The movie that was so bad, it took down a studio, and gave birth, for better or worse, to modern blockbuster culture.
Genre: Western/Drama
Premise: A sheriff attempts to protect immigrant farmers from rich cattle interests during one of the blackest marks on America’s history, the Johnson Country War.
About: Michael Cimino had just come off winning best picture and best director for his 1978 film, The Deer Hunter. He was the hottest director in Hollywood. Little did he know he was about to direct a film that would not only destroy his career, but bankrupt the studio producing the film, United Artists. The 1980 film cost 44 million dollars to make (130 million in today’s dollars), which was an unheard of amount of money to make a film at the time (for comparison’s sake, 1977’s Star Wars cost just 11 million). The film would go on to gross less than 4 million at the box office. Cimino would earn the reputation of being an obsessive director, routinely demanding as many as 50 takes per shot. To this day, many consider Heaven’s Gate to be the biggest box office bomb in history.
Writer: Michael Cimino
Details: 132 pages (undated)
Heaven’s Gate is one of the most fascinating behind-the-scenes stories about a movie ever. In addition to everything you just read, Heaven’s Gate put the nail in the coffin of the auteur-driven film, allowing for the blockbuster-driven industry we know today to emerge. You might even say that Avengers Infinity War wouldn’t be coming out this weekend had Michel Cimino never directed this film.
Here’s the funny thing: I’ve never seen Heaven’s Gate. I’d heard stories about it. I’d read about it. But because I’d heard the film was so bad, I could never get myself to check it out. With Heaven’s Gate’s failure being blamed almost entirely on its production, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to read the script and see if this movie was doomed even before the cameras started rolling. It should make for an interesting exercise. Let’s take a look.
The year is 1891. The place? Johnson County, Wyoming, where 40 year old James Averill has just become sheriff. Johnson County is experiencing all sorts of upheaval. It’s been inundated with immigrants, many of whom are unskilled and can’t find jobs. As a result, they’re all starving. And because they’re starving, they’ve taken to stealing cattle from surrounding farmlands to survive.
The Wyoming Stock Growers Association, the richest association of its kind in the world, has had enough of this. Despite countless attempts to jail these felons, the weak court system has made it impossible. So they take matters into their own hands by putting together a list of over 100 immigrants in Johnson County known to have stolen cattle, and have gotten permission from the governor to kill them.
Averill is shocked. But he’s got bigger problems. The love of his life, a young beautiful prostitute named Ella, is an immigrant as well as on the list. She’s been trading sex for meat from the stolen cattle.
Then there’s Nate Champion. Champion is an immigrant himself who’s been hired by the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, and has already killed several of his fellow immigrants for the company. Champion is also in love with Ella. She doesn’t like him as much as Averill, but at least he’s always around, something Averill can’t claim.
One day Averill shows up with a car, tells Ella that the WSGA is coming, and that if she knows what’s good for her, she’ll drive as far away from here as possible. When it’s clear he means just her and not them together, she’s furious, and decides to stay. As D-Day looms for the offending immigrants, Ella, Averill, and Champion must all decide what it is they really want, and if they’re willing to risk their lives for it.
Well highty-ho.
If we’re ONLY going by the script, here, I didn’t think this was that bad.
I was expecting something abysmal. But the seeds of a good movie are definitely here.
The trick with writing a good script is getting two things right.
A strong central conflict to drive the narrative.
A strong personal conflict to drive the character journeys.
Heaven’s Gate has both. On the plot side, we have this mass assassination looming. We know all these people are going to be killed. We know that a big showdown is coming. Any script would be happy to have those kinds of stakes.
On the personal side, we have this clever love triangle that’s really well conceived. The sheriff is in love with one of the immigrants who’s going to be assassinated. That same woman is also in a relationship with one of the men tasked with killing the immigrants (unknowingly). And in the ultimate display of irony, he’s an immigrant himself!
Screenwriters work very hard to come up with setups like this. There are a lot of layers going on inside an exciting setup with high stakes.
So what went wrong?
Well, a few things. We find out about the looming mass-assassination plan at the beginning of this two hour movie. Yet it doesn’t happen until the very end. That’s a long time to make an audience wait. And what can sometimes happen if you make people wait that long is they simply lose interest. Deciding when to introduce plot points is crucial in sustaining interest and I probably would’ve had this revelation show up later in the story, somewhere between pages 45-60.
Also – and this may have been a result of that mistake – Averill doesn’t do a whole lot when he learns of this information. He finds out at the same time we do, and his solution is to wander back to Johnson County, play with Ella for a little bit, bounce around town, and only THEN, halfway into the story, tell the town that the WSGA is coming to kill them.
I feel like if I had that information, I’d run back home immediately and start solving the problem. If your Hero Sheriff isn’t active in the face of 100+ of his people about to be killed, what kind of hero is he? I mean if he had a reason to keep the information to himself, that’d be fine. But he seems to keep it to himself merely because he’s lazy or the writer needs him to. I needed way more from Averill. But outside of a few intense scenes where he tells Ella she should leave town, he doesn’t do much.
On the personal front, it’s more complicated. They had this great setup where two men loved the same woman and she’s going to be killed and one of them is part of the group that’s doing the killing and she liked the other more than him but he won’t commit. That’s a mighty powerful stick of dynamite there. And yet they never lit the wick.
You kept waiting for the situation to explode but Cimino instead opted for a lot of tiny cuts and nicks, attempting to bleed the situation out. For example, when Ella finds out that Champion is working for the WSGA, she gets really mad at him in the scene, but, going forward, it doesn’t bother her that much.
And Averill was so damn wishy-washy about whether he liked Ella or not and Champion was so strangely unbothered that Ella was with Averill that the whole love triangle thing petered out before it even got started.
It’s like they came up with the killer concept of a Rubik’s Cube, but weren’t sure how to manipulate it so that all the colors appeared on their proper sides.
Also, the script is extremely overwritten, even for a writer-director. There would be passages of 19-20 lines where not a single relevant action was given. What I mean by that is there would be 20 irrelevant lines describing the town square and the trees and the wind, as opposed to one relevant line like, “Averill steps up to Champion, sizing him up,” – you know? Something that creates drama, conflict, entertainment, or excitement.
And, honestly, I think that hurt the movie. You can see that Cimino’s so obsessed with the visuals and the feel of the film that he’s forgotten what’s most important – the story. This is a movie. Shit needs to happen onscreen. Frequently. You start violating that rule enough and the audience checks out.
Assuming this draft is similar to the final film, I still don’t have any interest in seeing it. If Cimino had been a little more economical – just a little – and told a tighter story, that may have changed. But this feels more like an excuse to sweep the technical categories at the Oscars than it does making a movie that mass audiences would enjoy.
Script Link: Heaven’s Gate
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Sustaining a single looming plot thread for an entire movie is hard to do. It can be done in really funny or action packed movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark or Superbad. But it’s much tougher in slower films. For that reason, consider revealing the main plot thread a little further down the line. And that would’ve worked great here. If, on page 45, Averill stumbled into the revelation that a hundred immigrants were going to be killed while investigating a murder, you gain the in-the-moment excitement from that revelation PLUS you only have to sustain suspense for 60 pages as opposed to 90.
