Final Cut – Steven Bach, 1985 ★★★½

Living and Dying with the Ayatollah

If it is true that what one loves in life are the things that fade, at least fading is a process that doesn’t happen overnight.

But it literally did just that for the golden age of maverick film directors, barreling through Manhattan on the night of Wednesday, November 19, 1980, bearing a title very appropriate for the many career deaths it would reap, Heaven’s Gate.

Steven Bach, who greenlit this overpriced art film for United Artists, was out of work by 1981. In his memoir about the experience, he explains how good life was, how fast it went, and the razor-thin line between genius and crazy he discovered in Heaven’s Gate director Michael Cimino, known on-set as the Ayatollah and in the corridors of UA by less friendly terms.

“Cimino was an artist with an obligation to his work that transcended any other obligation,” Bach writes. “His tone implied confidence, not arrogance, and if there was a ruthlessness, it stemmed not from recklessness but from conviction.”

Michael Cimino, at right, confers with lead actor Kris Kristofferson on the set of Heaven's Gate. According to Bach, endless retakes and waiting for perfect weather were among the many causes of delay. Image from https://www.uncut.co.uk/features/michael-cimino-remembered-kris-kristofferson-making-heavens-gate-77697/. 

Final Cut is a pulsating tale of egos run amok, not least of them Bach’s own, and a look back to an era of filmmaking not all that long ago which seems very far away, when the director was the arbiter of everything from budget to casting to the all-important final cut.

How crazy were the scales balanced in favor of these so-called auteurs? At one point in Final Cut, Bach recalls being warned against giving Cimino what he wanted – by Cimino’s own agent:

“My client is a brilliant director – ”

“Aren’t they all?” I interrupted.

“No, some are bums. This one is brilliant,” he continued evenly, “but my duty is to protect him – even from himself – and you have to understand that the only thing he understands is force. Be forceful.”

By this time, Bach was plenty fed up with Cimino, wrung out of both patience and cash by the director’s insistence on getting it done right. “I had taken the two-year Cimino cure for auteur worship and laissez-faire ‘vision,’” he would write. But like cocaine, another Hollywood drug of choice in the 1970s, money went fast as Cimino blew through budgets.

Nor would he submit to UA oversight, ordering one such studio-assigned minder to keep away from the set and himself. Once Bach and his fellow executives caved in on a key Cimino demand, letting the director cast French actress Isabelle Huppert in a lead role despite her difficulty with English, the floodgates were opened.

Steven Bach. He didn't help his case with Cimino over the Huppert casting when he likened the actress's face to that of a potato. He suggests more than acting played a role in her getting the part. Image from https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-steven-bach31-2009mar31-story.html.

Cimino managed the feat of falling five days behind schedule one week into production. He initially budgeted the film for $8 million, then refused to acknowledge massive cost overruns.

One production executive, Lee Katz, warned Cimino was heading well north of $15 million. UA tried locking him in at that number. Denying any overage, Cimino refused to play ball. If he didn’t see a problem, why should anyone else?

“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,” Katz noted.

What to do. If they dropped Cimino’s dream project, they risked being labeled money-hungry philistines by the glamourous, artsy tastemakers from whom they craved approval. So Bach and his colleagues kept funding Cimino’s dream, hoping they would get lucky again the way they had funding Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, a production boondoggle that wound up earning back money and wowing critics.

So they doubled down with Cimino. The final cost: $44 million, and soon after, the demise of a storied studio Bach reminds us many times was co-founded by Charlie Chaplin.

The climactic shootout sequence of Heaven's Gate. In addition to costing millions of dollars and adding days to the schedule, the sequence killed at least one horse. Another horse was treated by a psychiatrist, according to Bach. UA paid the bill. Image from https://seeingthingssecondhand.wordpress.com/2017/08/05/heavens-gate-1980/.

There are conflicting views, now as then, whether Heaven’s Gate is any good. Some view it as better than Cimino’s prior film The Deer Hunter, which came out in 1978 and won the Oscar for Best Picture and Best Director.

Others agree with Vincent Canby of The New York Times, who after attending that November premiere wrote: “Heaven’s Gate fails so completely, you might suspect Mr. Cimino sold his soul to the Devil to obtain the success of The Deer Hunter, and the Devil has just come around to collect.”

Bach makes clear he respected what Cimino was trying to do, to refashion that classic film genre, the western, into a bittersweet eulogy for the American dream. It was just too long and depressing!

He recalls that November night:

They stayed there mesmerized by the spectacle, the enormity of the miscalculation, the perfection that money can buy, the caring that it can’t. They were stunned into submission by the sheer weight of the thing, the luxuriant wastefulness, the overbearing sound, the restlessness of its self-importance, its self love.

Cimino at work. One problem Bach suggest is the director's love of film work overrode his desire to screen the result, costing months of missed deadlines. “I don’t want to fire him – I want to kill him,” Bach recalled saying. Image from https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/peter-biskind-michael-ciminos-twisted-910101.

Another thing that struck me reading this was Bach’s own myopia. Bach, who died in 2009, was clearly not cut out to be a producer, not if his own account can be trusted. He’s entirely too caught up with the ideal of art for art’s sake, an art defined by and built around a narrow elite rather than the larger filmgoing public, who merely fund the cost.

He rhapsodizes about the “heat” in pursuing the rights to an unfilmable book by Gay Talese called Thy Neighbor’s Wife. Breathlessly, he informs his boss it will require an X rating because of its explicit sexual content. Questioned about marketability, Bach is unbowed, saying they need to get the film rights before worrying about such things.

“Art would prevail; business would bow; creative freedom would out,” he writes.

To his credit, Bach doesn’t shirk responsibility for the Heaven’s Gate fiasco, noting he was too eager to make his mark at a company where shepherding successful, culturally important films was the norm. He was new to his job, and wanted to uphold UA’s proud legacy.

“Do they respect us?” Bach is asked by his co-production head at UA, David Field.

“I don’t know,” Bach replies. “We have to do something first.”

One film Bach was proud of greenlighting for United Artists was The French Lieutenant's Woman, featuring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons, seen above. “I think this company now and then can afford to make a picture simply because it should be made,” Bach quotes himself saying at a studio meeting. Image from https://clclt.com/charlotte/the-french-lieutenants-woman-hackers-among-new-home-entertainment-titles/Content?oid=3649384.

“Doing something” here translated into finding a hot young director and giving him a license to make a film without attention to cost. Cimino was as hot as they came in 1978, and Bach recalls how thunderstruck he was when he screened The Deer Hunter. Soon everyone was. It was a critical success that drew audiences, too. What could Cimino do next?

Bach doesn’t attack Cimino’s vision as much as note his hubris. Heaven’s Gate was not a bad film, Bach argues, so much as one that missed its audience with a message of unrelieved despair, what he terms “a pervasive nihilism,” delivered in overlong and self-important fashion. “What one loves in life are the things that fade” was the Cimino-approved tagline for Heaven’s Gate, and one that for Bach summed up a big reason for the film's failure with mass audiences:

That nostalgic-sounding slogan is finally reductive: It narrows the world instead of enlarging it.

Heaven’s Gate details a real-life historical event, the Johnson County War of Wyoming, but fictionalized it into a Howard Zinn epic of immigrants trampled underfoot by capitalist cowboys. It committed the sin of brazen historical revisionism, then compounded it by being dull.

While Heaven’s Gate is the focus of Final Cut, Bach spends much of his book on other matters. There are meetings with Woody Allen – UA’s hottest property as far as Bach was concerned, whose post-Gate departure for Orion is dwelt on at length; earnest handwringing with Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro about Raging Bull preproduction problems; and talks over other films that would never see the light of day.

When all else failed, there was always Bond. The James Bond series was UA's hottest property. While the studio spent millions on Heaven's Gate, it made them back with 1979's 007 film Moonraker. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonraker_(film).

One poignant running sidelight is the effort to coax a new “Pink Panther” script from a clearly ailing and “wraithlike” Peter Sellers, who rallies enough to produce a draft only to drop dead a week later.

Another star Bach describes wooing was Barbra Streisand, who wanted to produce, direct, and star in what eventually became 1983’s Yentl. A senior UA executive was coaxed to lend his support after Barbra asked him to play a character in the film; later she claimed no memory of that offer.

Bach may have left Hollywood behind, but it is clear reading Final Cut that he wasn’t burning his bridges. A lot of egos are stroked, and sometimes Bach holds back identifying information when relating some anecdote. As enjoyable as Final Cut is, and it is very much that, it is easy to recognize this is one version of the truth.

Still, Bach’s novelistic flair for description and his moment-by-moment account of a studio’s collapse kept me reading, whatever my doubts.

Making you care about the producer’s lot in Hollywood may be Bach’s great achievement. It’s not the definitive story of Heaven’s Gate; a 2004 Trio documentary on YouTube details Cimino’s actual direction of the film in better detail. But Bach’s book is an immersive account about Hollywood on the threshold of massive change. If Bach deserves some of the blame for what went wrong, he also earns credit for telling the story here in such entertaining and compelling form.