WHAT WENT WRONG - Heaven's Gate

Episode Date: July 14, 2020

Ever wonder where “No Animals Were Harmed In The Making of This Film” came from? Special guest Matt Detisch guides Chris & Lizzie through the details behind Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, including record breaking budget overages and widespread animal abuse. We also examine the age old question: are Christopher Walken and Kris Kristofferson simply too hot for their leading lady?Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is the most unpleasant movie to look at that I can remember. I think this is just an example of what can go wrong when you try to build a grand scale movie and forget, for me at least, that the characters are all important. I was really shocked. I went to see it. I thought, gee, it can't be as bad as everybody said it was as bad as everybody. Hello, and welcome back to another exhilarating episode of what went wrong your favorite podcast about everything that has gone wrong on some of your favorite Hollywood hits. and biggest Hollywood flops. This week, we are very excited to have our first guest host, Matt Dedish. Matt is an editor, producer, and director based in Los Angeles. He edited the feature one over one and the HBO short film Monday. Currently, he produces the director's trademarks and Through the Lens series for IMDB. Matt, thank you so much for being here.

Thanks for having me. Tell us what movie we're going to be talking about today. We'll be talking about Heaven's Gate, Michael Chimino's 1980 or 81, depending on which release date you adhere to. There are several. Based on the Johnson County War, it portrays a fictional dispute between the murderous land barons and European immigrants of Wyoming in the 1890s. And Matt, why are you so into this movie?

Because Lizzie was like, I know this guy, Matt, and he knows everything about Heaven's Gate. Not everything, but, boy. Really? Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you, well, what got me into it was when I was in college, I watched The Deer Hunter for the first time, and I thought it was really one of the most incredible films I'd ever seen. And, of course, wanted to, you know, learn about this director and watch his other films.

And that brought me to Heaven's Gate. I rented it on DVD from Netflix. This is probably in the mid-2000s. And couldn't make heads or tales of it. Like, I thought it was spectacular, but also kind of a mess. And then I started reading about, you know, everything that happened behind the scenes and just became absolutely fascinated. I think it's really one of those legendary film productions where, you know, so much went wrong. But then at the other end, I mean, when you when you look at what he got on screen and what, what Chimino was going for, it's really something else.

I'll tell you this. It's visually beautiful, Matt. It is so long. Like, I, that thing is two hours. too long and I know it was like six hours to start but I didn't need to see 15 minutes of Chris Christopherson on a yacht in Rhode Island

at the end like there's a lot there's a lot that could have gone. Yeah for the audience Lizzie and I both watched I believe a 226 minute we watched a three hour and 40 minute version for those of you that can't do math like me yes of the movie I put it on this morning and I finished it 10 minutes ago

So very, very long. Thank you, Matt for that saga. Thanks, Matt. Yeah. I mean, it is cool. I guess it's not a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination. It's just too long. Well, I guess that's what I wanted to get to today is that this is not, this has been called the worst movie of all time.

And especially when it came out, it was notorious for being the disaster that it was. And of course, we're going to get into all that. but I really hope we are able to come away with this with an understanding of what that movie is, what it means in this really strange sort of 30-year trajectory it's had, from coming out and being really one of the most hated movies of all time, to having this kind of second life that it's experiencing now thanks to Criterion. Yeah, I'm excited. Well, let's get started.

Take us through what went wrong on Heaven's Gate. Sure. where to even begin. So I'm going to do some table setting. This was the 1970s in Hollywood. This was the Artura era, the new Hollywood era. Guys like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Stephen Spielberg, George Lucas. These guys ruled the world.

And they truly saw themselves as the great artists of their time. And by the end of the 70s, their egos, you know, led to this era of incredible excess. Spielberg and Landis were competing for the most expensive movie ever made. Coppola dunked on them with Apocalypse Now. And around that time, a new face emerged. Michael Chimino with a film called The Deer Hunter. Chimino was a Yale grad. He had painting and architecture training.

He went on to become a very famous commercial director. He was known for his visual style. Clients loved him because of his really impressive visuals. And his work was so impressive. But he became notorious for the amount of time he took on each production because he was a perfectionist about every little thing. Yeah, this adds up so far. Yeah, I mean, you can, yeah.

Feels consistent with the movie I watched. Especially the painting, actually, because that's the composition of, anyway, keep going. But yeah, that makes sense. The painting and the architecture, because, you know, all of the sets in Heaven's Gate and everything were, you know, were things that he designed. So he moved to Los Angeles in the early 70s.

He wrote films like Silent Running, Magnum Force, which is the first Dirty Harry movie. And then he did Thunderbolt and Lightfoot in 1974 with Clint Eastwood. And Clint Eastwood allowed him to drive. direct it, and that was his first feature. Very cool. And that movie was a hit.

So from there, Chimino went on to co-write, direct, and produce his masterpiece, the deer hunter, which would win him the Academy Award for Best Picture, earned him a best director, Oscar. And it was only his second film. So with two movies, he cemented his place in the pantheon of great Hollywood film directors. That lasted about two weeks. Oh, no. Thanks to a little film called Heaven's Gate. The company that produced Heavens Gate was United Artists,

which was founded in 1919 by D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks. These were considered the four most famous people in the world at the time. And their mission was to allow filmmakers to control their own projects with minimal interference from the studio. That was what they set out to do. And over the next 60 years, they built their reputation as a studio that created classics.

Some like it hot, graduate, all the James Bond movies. Oh, wow. And they had three back-to-back, best-picture winners. And the Pink Panther. The Pink Panther, yeah, they did all the Pink Panthers. Yep. Those are great.

They are. Pink Panther Strikes again is one of my all-time favorites. It's so good. Yeah, it's so good. Three back-to-back, best picture winners, one for the Guckoo's Nest, Rocky, and Annie Hall. Wow. And that street was broken by the deer hunter.

So at that time, there was a lot going on at United Arts at the time. There was like a big dilemma over the release, the X-rated release of Midnight Cowboy and Last Tango in Paris. What happened was the United Artists top executives left and started Orion Pictures. And that left behind young executives who felt the need to establish themselves within United Artists and the film industry. One of those guys was the production head, Stephen Bach. Here is Stephen Bach talking about United Artists at that time. There was a feeling that we had these gigantic, choose to fill, we needed to make our own marks. Michael Chimino was a way of making our own mark.

We believed. So there's nothing like the desperate need for a home run to lead to the biggest strikeout in like this. I'm greasing the rails here. Yeah, there's, yeah, you can see just how this might all have begun. So Bach saw an advanced screening of the deer hunter and rightfully was blown away by the film and immediately wanted to get into business with Michael Chimino. the two met to discuss Chimino's next film, an epic he had written, which he described as a Western, but not a Cowboys and Indians movie. No.

Onyman Valley, you know, movie like a John Ford film. This was about immigrant homesteaders in Wyoming fighting against government assassins to protect their land. It's basically like Western boring gangs of New York. It's like, yeah, that's kind of right.

So just for anybody that doesn't know, because I had to look this up, this is based on a real, thing, based on the Johnson County War, which was real, as far as I understand. It was a bit confusing to start actually researching the war itself because he does take substantial liberties. He uses like real people's names, but then they're doing totally different things from what they're actually they did in history. But anyway, it is interesting if you want to look into the actual war. Well, and to that point, Lizzie, I mean, he, yeah, he has taken liberties with history in his other

films as well. There was controversy over the deer hunter because Michael Chamin, said that he himself was in Vietnam, embedded with Green Berets and, you know, part of a medic squad, I believe. And when the film came out and he said that to the New York Times, they fact-checked him and found out that he wasn't in Vietnam. And that cast doubt over, you know, a lot of the film. But when he won best director, that all went away. Interesting.

Okay. So we know he's somebody that has no problem taking some liberty with facts. So that's interesting. Well, he, and we know that, and the press knew that at the time. And I think that's an important point here, because he sort of picked a fight with the press over Deer Hunter that wasn't dealt with. It was just kind of set aside, and that would all come back to bite him. So Chimino told Stephen Bach that this movie, Heaven's Gate, would cost the same as an average movie.

And like seven and he said seven and a half million dollars. Yeah. The first scene has 5,000 people in it, just to let everybody know. It's like 5,000 people dancing on the Harvard campus, all-in-period costume. Stephen Bach was totally, you know, blown away by this. He gave Chameyno a huge cash advance. I think it was a million and a half dollars. Oh, my God.

You know, in 1978 for his screenplay, his directing fees, and some of that funds was to lock in Chris Christofferson, who would star in the movie. Stephen Bach saw huge Oscar potential and United Artists approved a budget of $11.5 million for Heaven's Gate with an ambitious release date of December 14th, 1979. And this was 78 when they're talking or 77?

They're talking to 78. No way. And they didn't start shooting until the beginning of 79. So they thought that he was going to make this epic and release it in time for Christmas on a budget of 11.5 million. They're pulling the cats. They're getting there.

They grew the cast to include Christopher Wacken, John Hurt, Sam Wanderston, many others, and they were really ready to get going. And then the fighting started. The first battle of many between Michael Chimino and Stephen Bach came when Chimino insisted on casting the then unknown French actress, Isabel Hubert, as the lead actress in the film. Interesting. Bach felt that her English wasn't good enough to carry the film, even after traveling to Europe for an in-person audition with Huper and Christopher Wachin.

That's crazy because she's like easily one of the film. the better parts of this movie. She's terrific. And the narrative artists, they couldn't see it. Chimino could see it. He fought for her tooth and nail. He wouldn't budge. He threatened to take the movie to another studio.

And Stephen Bach was sort of desperate for an alternative option. He went to Diane Keaton and Jane Fonda to see if he could talk them into being in the movie and possibly win his pick. And they both turn the movie down. Oh, interesting. Isabel Who Per plays for those who you haven't seen it,

She plays a Bordello Madame who's romantically involved with both Chris Christopherson and Christopher Walken. Yeah, but she always makes Christopher Walken pay, which seems right. I think it's a really interesting character. She's surprisingly modern in a lot of ways. I did read apparently one of the big reasons they were saying they didn't want to go with her is they felt like, and this blows my mind that Christopher Walken and Chris Christopherson were both so much hotter than Isabel Upaer that they couldn't believe that they would want to sleep with her, Like, what were they doing in the 70s?

I don't, she's like the hottest lady anywhere near there. And those two guys are so weird looking. I think Walkin especially because he's so thin and he's like so gaunt. He's got a very odd look. He's like massive amounts of mascara and then like a weird bowl cut. But sure, whatever. Yeah, there's pictures of Christopher Walkin towards the end of the movie, production stills, where because of his makeup and just the way he,

looked like his head looks like a pumpkin and his eyes are like recesses he's very scary looking it's really actually a disturbing uh shot of walking super hot though all right so so so he gets huper he gets the actress that he wants so yeah what basically what happened is that um stephen bach went to the the the international chief at united artists um who said that uh he felt that huper was known internationally enough that they could make back their investment overseas um and by this point Bach knew that Chimino had the upper hand and had no choice left but to green light, the casting of repair. And so with that, Heavens Gave was set to begin production. Here's Michael Chimino on his approach to shooting the film.

I don't believe in storyboarding. I want to be free in a 360-degree space. You want to get to the real world. After all, movies have something essentially magical about them. You're creating a nostalgia for a past that never. existed. I like the sentiment, but not storyboarding like epic war scenes and dance sequences seems troublesome at some level. Well, we're this now comes to fun stuff where we can actually talk about what he was doing instead and how without seemingly storyboards he was able to achieve

the vision that that I think he does. On April 16th, 1979, just one week after Chamino took home the Best Director for Deer Hunter, filming began on Heaven's Gate. So that honeymoon was short-lived. Oh, no. By the sixth day of filming, the production was five days behind schedule. Oh, what? Oh, no. How?

So unlike other troubled productions of the time, like Jaws, Apocalypse Now, sorcerer, Heaven's Gate wasn't struck by acts of God. It was just Chermino's perfectionism that was the real issue. and I'm going to run down a list of examples of things that he did in the pursuit of his art. Great. Chimino personally interviewed 300 horses for the film. Chimino would pick and arrange his extras one at a time. Matt, you can't gloss over him interviewing three.

Oh, yeah. All right, let's just stop. We'll just stop right there. But he was very meticulous in every single costume. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that I don't even think we have timeflop. There's this whole anecdote about how they got all the top hats for the beginning of the movie, that they didn't make those top hats anymore. So they had to find some place in Europe, I think, that was able to fire up their factory

and make them, you know, how many thousands of top hats that get thrown in that opening sequence. So, yeah, I mean, like, that's, but that's a glimpse into sort of the, you know, Jimino's thinking. I mean, every setup required hours, if not a full day, of very meticulous placing of extras, of props. He would just line up all the extras and then go down one by one and place each person in the frame the way that he wanted to do it. And he was painting in front of the camera with people, one person at a time, very slowly, very meticulously. The train, that train that's in the film, he had that rerouted specifically for the productions. They had to bring this whole train in. The cast took six weeks of roller skating lessons, horseback riding, weapons training, dance lessons.

They called it Camp Chimino. So you can hang for all these people to learn how to do all this stuff for the film. I will say the crowd scenes are so well done, though. Like every shot feels lived in and real, and you can look at anyone in the frame and they're doing something, you know, related to the era. So nightmare to be involved, but it looks great. Also, like... The war skating was, yeah, they were really good at roller skating.

They were amazing at roller skating. Also, the thing with the crowds that I kept noticing, is like this is the first time where I've seen a depiction of that era of America, particularly in the West, where it looks so crowded. Like you always see these big, open, you know, beautiful, wide expanses. In this movie, you understand, like, how gross those expos must have been, how jam-packed people were when they were trying to get out there. And it's like, that was impressive and that was a different experience.

And they're dirty and a lot of them are speaking with accents and they're speaking different languages. Like, yeah, there was a lot that, I really appreciated with his attention to detail for sure. Yeah, it's electrifying to look at. I mean, every shot really has something to say, and it's overwhelming. Like, it's exhausting, and actually I think it's probably too epic if such a thing could exist. Yeah, you know. Chimino sent all the women who played the prostitutes in the film to live in a brothel for a week.

No. No, I'm out. Yeah. It gets worse. Believe me. I'm just warming up here. There's a set in the film. It's near, I think, a lake, and you can see, like, the church in the background, and it's sort of this big exterior set. Chimino had that set built specifically to specifications that he had drawn up, and when he saw it all built, realized that it didn't look right to him. It was the road was six feet too wide or something like that. And so at the cost of a million dollars, tore the whole thing down, his big set, and then rebuilt it, you know, putting them behind schedule.

Chimino had an irrigation system built under the land where they shot the big battlefield scene at the end so that the grass would stay vividly green so that when he poured blood on it at the end, it would be a contrast. You literally can't even see the grass in the scene at the end. It's just dust. It's all dust and sepia. Yeah, exactly. Exactly, exactly. That battle sequence, the location for it was three hours from the nearest town or where they had their production headquarters. So they had to bring in all the horses.

Any direction and you can't see anything except for mountains. That's right. Well, that's probably why I wanted it, but what a pain. Well, it's cool, but you get the right effect because it's this circular firing squad. It's like they're, you know what I mean, like rounding it over and over again. And so it is incredible, like when you see it. So Chimino would shoot 50 takes of, many shots.

Individual scenes he would spend all day working on. He would wait all day just for the right cloud to come into frame. So he could roll. So he's like Terrence Malick plus David Fincher plus a painter and an architect, like all in one person basically.

That's pretty accurate. Yeah. Chimino shot more than 1.3 million feet of film. That's 220 hours of footage. And his goal there was to shoot more film than Coppola did on Apocalypse now. Oh, what a goal.

Coppola shoot 1.5, Millie? I think you're right. Yeah, I think you're right. Chimino, second place. This was the film debut of Willem de Fo, who was supposed to have a much larger role in the film, but during a long lighting setup, he laughed out loud at a joke than an extra told him, and Michael Chimino heard it and was so annoyed that he fired Defoe on the spot. What? Is he in the final film?

He's in the final film. You see him. I will text you guys a picture that I took last night. Oh, yeah. Show me. I recognized a lot of people and I was really proud of myself, but I didn't recognize him. He was uncredited in the final cut. And the irony there is that they made a documentary many years later about the making of this film.

And he's the narrator of the documentary. That's awesome. John Hurt spent so much time waiting around with nothing to do that he went and made the elephant man. and then came back to shoot more seats. No. My God. The shot of Krista Christopherson, waking up from drunken sleep and cracking that whip at a group of men,

took 52 takes in a full day of filming. It might have even taken more than that. I think in the clip that we're about to play, Chimino says that they did more than 60 takes. That shot lasts for about a second in the film. Here's Michael Chimino talking about that scene. Cracking a bullwhip and not kill somebody in the attempt to crack it, That took some 65 takes to get that right.

It was just incredibly difficult thing to do. So all I'm saying is that there were certain things that required a lot of footage simply because of the nature of the thing being shot. 65 takes. Yeah. That's a lot for an insert. I literally don't even remember that shot in the movie. I do.

I thought it was cool that he had a whip on him. I guess. Yeah. Well, that he really whipped it and it was inches from that guy's face. It was a really incredible shot. It is. How long did it take him to get it right

and how many times did that guy get whipped in the face? Yeah, that's the real question. Chris, from your perspective as a film director, how unusual or usual is this behavior that Chimino was showing? I can say, I think the impulse

is extremely usual and normal. Like the impulse to if you don't believe it on set, then you're just, you know you'll never believe it, no matter how many times you watch it in post. I think that the difference is you usually have producers and a first assistant director there saying there's not going to be any more money. And so what you're doing right now is costing yourself time down the line.

But it seems like with Chimino, maybe there wasn't, he knew the tap wasn't going to get cut. You know what I'm saying? At a certain point. So he could take that luxury. I certainly have shot things where it's, like it's going to be one half a second in the final product. And I'm like, but it's not right. And it just kills you when you're doing it to settle for it. So I can sympathize with that. Yeah, you're, you're absolutely right. It's just amazing what, uh, how well he put the screws to United artists.

Uh, he knew the power position that he was in. He took advantage, I think, of the fact that, that, that he knew that United artists wasn't going to micromanage him. Um, and that he was dealing with young executives who didn't have the experience. or the clout to say no to him. And so he knew how to take advantage. Yep. United Artists was wondering why they were paying so much to rent the land where they were filming.

And Stephen Bach went to Wyoming and found out that the owner of the land was Michael Chimino. He'd gone to Wyoming, he'd gone to Montana, purchased 152 acres, and then rented the land back to the studio at a hugely inflated rate. Oh, my God.

He probably bought the land with the advance that they gave him, too, Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And a brand new Jeep. And then he put that irrigation system in. And so Bach knew that they were in serious financial trouble as the budget rocketed past the $11.5 million with no end in sight. And so he confronted Chimino over the runaway production. Chimino said he was making a masterpiece

and once again asserted that he could take his film to any other studio. But this time, Bach called his bluff. And he called all of the other studio heads and said, hey, do you want this? Because we don't. And they all said no. Oh, wow. Oh.

Uh-oh. So now they knew. I got to get some credit there. Yeah. He played a power move. Yeah. So here's where that move landed them. They basically had several options.

First option was to pull the plug on the film completely and write it off as a loss, which would have been a big hit, but they were ready to do it. They could fire Chimino and replace them with another director. And Stephen Bach, the rumor is, Stephen Bach, went to David Lean and said, hey, we've got this movie. I think, you know, this director is really something else, but he's gone mad. Can you come in and take this film over, you know, for him? And David Lean said, no way.

And then the third option was to continue on, but with tighter restrictions. And that's the option they chose. At this point, still holding on to the hope that Chamino was, in fact, making a masterpiece and would win them a non-stop. Oscar. Well, and I bet you that the Daily's looked great. So, like, that's what's got to give you hope is, like, you're watching footage, and it's like,

the performances are good. The vistas are some of the most incredible things I've ever seen. Like, like, it surpasses the best, you know, you've watched games, shows with scope now. You watch a movie, you know, you watch Game of Thrones, whatever. Chimino does more in a shot of a,

you know, carriage moving across a field of poppies with the, you know, in the backgrounds, then they can do with a dragon and an army in terms of showing off cinematic scale. So, like, they have to be believing, like, there's something, you know what I mean, here. Like, we can't just throw this all away. Yeah, you're absolutely right. The footage was amazing. They knew it. The rumor, sort of the rumor that they were passing around town, Stephen Bach and the United Artists execs, was that it looked like David Lean had gone to make a Western. And so it wasn't irony that they went to David Lee and to actually take over the movie because they

actually thought it was on the level of the David Leon movie, which says a lot about Michael Chimino. All right, so here's how it went down from here. Bach demanded that Chimino follow a new faster schedule, which they would control, as well as a new budget of $25 million, which they would be auditing daily. United Artists would also take over as the production company and assume full control over the film. Chimino really didn't have any other choice at this point, but to agree, and was only halfway through, not even halfway through making the film at this point. And so he said, sure, and the film continued.

He said something to his producer at this point that is very indicative of everything going on, which was tell the studio what they want to hear and then go do what you want to do. And he followed that the whole way through. But the one issue at this point was that it was very clear that the film would not be ready for its 1979 Christmas. Like, no, duh, no doubt. So they pushed the release date back a year so Chimino could finish the film. And then the mayhem truly began. Okay, I know you guys don't usually play clips from the film,

but I just wanted to give a taste of how unbelievably loud, noisy, violent, insane, that last 40 minutes of the movie is. Yeah, yeah. It's basically, like, just unedited gunshots and, like, just... It's insane. Dynamite and, like, weird mercy killings. And, like, it's just, like, everything. Just so many women getting shot, too. Like, it's weird.

horribly violent. People shooting themselves in the head. Yeah. Like, spoilers. Christopher Walken getting shot 750 times in a row as he's making his last stand. I kept being like, okay, he's done. And then they just kept coming back to him. Yep.

I mean, oh, a lot of carnage. A lot of carnage. The one that always sticks out to me is the guy that gets his legs run over. Yes. Yes. And the lady shoots him. Oh, yeah. He's not dead.

No, he's like, I'll be fine. My legs are just broken and she's like, you're useless. In the back of the head. Like, honestly, he was going to be okay. My favorite guy was the war stenographer who's like sitting in the middle of the encampment as everyone's getting killed around him. And he's just literally taking notes on like what's happening in the battle at his like little foldup table.

My favorite is John Hurt just being drunk and completely useless in the middle of the battle. And then just got in the face. Yep. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay, so here's where things get really interesting. Up to this point, United Artists was somehow able to keep all of this out of the press and underwraps. But in September of 1979, Bach woke up to a huge surprise thanks to this guy named Les Capay. Les was a former Wall Street Journal staff writer who turned freelance and moved to Montana for a change of pace.

Oh, no. And he's there writing for local papers and doing freelance jobs. and doing freelance jobs when this Heaven's Gate production rolls into his little town. Oh, man. And so he goes to the production company and requests an interview with Michael Chimino to do what he thought was just going to be a puff piece about the movie for the local paper, and they denied him very rudely, very arrogantly. And so what Les Capet did was got a job as an extra on the movie

and spent months on set recording everything. he saw. He put this expose out called Shootout at Heaven's Gate. It was picked up nationally, so this became a national news story overnight. And the stuff that he talked about had a lot to do with high turnover rate, dangerous working conditions for actors. He was talking about extras falling out of wagons, extras falling off of horses, horses crushing extras feet. There was one day where he recorded 16 violent injuries, extras passing out from the amount of smoke used in the interior scenes. Now, these extras were locals in this town, and a lot of them were families who would bring, you know, a father, son, you know, like wife. They would bring the whole family unit to be

extras in the film. There's a lot of children in the background of these scenes, too, and they're all covered in mud. They're all these horrible locations and interiors that are all smoked out, and they would be passing out all day long and then quitting. And then, and I think this got him, this was the part that he got into some trouble about the actual shooting permit, but he was using real slaughtered animals on set in these restricted areas of Montana that you weren't allowed to slaughter animals because of bear attacks.

And he had all these flattered animals all over that were essentially just bait waiting for a bear attack. Oh, my God. Excessive is an understatement at this point in regards to Chimino and the production. Some folks in the makeup department said that the violence, that they were seeing was the most gruesome they'd ever seen on a movie,

and they told the extras not to take their children to the movie when it was released, and this started a media frenzy. The other things that came to light around this time as well, and be forewarned, these are truly awful things, talking about the animal abuse that occurred on set. Tripwires were being used to flip horses mid-galop, a practice that had been discontinued in Hollywood for years because they were deadly to the horses.

real horse blood instead of fake blood on all the actors. So all that blood you see in the movie is real blood. It's horse blood. Live horses were bled from the neck without giving them thin-pillars so that their blood could be collected and smeared on actors in the scene. The American Humane Association asserted that four horses were killed and many more were injured during a battle scene. One of the horses was blown up with dynamite and that shot is in the movie.

I was wondering, there is a shot. I saw the shot where I was like, what just like a whole wagon and horse just goes up. I know what you're talking about. It's when the wagon is, it's in the circle, it's at the end, it's coming towards you,

and it looks like the entire thing blows sideways and flips over. And I was like, there's no way that they fake that. Like that, oh, God. And these things are, a lot of these things anyways,

are indisputable. Michael Chimino would dispute a lot of the things that I've said just about the behind the scenes of the production. But these things that we're talking about right now do actually appear in the movie. actual cockfights decapitated chickens a group of cows disembowl to provide fake intestines for the actor

I think that's that opening scene where Christopher Walken shoots the guy through the sheet at the beginning so this movie Heaven's Gate forced the American Human Association to monitor the use of animals in all film and television moving forward and this movie is the reason we have that no animals were harmed during the making of this film disclaimer at the end of all films I always assumed it was Milo and Otis the horrible Japanese production

where they were just like throwing puppies off of cliffs like yeah yeah unfortunately Chimino wasn't the only one doing this kind of stuff throughout the history of film and there's a whole thing about that but this movie I think really put an end of that in a big way

even though a couple things would even happen recently okay so March of 1980 as the dust settled on production Chimino retreated to an edit bay for months to prepare a work print of the film for United Artists execs to see He had spent more than $30 million by this point, and now had 220 hours of footage to sort through.

Boxes in his memoir that Chimino had the locks changed on the edit bay and an arm guard stationed in front of the door at all times, although Chimino would dispute that claim. He screened the first cut for United Artists executives in the summer of 1980, and it was five hours and 25 minutes long. The end battle sequence alone was 90 minutes. Of what of them riding around in those sickle? Yes, yes. He basically just played it in real time. Yep. You know what's interesting, though?

Somebody said that there was some connective tissue. There's a lot of things that they cut out of that five-hour cut that are some of the reasons why some of the story beats and the character beats don't quite add up. That if this was made today, this would probably be an 80-mobile. It's a mini-series. Yeah. It feels like, it feels like Deadwood. Like, you know, it should be, it should be more melodrama, more like infighting, you know, character beats and that's, yeah, that's an interesting point, Matt, because, like, that's probably my biggest complaint about this movie is that, like, if you are not paying the closest possible attention for literally three hours and 40 minutes, you are not going to know what's going on.

Like, I had to keep rolling back to figure out. A lot of stuff is implied, a lot of, like, big animics and relationships. Yeah. So when Stephen Bach saw the five and a half hour cut, he obviously freaked out. He hired an Oscar-winning editor to come in and help him cut it down. For reasons, I can't understand, they let Chamino finish the film and premiere it without ever watching it. The studio execs did not watch it before the premiere. What?

And so they all show up to this, you know, glamorous New York City big movie premiere. So the first screening for executives was a premiere? Was the premiere. Yeah, they'd seen the five and a half hour cut. They all were extremely upset and just forced him to finish it. The premiere was, by all accounts, a complete disaster. People were bored. People were walking out during the intermission.

Chimino asked a publicist why nobody was drinking the champagne, and she told him to his face because they hate the movie. The day after the premiere, they were reading the reviews. And one review said it fails so completely. that you might suspect Mr. Chimino sold is sold to the devil to obtain the success of the deer hunter and the devil has just come around to collect. Oh, man. The reviews were so bad that these critics went back and re-reviewed the deer hunter and just trashed. Yeah, yeah.

And then the press sort of started to circle the waters. The press was out for blood, specifically for Chimino's blood. This is going back to what we were talking about with the deer hunter. they were ready to pounce. They looked at everything that was wrong with this movie and just wanted to assassinate Chimino. And they took them to task for everything from wasting the millions of dollars

to being arrogant to being a fraud. This all came out in this huge way. And this is like the day after the premiere. And so they canceled the release of the movie. They canceled the rest of the premiere. I think they did one more screening in Toronto. They were going to do New York, Toronto, in L.A., three nights in a row.

They did the New York. They begrudgingly did the Toronto, but then they canceled the L.A. And then Chimino went to United Artists and begged for them to pull the movie from wide release and give him another six months to get his act together. Wow. And for some reason, Stephen Bach said, okay. And they pulled the movie. They tried to play damage control and control the press and all that kind of stuff.

They gave Chimino plenty of time to. cut the movie down. He cut it down to two hours and 18 minutes or something like that. Second version opened wide on April 1st, 1981. The film went on to gross $1.3 million its opening weekend and closed after the second week, having only grossed $3.5 million against its $44 million final spend. That's a $40 million loss for United Artists. That's $152 million in today's money, making it one of the biggest box office bombs of its time. I will say that yeah the reviews are absurd

it's obviously not the worst movie ever no for sure not not the worst movie in the year it came out and this idea that it didn't it's like narratively it's mess it's a mess you know what I mean like it is there's just it's sprawling but visually it's doing things

that very few movies are able to do and and performance-wise and character-wise, I actually think it's got some really strong. I think the Christopher Walken character is the most interesting character in the movie Nate Champion. But anyway, yeah, I can, you know, Matt,

when you were saying that the press came circling back, you can just see it. And it's funny. I think, you know, we talked about Fantastic Four, the Josh Trank movie, which is, by the way, Fantastic Four is way worse than this movie. Oh, my God. It's not a good movie. But I think that the critics

were like eager to tear him down in a way coming off of Chronicle. You know, like there's this like Wonderkin narrative that sometimes pops up and they want to pounce on that, you know, pretty quickly. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. So here's the fallout. Several top level executives at United Artists either were fired or resigned. Stephen Bach was fired. He was the fall guy for this whole thing.

He would eventually write a book about the making of this film, which is called Final Cut. highly recommended if you're interested in seeing how a film is made just from the studio perspective. Chimino's career never really recovered. He would go on to direct four more films. Most of them aren't great. So what went wrong? In pushing to out to himself after the deer hunter and earnestly make what he thought would be a Gone with the Wind level, American classic,

Chimino bet it all and lost it all. His reputation, his career, and the studio that helped him succeed or not succeed. in this case, he did damage to the whole industry with that film and brought an end to the new Hollywood era. He also left behind a trail of destruction to people, to animals. He injured extras. He murdered horses. Did the end justify the means, God, no. But was it wrong of Chimino to indulge the way he did and spend all that money on a movie?

Here is critic Gene Shalett asking Michael Chimino that question. I think that one has to understand. what the motives were. Is it obscene to spend 30 or 40 million dollars on a blatantly commercial effort whose sole purpose

is to make more money? Is that obscene? And that's it. That's Heaven's Gate. Damn. RIP, all those horsies. Yeah. There was a lot more consideration, it seems like, at the time,

the budget, this concern of, you know, how can we spend this much money? You know, when Coppola was on the Merv Griffin show in that quote we had before, you know, it was clear that the host was incredulous that they had spent $32 million, and then this one it's $44 million. You know, nowadays it's not even a question. It's not a consideration. You know, it's like, yeah, of course, it's an Avengers movie. It's going to be $300 million.

That's just how much it is. Well, I feel like the turning point for that, to a certain extent, though, was Titanic. Because that was, like, as we discussed in that episode, that was a movie where they thought it was mathematically impossible for them to make the money back. And that's what the entire narrative was in the press prior to it. And it was getting kind of similar press, I feel like, to Heaven's Gate in terms of, like, the behind the scenes of them being like, the extras were being mistreated. This is costing $200 million, all this stuff. And then that kind of had the magic where it did make the... money back. And I almost wonder if that was what clicked for executives where they were like, no,

you can spend $200 million and you can make it back. Yeah. I also think, I just think it's this silly question. Like, is the ethics of spending that much money on a movie? It's not, you're not lighting money on fire. Like, United Artists lost all that money, but hundreds of people were paid for months, if not years of work. Right. That money like gets dispersed into the economy in one form or the other. You know, Chimino did horrible things on this movie separate from that.

But this idea that like that money's disappearing. It's disappearing as an investment, but actually it's not disappearing in the way that like WeWorks value has disappeared, for example. You know, like when a company just literally dissipates overnight because it's all fake and inflationary. I just do like when you, the budget goes, to paying people at the end of that.

And obviously too much of it went to paying Chimino to rent his land back to him in this instance. But people are getting paid to do this work. And a lot of them are craftsmen and carpenters and, you know, more blue collar type workers, for example. Train men. Yeah. Extras to get punched in the face or whips or whatever it is. Right. But I just do you think it's funny when they're like, oh, no, you've thrown away X million

dollars, that's not true. It's not like we did a roulette role. You know what I mean? Right. Well, Chris, let me put it in a broader perspective here in terms of what this really meant from a business standpoint for United Artists, but more importantly, at least for them, the parent company, Trans America. So Transamerica was the company that at the time owned United artists. And when the film first premiered, I'm sorry, when the film premiered for the second time, Two days later, Transamerica decided they wanted to get out of the film business. They sold United Artists to MGM, and they rode off the loss. Their stock took a hit for half a day, and then it rebounded the next day.

It was a blip on the radar to the corporation. Yeah. You know, I think what changed was the way that studios worked with directors, and this has a lot to do. This film has a lot to do with one from the heart and the cotton. Club, which are, for instance, for Coppola films, you know, 1941. And these films that were massive losses, very expensive movies that were massive losses that showed these parent companies of these studios that there wasn't enough management and there wasn't enough understanding about how a film is made to really control them

and to create a sort of viable product with them. So what you saw as a result is these studio-run pictures, where they can control the director, they can control the script and the casting and all these different aspects and make sure that McDonald's is getting their happy meals and all that kind of stuff like it's that was really what what came out of this and um to your point though yeah I mean this was the beginning of the the two or three hundred million dollar movie this showed that some movies do actually uh deserve to cost this much because they are that valuable and in so many ways all right so Matt, thank you so much for walking us through the second most deadly thing called Heaven's Gate.

And what we like to do at the end of every episode is what went right. This is not meant to paper over the fact that there were a lot of atrocities on this project. But in the interest of keeping things positive during our troubled times, maybe Liz, you would like to start as a viewer. and then I can follow, and then Matt, you can conclude with your depth of knowledge. So what went right? I feel like I always come down to a performance or actor when we talk about this, and it's going to be the same thing here for me again. I would say what went right here is both the casting of Isabel Upaire,

who really is great and I think went on to have a really incredible career that she's still having. I would say the casting of her and also the writing of her part is very interesting and is something that I hadn't seen a lot of in earlier movies. Although I wish they had evened out the nudity with a little bit of male nudity from the other ones because I got a lot of full frontal Isabelle Uppaire and I was interested in seeing either walking or Christopherson but didn't get it. Yeah, she was, she was, she was just, and then you'll just take it all off.

And that's the conclusion of the scene. She literally at the breakfast table, she just takes her entire dress off. And I was like, oh, all right. Maybe that was the first hint that she was playing in the damn, but I didn't pick up on it. I also didn't get it. For me, I agree with everything you just said, Lizzie.

What went right for me? The cinematography, I thought it was incredible, and it's beautiful, looks amazing. Every shot could be a gorgeous, realistic painting or beautiful photo, Anceladam style, like the color of the time. And then also I just have to say Christopher Walken as like a magnetic performer. Every time he's on screen, I'm like, we need more Christopher Walken in this movie. He steals so many of the scenes he's in.

He's so roguishly charming. You're introduced to this character murdering someone in cold blood. And by the third scene with him, you're on his side and you want him to make it. And win Isabelle's heart in the end. He has a really interesting arc too as a character. And obviously, I loved him, the deer hunter, et cetera. He just proves, again, one of the most unique performers that we've had, I think, in movie history. Agreed.

And to that, you know, the production design, I think, is incredible. obviously the locations, but the costumes. So each costume was, they had 20,000 old photographs of people from that time. And they went through every single one. And Chimino and the costume designer picked the ones that they wanted to include in the movie. And this costume designer made them one-to-one recreations of every single one. I thought the music was very good. They went after John Williams to try to get him to do the score.

and he was too expensive and all these other guys were too expensive. So the kid that plays the fiddle in the roller skating sequence, that's David Mansfield. He scored the movie and the score is brilliant. And he would have a whole career. He composed The Apostle, Transamerica. He did, I think, all of Chimino's other films. So that was another one of the good things to come out of it.

You know, I go back and forth on this all the time. Like, I can't knock Chimino's effort here. I mean, the level of ambition, the level of obsession, it's all on screen. It's not like he wouldn't spend $30 million and came back with a cheap-looking movie. Like, it's really one of the most intoxicating, visually impressive and overwhelming films I've ever seen. The CODA on this whole thing is that in 2012, Criterion selected Heaven's Gate for Restoration. And they went back to the original negative, and they restored the footage with Michael Chamino sitting right there. And the producer basically says, it's all here.

Like, we had it. This is really something. And we had it. And it's on celluloid. It's here. And so, you know, that release of the criterion brought a new wave of reviews of the film. And it's had this second life where people now recognize it as not a masterpiece, but a very impressive film.

And when understanding the story behind it and all, the things that it led to an important film. I think Chamino got what he was after in the end, but it took him 30 years to do it. Yeah. And on that note, we recommend you pick up a copy of the Blu-ray Criterion Collection release of Heaven's Gate. Thank you again, Matt, for joining us this week. We had a blast. Please reach out. If you have any troubled films you would like us to cover in one of our episodes. We look forward to diving away from the high-class auteur of the 70s into the lowbrow trash of the 1980s. Well, we'll see. Thanks again, guys. Make sure you tune in next week. And if you can, rate and review us on iTunes.

Five stars, five stars. Five stars. One star. I don't care. Just give us a review. Yeah, we'll take anything. What went wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett, Chris Winterbauer, and this week's guest host, Matt Deddish, editing and music by David Bowman with cover art from Uthana Uos.