Career Killing, Auteur Era Shattering Flop or A Misunderstood Masterpiece? A Heaven’s Gate Retrospective. By Simon Thompson.
Throughout the history of filmmaking, it’s rare that you come across a film that is so divisive and predominately reviled that even the mere mention of its title quickly springboards into an extensive debate. Michael Cimino’s epic western Heaven’s Gate (1980) is a movie with a notorious (huge understatement). reputation. To its many detractors it’s nothing more than a never ending, bloated self-indulgent mess that ushered in the end of the auteur era in Hollywood, bankrupted a historic major American studio (United Artists), and set Hollywood down a path of safe corporatism that we’re still feeling the effects of now. To its supporters on the other hand, it’s a misunderstood masterpiece, which gets under the skin of the ugly history of American capitalism and the true nature of the American west.
Cimino’s Rapid Rise
Filmmaker Michael Cimino’s early life is somewhat of a mystery, owing to the director’s reclusive nature. Born in 1939 (although this is a source of contention amongst his various biographers), in New York City, into a highly creative household with a costume designer mother and a music publisher father, the young Cimino was a highly intelligent, yet rebellious youth, who would constantly come home drunk, get into fights and hang out in street gangs.
Coming from the household that he did, creative pursuits were something that Cimino naturally gravitated towards. First, attending Michigan State in the late 1950s-early 1960s he majored in graphic arts. Cimino became a well-known figure for his entire time on campus, demonstrating his artistic expression through a role on the college’s humour magazine Spartan, which won him a prestigious Harry Suffrin Advertising Award and a scholarship to Yale.
At Yale, he studied painting, architecture, and art history and became involved in the school’s drama club. Filmmaking didn’t enter the young Cimino’s mind until he secured a post graduation position at a company that produced industrial films and documentaries, falling completely in love with the medium as a result.
Cimino’s career started with directing commercials for various companies including Pepsi and Maxwell House Coffee. What really started to get him noticed though, was an ad that he directed for United Airlines in 1967 entitled Take Me Along , in which a group of clearly bored housewives beg their husbands to take them along on their business trips.
The success that he had with United Airlines led to Kodak hiring him for an ad campaign of their own entitled Yesterdays, which was so effective it led to Cimino winning several awards for it. In a sign of things to come however, the shoot for Yesterdays took just under a week, ballooned in budget because of the extensive sets that Cimino demanded, and required extensive editing due to Cimino shooting over eight thousand feet of film that had to be chopped into two minutes.
Cimino by this point had gained a name as one of the most exciting and creative directors in the advertising business, but with his production manager Charles Okun noting that his meticulous perfectionism made him far from easy to work with.
At the tail end of the 1960s, Cimino began to dabble in writing screenplays encouraged by his girlfriend at the time, Joan Carelli, a commercial director representative. His first attempts at screenplays were largely collaborative, often writing in conjunction with Deric Washburn (a writer who proved to be an extremely important collaborator in Cimino’s career) and the poet Thomas McGrath.
Eventually Cimino gained an agent named Michael Gruskoff , who through his contacts, secured Cimino various script doctor gigs on decade defining films such as Magnum Force (1973) and Silent Running (1972). It didn’t take long for Cimino to become frustrated with his role as a script doctor, and after a piece of sage advice from his wife, who told him the only way that he was going to be able to direct would be to write an original script, he got to work on his debut, a crime comedy titled Thunderbolt And Lightfoot (1974).
Initially conceived as a period piece set in Ireland, Cimino retooled the script to have the story take place in a contemporary American setting at the behest of an agent named Stan Kamen. He took the spec script to Clint Eastwood while Magnum Force was still in production. Eastwood liked the script so much he asked if he could direct it himself, but after a short negotiation he agreed to step aside to let Cimino direct.
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot follows its pair of eponymous protagonists, a joyriding drifter ( Jeff Bridges), who meets a veteran thief ( Clint Eastwood) being hunted by his old gang who believe that he betrayed them during the robbery of a Montana bank vault. After Thunderbolt manages to successfully sidestep his old crew, he and Lightfoot decide to try and rob the very same vault.
With an established major movie star in Clint Eastwood and a young ascendent Jeff Bridges, Thunderbolt And Lightfoot took the American box office by storm, grossing $25 million from a $2.5 million budget, and earning largely positive reviews for Cimino’s direction as well as Eastwood and Bridges’s acting. In a few short years Cimino had gone from commercial director, to script doctor, to a feted directing talent, but the success of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot would be nothing when compared to what was in store.
In the mid-1970s Cimino flitted from script to script, attempting productions of Frederick Manfred’s Conquering Horse, Dostoyevsky’s Crime And Punishment, and Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, a biopic of Janis Joplin, a biopic of mafia boss Frank Costello, as well as his own original scripts Perfect Strangers and Head Of The Dragon. Various different factors scuppered each and every one of these, so with months of pent up frustration Cimino went to a meeting in October 1976 to pitch EMI an ambitious Vietnam War drama that he wanted to make called The Deer Hunter.
After an hour’s meeting and without any kind of script, to Cimino’s surprise EMI agreed to take on the project and in conjunction with Universal provided him with a sizeable $15 million budget ( $75 million adjusted for 2026). After a brief casting hiccup, when initial leading man Roy Schneider dropped out two weeks into shooting, Cimino replaced him with rising star Robert De Niro ( fresh from Mean Streets and Taxi Driver) to portray the movie’s lead, Mike Vrosnky.
Starting in 1968 at the height of America’s conflict in Vietnam, The Deer Hunter follows three lifelong friends from a Pennsylvanian steel town, Mike (Robert De Niro), Stanley (John Cazale in his final role), and Nick (Christopher Walken) who have all enlisted to fight in Vietnam. Taking place over 5 or 6 years, the story tracks their harrowing experiences in the war itself, as well as their PTSD and struggles once returning home.
Released in 1978, just three years after the American war in Vietnam had ended, Cimino’s movie captured the public mood like very few films before or since. It was both a smash hit commercially (in a time where adult dramas were still seen as blockbusters), and largely received rave reviews from critics amongst some very justifiable criticism about Cimino’s depiction of Vietnamese people and the movie’s historical accuracy, with the scenes of POWs being forced to play Russian roulette being called out by Pulitzer Prize journalist Peter Arnett (who extensively covered the conflict) as being unequivocally false.
At the 1978 Oscars, The Deer Hunter took home 4 awards (including best picture and best director for Cimino) and was nominated for 4 others. With 4 Oscars and a box office juggernaut to his name, Cimino at the age of 39 had reached a position in Hollywood that most writers and directors could only dream of, as the success of The Deer Hunter allowed him to be able to make any movie of his choosing at any price, with all the major studios in Hollywood queuing up and down the block for a chance to work with him.
Flying too close to the Sun
United Artists was the lucky studio that landed Hollywood’s most talked about young director, offering him a two picture deal of his own choosing and limited restrictions on their respective budgets. Cimino used the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, with United Artists agreeing to produce both an adaptation of one of his favourite books, Conquering Horse, and another ambitious western script he had written between the late 1960s and early 1970s titled Johnson County War – an endeavour Cimino had put on the backburner due to the sheer time and money that it would take to see it fully realised on screen.
The movie can broadly be described as a revisionist western historical epic, retelling the story of the Johnson County war in 1890s Wyoming, where the local land barons were locked into a violent and bitter dispute with the region’s newly settled European immigrant population. The protagonist, Jim Averril( Kris Krisstoferson), is a wealthy Harvard graduate turned sheriff who, seeing the effects of the conflict first hand , decides to try put a stop to it out of his strong sense of justice.
Realising that the initial title didn’t exactly leap off the page, Cimino changed it to Heaven’s Gate, and was given an initial $11 million budget to work with ($49 million in 2026). Location scouting in Montana began shortly after the Academy Awards, and the participation Kris Krisstoferson, John Hurt, Brad Dourif, Jeff Bridges, and Isabelle Huppert were all secured.
Production was immediately held up by Cimino’s demands for stupidly expensive sets including but not limited to; building an entire replica town; transferring a working period accurate steam train from a Colorado museum; building an entire irrigation system on the land used for one of the defining battle scenes so that the grass would always be bright green; shipping an entire tree across the Atlantic ocean for the film’s intro sequence at Harvard (filmed at the University Of Oxford because Harvard didn’t want a film set in the way); and to top it all off, demolishing large parts of the set because he wanted a street to be six feet wider than had initially been built.
Cimino’s demanding perfectionism was so difficult to deal with for the beleaguered crew that they nicknamed him the Ayatollah. Cimino’s whims were so time consuming that by the sixth day of shooting they were already five days behind schedule. This was exacerbated by Cimino’s insisting on shooting only during the golden hour, demanding no less than 50 takes of scenes and delaying filming for hours or days at a time until a cloud he liked appeared in the frame. The production became so protracted that it even gave John Hurt enough downtime for him to be able to shoot The Elephant Man with David Lynch, such was the extent of the gaps.
The $11 million Cimino had been given to play with had now ballooned to close to $44 million (over $200 million in 2026). This was in a large part due to the length of the shoot, but also thanks to some creative accounting on Cimino’s part. Every single day was costing up to $200,000 to cover costumes, salaries, equipment, and to pay the costs to rent the land for the outdoor scenes. With a spiralling budget on their hands, United Artists asked their accounting department to investigate whom or what they were paying the land rental costs, and it turned out to their dismay that the land belonged to Michael Cimino himself, providing him with a little extra unauthorised salary.
It was at this point that United Artists finally woke up and smelt the coffee, that this movie was a disaster, but given the amount of time and money that had been sunk into Heaven’s Gate it was too late to pull the plug.
To make a complete trainwreck of a shoot somehow even worse, there were numerous allegations of animal abuse on set (to the extent that Heaven’s Gate is largely why most films carry a disclaimer of no animals being harmed during production) specifically of cock fights ; horses being mistreated; rumours of an extra killing a native Montana grizzly bear; and cows being disembowelled so that they could provide fake intestines for the actors – all of which earning it a place on the American Humane Association’s list of unacceptable films.
Shooting finally wrapped in March 1980, a full year after United Artists had greenlit the movie. With a completed rough-cut, Cimino changed the locks on the editing bay so that no one else could get in, and edited together a rough cut that clocked in at exactly 5 hours and 25 minutes. With the original Christmas 1979 release date up in smoke, United Artists changed the release date November 1980 and spent a whopping $1.5 million on aggressively advertising the movie.
The Fallout Of Heaven’s Gate
After a protracted back and forth between Cimino and United Artists over its length, Heaven’s Gate was finally premiered on 19th November 1980 in New York. At the premiere screening, the audience were so quiet that Cimino wondered why they weren’t enjoying the free champagne, to which his publicist replied “ because they hate the movie Michael”. At opening weekend it grossed only a paltry $1.3 million, and was pulled after its second week of cinematic distribution having only made back $3.5 million of its $44 million budget.
Heaven’s Gate was cut to pieces by many leading critics upon its release, with Vincent Canby of The New York Times describing it as “ something quite rare in movies these days – an unqualified disaster”, compared it to a “ forced four hour walking tour of one’s own living room” and calling its failure so catastrophic that “ [ he] suspected that Mr. Cimino sold his soul to obtain the success of The Deer Hunter and the devil had just come round to collect.” Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun Times called it “ the most scandalous cinematic waste I have ever seen, and remember, I’ve seen Paint Your Wagon”.
United Artists as a company was totalled by the box office takings of Heaven’s Gate, a studio dating right back to the very start of Hollywood (founded in 1919 by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, DW Griffith, and Douglas Fairbanks no less), bankrupted by the high production costs and complete lack of commercial success. UA were so desperate for a hit to avoid being sold to the TransAmerica Corporation, that the executives continued to funnel money and allowed Cimino carte blanche even when rationality dictated doing the opposite.
Heaven’s Gate losing money to the extent that it did is largely cited as being the end of the auteur driven 1970s, and the advent of the by committee play it safe era of the 1980s. While Cimino’s actions behind the scenes and the box office implosion of Heaven’s Gate sped up the process of this sea change, to put it down as being entirely responsible is more than a little unfair. During the late 1970s and early 1980s the most prominent of the movie-brats ( a group of young, ambitious, filmmakers taught in film-school rather than the old studio system method of learning on the job) Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, William Friedkin, and Francis Ford Coppola were directing colossal financial failures such as New York, New York (1977), 1941 (1979), Sorcerer(1977), and One From The Heart (1981), at around the same time as Heaven’s Gate and were given similar levels of budget and free rein with similar results.
For a long time after its 1980 release the critical consensus around Heaven’s Gate was that it was nothing more than a self-indulgent flop, a monument to one director’s vanity and excess, and an indictment of a studio that failed to reign him in. In 1999 Time Magazine listed Heaven’s Gate as one of the 100 worst ideas of the 20th century , and similarly budgeted box office flops are almost always compared to it (for example Waterworld which was christened Kevin’s Gate in reference to the film’s star Kevin Costner and director Kevin Reynolds). In 2008 satirist and critic Joe Queenan called it the worst movie ever made, further elaborating ;
“ This is a movie about Harvard-educated gunslingers who face off against eastern European sodbusters in an epic struggle for the soul of America. This is a movie that stars Isabelle Huppert as a shotgun-toting cowgirl. This is a movie in which Jeff Bridges pukes while mounted on roller skates. This is a movie that has five minutes of uninterrupted fiddle-playing by a fiddler who is also mounted on roller skates. This is a movie that defies belief.”
Some of the first instances of a more complimentary attitude towards the film however, came in a contemporary review by critic Robin Wood who praised the uncut version as “ one of the few authentically innovative Hollywood films … It seems to me, in its original version, among the supreme achievements of the Hollywood cinema.”. British film historian David Thomson, was another early champion of Heaven’s Gate, calling it a “ wounded monster” and placing it in a grand American tradition of Herman Melville and Henry James calling it a “ mighty dispersal of what has gone before. In America, there are great innovations in art that suddenly create fields of apparent emptiness. They may seem like omissions or mistakes at first. Yet in time we come to see them as meant for our exploration”. Directors such as Martin Scorsese have also publicly championed the film, describing it as having overlooked virtues.
In 2012 and in 2013 two of Cimino’s much longer cuts were put on the festival circuit to newly found critical acclaim, tipping the scales of decades worth of vociferous backlash into a more balanced state.
Unfortunately for Cimino himself, however, this positive revisionism came far too late, both in his life and career, for him to reap the benefits. In the years since 1980 up until his death in 2016, Cimino was a reclusive pariah in Hollywood, directing just five more films in 36 years (including the criminally underrated Year Of The Dragon in 1985), giving very few interviews and making little to no public appearances at all.
My Personal Thoughts on Heaven’s Gate and Cimino
There is a germ of a good movie trapped inside Heaven’s Gate, but unlike other epics of comparable length and scale such as Laurence Of Arabia, The Bridge Over The River Kwai, Once Upon A Time In America; or Apocalypse Now it’s a turgidly paced affair which fails to really get off the starting blocks. It is, to Cimino’s credit, stunning to look at, with almost every shot living up to the old cliché of ‘every frame a painting’ but its story structure is such a mess that it takes you out of what you’re watching.
It is unfair however, that this movie and Cimino single handedly carried most of the blame for being responsible for the end of the New Hollywood era, given that other prominent figureheads of that artistic movement were also making high risk low reward efforts as well. The resulting pariah status that Cimino acquired was nothing less than a crying shame, because it prevented such an interesting and ambitious filmmaker from providing audiences with decades worth of original ideas.
Maybe a filmmaker with perfectionist tendencies as great as Cimino’s was always going to be destined for an Icarus-like downfall, and in an industry so obsessed with playing it safe and reverting to type, was never going to be truly comfortable. Still, the fact that a movie made almost half a century ago now can still generate this level of debate shows just how important Cimino is to American cinema history.
