Death of an American Huckster

Cimino directed just seven feature films in 42 years—a pace that makes Terrence Malick look like a workhorse. But he was so much more than just a lazy director. He was one of the great American hucksters.

Please understand that I don’t say this to speak ill of the dead, but rather to give Cimino credit for being something like an archetype of a very specific kind of hustler.

Variety’s long obituary gives you a taste of Cimino’s fraudulence, beginning with this delicately phrased line: “His birthday is usually cited as Feb. 3, 1939, though many facts about Cimino’s life, including his birthdate, were shrouded in conflicting information.” Also:

But if you really want to delve into Cimino’s life, you should read Final Cut, which is—hands down—the best book ever written about Hollywood.

Final Cut was written by Steven Bach, who was a high-level executive at United Artists in the 1970s. He was also one of the people responsible for greenlighting, and then managing, Cimino’s third film, Heaven’s Gate.

As Variety summarizes: “The film was greenlit for $7.5 million but eventually budgeted at $11.5 million. It ended up costing $35.1 million, with another $9 million for marketing, leading to a $44 million writedown for UA.” Heaven’s Gate was such a disaster that it destroyed the studio.

(Please remember that back in the ’70s, $45 million was an enormous price tag for a movie. George Lucas made Star Wars, an f/x laden space opera, for $11 million. Jaws—a cursed production famous for its runaway budget problems—cost $9 million to make. Today, it is not uncommon—at all—for a studio to spend $200 million on a big picture. Back then, you couldn’t spend $200 million on a film—Brewster’s Millions-style—if your life depended on it.)

Reading Bach’s account of the Heaven’s Gate disaster it’s clear that there were warning signs about Cimino from the very first moment. At Bach’s first lunch with him, Cimino began by denigrating the studio that backed his calling card, The Deer Hunter. Cimino admitted that he had gone over budget on the movie by a cool 100 percent. Cimino admitted that he had overshot the film to an alarming degree. He let slip that he had arranged a system that denied his studio a look at any dailies until after principle photography had finished. He told Bach about how he was fighting with the studio over running time. Each of these admissions should have sent Bach running, but Cimino had ready explanations for them all and it was a convincing snowjob.

Cimino then pitched Bach and his studio, United Artists, on Heaven’s Gate, a historical drama/Western about a war between immigrant workers and land barons in Johnson County, Wyoming. They agreed to make the picture for $7.8 million.

And then things went sideways. It turned out that the Heaven’s Gate script was so loosely based on the Johnson County War as to be almost totally fictional. Only later did Bach and the other studio executives understand what Cimino meant when he said off-handedly that, “One uses history in a very free way.”

Once under contract, Cimino quickly added two large-scale scenes to his screenplay, which required a 30 percent increase in the budget. (His production schedule, however, remained unchanged, at a brisk 69 days—another bit of dishonestly that should have raised alarms at UA.)

The studio execs had a short list of actresses for the movie’s female lead. Cimino insisted on casting an unknown French actress, Isabelle Huppert. He did this even though his contract did not give him final casting authority—he simply refused to make the movie without her and, because by that point the studio had already committed to spending close to $10 million dollars to the project. And because they had already raised this ceiling, Cimino gambled that it meant that United Artists needed Heaven’s Gate more than he needed United Artists. He was right. The studio execs folded and Huppert was given the role.

After the brinksmanship with Huppert, relations between Cimino and UA devolved. On the day before Cimino and the studio were to sign the final contracts moving the film into production, Cimino delivered a list of twelve non-negotiable demands. One of them was a further increase to the budget; another was a clause stipulating that Cimino could not be penalized in any way should the movie go over-budget and/or overschedule. (Another of the demands was that the movie would always and everywhere be billed as “Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate” with Cimino’s name in the same size type as the title of the movie.)

In the end, United Artists blinked. At the meeting that would seal the death of the studio, one of the executives muttered to Bach, “We seem to be in the ironic and paradoxical position of not really trusting the gentleman with our money and, therefore, insisting that he take more.”

Cimino flew out to Kalispell, Montana, to begin shooting. And that’s when things got really bad.

In Final Cut, Bach reports that “in the first six days of shooting on Heaven’s Gate Michael Cimino had fallen five days behind. He had shot almost 60,000 feet of film and had approximately a minute and a half of usable material, which had cost roughly $900,000 to expose.” In other words, he used almost 8 percent of his budget in six days to create what might amount to 0.5 percent of the final film. In less than a week, the movie’s schedule and budget were nothing but a distant rumor. The execs at UA panicked and tried to impose some discipline on the man who was burning through their money.

Cimino assured Bach and the others at UA that he was merely in the “shakedown” phase of shooting, that he would make up time as he went along and his production sped up.

But there was never any chance of that. Production headquarters for the film was in Kalispell, but Cimino was actually shooting at Medicine Lake in Sweetwater, two hours away. That meant that for every eight-hour work day, the salaried crew was spending half their time commuting. Which meant that every crew member was working overtime, all the time. And that wasn’t all he was doing with UA’s money:

When you’re shooting a movie, time really does equal money. Every day a project is actively shooting it has to carry crew salaries, equipment rentals, craft services, lodging, insurance, transportation. And Heaven’s Gate kept falling behind schedule. Cimino had promised UA he would shoot two script pages per day. He averaged 5/8ths of a page.

Two weeks in, UA considered pulling the plug—literally cutting of funds and killing the movie entirely. But by that point they had already spent $3 million and were obligated to pay another $2 million in pay-or-play commitments. With other sundries thrown in, Bach concluded that it would have cost the studio $8 million to kill Heaven’s Gate, with no chance of ever recouping any of the money.

In hindsight, it would have been a bargain at twice the price.

Instead, the studio hoped to contain Cimino’s costs to somewhere between $15 million and $20 million and then hope that Heaven’s Gate turned out to be a hit. The studio sent one executive after another to Montana. They tried, alternately, to prod, cajole, flatter, and threaten Cimino. One accountant looked at the budget, the schedule, the burn rate, and the production, and concluded that the movie, which was supposed to be shot in 69 days, then scored, edited, marketed, and in theaters on December 25, 1979, would not even complete shooting until January 3, 1980.

At first, Cimino went to the trouble of making excuses to the studio people. Then he gave up that pretense and was defiant. Finally he refused to speak to the UA people entirely.

By the time Bach arrived in Kalispell to try to get a leash on Cimino, the total cost of the movie (including debt service) was projected to be $50 million, which was half of the studio’s entire production budget for 1979. (Cimino continued to insist that he would finish the movie for $25 million.) At this point, Bach realized that United Artists’ continued existence hinged on the movie being completed and becoming a smash-hit. Anything short of that would kill the company.

It’s important to understand in all of this that Michael Cimino wasn’t a tortured artist—or wasn’t just a tortured artist. He was a fraud. To take just one for instance: For his climactic battle scene he chose a meadow in Montana. He was insistent that this was the only place he could shoot the scene. He then decided that the field wasn’t perfect enough—that it needed to be flattened and have rocks cleared. So he set contractors to work grading and smoothing the field. Then Cimino announced that it was of vital importance that, at the beginning of the battle, the audience see that the meadow was covered in grass. So he installed an irrigation system and took the time to grow grass across the field. Only after the fact did Bach discover that Cimino did not rent this field from a local. He owned it himself and had gotten United Artists to pay to improve it.

In the end, the flat cost of production was $36 million. (Debt service, prints, and marketing would push the total costs much higher.) Cimino shot 1.5 million feet of film on Heaven’s Gate, an unimaginably gargantuan bit of profligacy; 1.3 million feet were printed, more than on any other production in history. Though contractually obligated to produce a film between two and three hours long, his first cut was five and a half hours. Cimino told the studio that he thought he could trim 15 minutes from it.

When it was finally released, Heaven’s Gate made $3.4 million in theaters. That’s not the opening weekend—that’s the total haul. One executive was quoted in the Los Angeles Times saying, “It’s as if somebody called every household in the country and said, ‘There will be a curse on your family if you go see this picture.'”

United Artists was pushed to insolvency and then sold to MGM, which harvested it for its back catalogue. Steven Bach left the movie industry and became a professor at Columbia. He died in 2009. And Michael Cimino spent the next 36 years claiming that Heaven’s Gate was a masterpiece and denying that he’d ever done anything wrong.