10
The final piece of the demand brings into question his grasp of reality, given that no studio is in a position to compel movie theaters to include the director’s name on their marquees. These mounting stipulations evoke questions regarding how Cimino saw himself at the time. An interview with Nancy Griffin in the Independent gave some dimension to a man whose audacity is not without at least some justification. Cimino grew up on Long Island and graduated from Yale University with a master’s degree in fine arts in 1963. Before long he was immersed in the high-profile world of advertising in New York City. Not one to be confined to the small screen of television commercials, Cimino relocated to the distant, sunny land of Hollywood with a heist movie he wrote titled Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. Clint Eastwood played the lead role under Cimino’s direction. Four years passed before he embarked on The Deer Hunter, which came in over budget, escalating from $8 million to $15 million. Any questions about the vast budget overages could be directed to the row of Oscars his film snapped up.
The supreme confidence the director held in himself was only emboldened by his Academy Award victories. The recollections of those who have worked with him illustrate a regal image of the once unassailable auteur. In Griffin’s article, former United Artists executive David Field recalled, “Michael had these people so spooked that no one dared to tell him to go shit in a hat.”11 It was likely that this power dynamic was also responsible for the right Cimino won to deliver a cut between two and three hours in length. He also managed to win a drawn-out dispute regarding the casting of the picture. Studio executives were eager to cast a more well-known actress in one of the lead female roles, like Diane Keaton or Jane Fonda, but Cimino insisted that Isabelle Huppert play the role of Ella Watson. This was only one of many arguments that would follow, but it set a dangerous precedent for the studio executives, who caved to Cimino’s demands.
The decision had less to do with Huppert than it did Cimino. Bach, revisiting the decision, remembered, “The star of this picture—it was so clear—was Michael Cimino. We weren’t betting that this or that actor or actress would add a million or two to the box office. We were betting that Cimino would deliver a blockbuster with ‘Art’ written all over it, a return to epic filmmaking and epic returns.”12 The decision to agree with Cimino’s casting ultimatum was simultaneously a decision to press forward with the picture and to clear the way for more expensive power plays. Bach reflected, “Perhaps some less enlightened or more hotheaded production executives at another studio might have told Cimino to go fly a kite and thereby saved their company $40 million and its very existence.”13 Instead they gave him what he wanted because, “in what was perhaps the most naïve and seminal delusion of all, we believed that now that we knew Cimino’s darker, colder side, we could better handle him in the future.”14
In retrospect, this chain of concessions to Cimino was the ultimate undoing of the studio, but the decision to afford greater control to the director was not uncharacteristic of United Artists. In fact, it was an established practice of the company. Following World War II, studios struggled to remain profitable amid the dwindling audiences and escalating costs of production. The studios began to rely more and more heavily on valuable talent in order to establish audience loyalty and to float films with low production costs. This particular business climate precipitated a change in practices that marked both the beginning and the end of the United Artists studio.
In an examination of the history of United Artists, author Tino Balio summarized the decisive shift in strategy that put greater power into the hands of the talent. Balio explained, “To keep top producers and directors in tow, the majors formed semi-autonomous production units that offered the lure of creative authority in addition to a share of the profits.”15 The privilege of sharing in the profits of a picture could translate into big dollars for not only the director, but also in some cases a famous leading actor or actress who could secure the same deal. The system was devised to give greater control to the directors based on their previous successes. The more marketable the directors had proven themselves to be, the more autonomy they would be granted.
However, this response to the postwar decline in the film business generated other problems. Once their income became directly tied to the profits of the film, directors and actors entered the “management” stratosphere. While they make excellent artists, directors often exhibit lesser capabilities as executives, as seen in the extravagant spending on Heaven’s Gate. As Balio wrote, the “flaw was that those traits of independence, flamboyance, and melodramatics that characterized the owners’ work as artists could not be checked in the board room, severely handicapping the management of the company throughout much of its history.”16
United Artists was founded in 1919 by the big stars themselves: D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin. The inclination to grant greater power to the actors is easily understood in a company that was started by actors. In the early days of United Artists, the company functioned only as a distributor of independent pictures. This small group of wildly successful actors had already reached the highest echelon of their profession and opted to circumvent the studio system in which they had once worked. They were no longer negotiating contracts; instead they were in a position to write them. They reigned over every conceivable aspect of their pictures, and this meant having to secure financing and accept greater financial risk while embarking on independent productions. This system gave the director not only creative control, but also a way of aligning their interests with those of the studio. Somewhere in the process of producing Heaven’s Gate, however, this alignment disappeared. While director and studio wanted the best movie possible, there was undoubtedly a strong disagreement on how to achieve that goal.
