United nil, Artists nil FINAL CUT: DREAMS AND DISASTER IN THE MAKING OF HEAVEN’S GATE by Steven Bach (Jonathan Cape, 1985, ISBN 0-224-02842-1, $43.95). Final Cut is the best book yet written on corporate Hollywood, the pheno menon that emerged when the dreamers left the Dream Factory and the conglomerates moved in. Not that the factory manufactures dreams (or nightmares) any less frequently: it merely does so accord ing to different processes and under different control (in United Artists’ case, it did so under the control of the Transamerica Corporation). It is to that process and that control that Steven Bach’s book is an extra ordinary and fascinating guide. When Heaven’s Gate first hove into sight, Bach was ‘Head of East Coast and European Production’ at United Artists. As the film lumbered through the system, he became joint head of production (with David Field), then went solo, after Field’s abrupt departure for 20th CenturyFox. By the time Heaven's Gate had been (and very swiftly gone) — an “ unmitigated disaster” , in the words of the New York Times's Vincent Canby — Bach was out of a job. And, in the aftermath of the debacle, United Artists collapsed into the arms of Kirk Kerkorian’s MGM. Originally budgeted at $7.5 million, Heaven's Gate finally staggered home, over a year late, at a negative cost of $35,190,718. This later rose to an alleged $44 million, the figure at which UA wrote the film off after the recut version had also bombed. United Artists never, to the best of my knowledge, revealed the final -returns on Heaven's Gate. It had a critically acclaimed and reasonably successful re-release in London in the summer of 1983, but it is doubtful if that season did much more than cover its promotional costs. Thus, all the signs are that the film recouped rather less than 5% of its final cost. Not surprisingly, Heaven's Gate has become the cornerstone of eighties Hollywood lore, held re sponsible not only for the untimely demise of United Artists, but also for the end of the 'movie brats’ era. Within a year of Cimino’s nemesis, Steven Spielberg struck out with 1941, and John Landis overspent and underearned dramatically with The Blues Brothers. Neither failure, however, had quite the impact of Heaven's Gate. The days of the ‘artistic’ block-buster were over (though Coppola slipped The Cotton Club under the wire), and so was Hollywood’s brief flirtation with the auteur theory. Nothing could illustrate the impact of Heaven’s Gate better than the reaction to the screening of the shortened version in Arthur Knight's film class at the University of Southern California, that industry-
oriented cradle of the brats. As the opening credits rolled, the future cream of Hollywood followed its usual procedure of cheering or clap ping the names on the screen — the actors, the cinematographer, the composer, the editor, all doing jobs to which the students aspired. As Cimino's name came up, however the auditorium erupted into boos: Cimino had blown the gaff on their hopes. He had failed to play the game according to the rules, and now there was a very real chance that none of them would get to bat. What makes Bach’s book so good is the fact that he writes wittily and fluently, has almost total recall, and that his account is fiercely and un ashamedly first-person, not the mish-mash of quotes and recollec tions which marred David McClintock’s otherwise fascinating account of modern Hollywood, Indecent Exposure. His facts appear welldocumented and beyond dispute (at least, most of those concerned have accepted them). But what of his con clusions? Expecting Bach to be wholly objective about Heaven's Gate is a little like commissioning a biography of Cori Aquino from Ferdinand Marcos. At his best, Bach is making valiant efforts to be fair; at his worst, there is a dancing-on-the-grave glee about his account. This is especially true once the film has opened, and the pretense at equanimity is dropped. Cimino emerges as a devious mega lomaniac, liable to promise one thing one day, and have his lawyers deliver a contrary injunction the next. And Cimino's friend and producer, Jo Ann Carelli, comes across as a scatter-brained incompetent, unable to hold Cimino in check (or do much of anything else, for that matter). Right at the end, when Bach's boss and idol, Andy Albeck, has been toppled from the presidency of UA, Bach allows himself some fun at the expense of his successor, Norbert Auerbach. There is an especially wicked little vignette of his new boss’s unreciprocated fascination with Barbra Streisand, who was then trying (as she would for another couple of years) to sell Yentl to UA. But, entertaining as this is, none of it is really to the point. By the account of those who worked with or near him, Cimino behaved insuffer ably on Heaven's Gate. But he also came up with a near-masterpiece, at any rate in this writer’s view. It is not unusual for these two things — the insufferable and the brilliant — to go
On the rink: part o f the original publicity fo r Heaven’s Gate. hand in hand, least of all in Holly wood. The great unanswered question about Heaven’s Gate, therefore, is how a studio with the streamlined budgeting and control mechanisms that UA possessed, and the experienced executives to run them, allowed the production to get out of control. That UA was in Hollywood and Cimino in Kalispell, Montana, is not much of an excuse in the late twentieth century. Bach offers the beginnings of an explanation, in his lengthy intro ductory history of United Artists, which had never been set up as a production house, and which had suffered a massive loss of kudos when its guiding lights of a quarter of a century, Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin, left to found Orion in 1978. But Bach doesn’t follow through. The true key to the situation is hidden in the text of Final Cut — in Bach’s references to the swings and roundabouts of executive change, with new production chiefs brought in from almost anywhere but film production, and in the author’s enthusiastic account of the perfect deal with which he almost prevented Woody Allen leaving UA for Orion. Under Albeck and Bach, UA was a deal machine which somehow neglected the deal it gave Cimino. And, for all the detail and the 400-plus pages of Final Cut, it seems clear that Cimino did what he was hired to do — make an epic — and that UA reneged on its side of the bargain: to supervise the pro duction. This is not offered in defence of Cimino’s behaviour, merely to point out that American producers and production executives are (very) well paid, not just to get screen credit, but to do specific jobs. In a word, to produce. Right at the end of Final Cut, Bach quotes Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times: “ the moral of Heaven’s Gate seems to be that the then-executives at United Artists poured bad judgement after bad judgement in a futile effort to make the earlier judgements look less bad” . The context of the quotation suggests Bach feels the remark to be unfair. But nothing in Final Cut contradicts what Champlin has to say. Nick Roddick
Left fielder ONE MAN’S WAY by Cecil Holmes (Penguin, 1986, ISBN 0-14-007651-4, $9.95). “ The game’s stacked all along the line. The little bloke just can’t win,” says a cab driver in the third section of Cecil Holmes’s 1956 feature, Three in One. And it’s a theme that is frequently reiterated in One Man’s Way, the autobiographical mis cellany of writings by this New Zealand-born filmmaker and journa list for whom life and politics have always been inseparable. Not that Holmes is either a proselytizer or a socialist theorist. For, though capitalism encourages creativity while planned societies stifle it, the cost to art in tfne West is its resulting evaluation almost solely as a commodity. Holmes acknow ledges the irony (he’s a great man for that). It may not be a name he quotes, but there’s a lot of Brecht in Holmes. They take the same pleasure in the backwaters of the world and the seedier side of cities (Holmes, for instance, writes well of New York’s First Avenue, its bars and whores). And both do a nice line in sarcasm about the film industry. “ Every morning, to earn my bread,” the exiled Brecht snarled in his tart poem, ‘Hollywood’, "I go to the market where they buy lies.” For his part, Holmes reproduces here an imaginary report he wrote in 1957, after every Australian distributor, despite the film’s critical and com mercial success overseas, had refused to screen Three in One, finally releasing only one of its three sections as the support to, of all things, a revival of Alfred Hitch cock’s Rebecca. Holmes imagines the premiere at Sydney’s State Theatre of a film made from Power Without Glory, the novel by Frank Hardy, who partfinanced Three in One. Norman Rydge, then head of Greater Union, and the Minister for Trade are described as welcoming the film and praising the thriving Australian film industry. The terms used tend to be interchangeable with those actually employed by GUO’s David Williams and Arts Minister Barry Cohen in recent years as they launched some new Australian production. And, as
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