If Cleopatra signalled the demise of Hollywood epics, Heaven's Gate ended the reign of the all-powerful director. Should these films' reputations be rescued? And has the film industry lost its kamikaze tendency?
Sexual intercourse must have been invented earlier in New York than in Yorkshire because all that Robert Benton could think about in 1963 was movies. One movie in particular. But it was not Hollywood's current grandest offering, Cleopatra, which Joseph L Mankiewicz directed for 20th Century Fox, with Elizabeth Taylor in the leading role. Benton was thinking about another love story – another portrayal of a woman loved by two very different men. The director was François Truffaut. The star was Jeanne Moreau. Benton saw Jules et Jim 12 times after it was released in the US, and his obsession was crucial to what happened next.
"You cannot see a movie that often without beginning to notice certain things about structure and form and character," Benton told the film critic Peter Biskind, speaking not as a cinephile but as a screenwriter and director whose career had got off to a terrific start with Bonnie and Clyde, the film he conceived in that same year 1963 with a colleague at Esquire magazine, David Newman. Benton learning so much from Jules et Jim is now seen as a turning point, or a point of no return, in the history of American cinema. Biskind's vibrant and anecdotal history of 70s Hollywood – Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998) – tells a story in which Jules et Jim is an enabler, Bonnie and Clyde a harbinger, and Cleopatra a corpse. Mark Harris's 2008 Scenes from a Revolution: The Birth of the New Hollywood opens with Benton at a screening of Jules et Jim during the period of "huge, unseaworthy battleships like Cleopatra". And David Thomson, in last year's The Big Screen, reminisces about "a stylistic urgency and a respect for behavioral daring" in the films of the French new wave that "put American cinema to shame in the somnolent season of Cleopatra, How the West Was Won, and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World".
At the time, Cleopatra's significance was commercial – it was the latest and, all too problematically, the largest of the Hollywood epics, delivered at a time when the studios were losing power. (In 1948, the supreme court had taken away their cinema chains; the arrival of television the same year didn't help.) But for Biskind and others, the film has an import as much aesthetic as financial – it was the greatest, if not the last, of the Hollywood stinkers, before the masterpieces arrived. (Harris asserts that not even the "makers" of films such as Cleopatra were "inclined to defend them as creative enterprises".) A symbol of leaden failure is useful in a story about wakeful dynamism, and, according to the obscuring logic of hindsight, Cleopatra must be as stale as Bonnie and Clyde – or Jules et Jim – is fresh.
But to watch the new 50th-anniversary print, which restores the film to its full four-hour length (Mankiewicz's six-hour version may never be reassembled) and something like its original splendour, is to be reminded that historians love a paradigm shift, and Hollywood historians more than most. Yes, the money was spent on horses and tunics and gold leaf, on chauffeurs and hotel suites – but it was also spent on choreography and music, on Elizabeth Taylor, Rex Harrison (Caesar), and Richard Burton (Antony). The script, written and rewritten by Lawrence Durrell among others, tells the whole story, from Caesar's first encounter with Cleopatra, to her death, via his assassination and the battle of Actium, and there are moments of trenchancy alongside the po-faced sermons and impudent chatter, with Roddy McDowall, a loathsome Octavian, delivering the most memorable speech ("Is that how one says it – as simply as that? … Antony is dead … The dying of such a man must be shouted, screamed"). VF Perkins, in his book Film as Film, written long before there was a New Hollywood narrative to defer to or confound, said that it was no surprise that "when Cleopatra finally emerged", it was "in many ways unsatisfactory and incoherent. The amazing thing was that there was actually a movie to show, and that so much of it was intelligent, witty and genuinely glamorous."
Amazing because of the "chaos" in which the film was born – what the producer Walter Wanger, in a downbeat diary mocked-up after the fact, called "melodrama not in the script". If Wanger didn't know at the start that the process would be long and painful, he twigged pretty soon. "Disaster!" cries the entry for 2 December 1959. "Nothing is right or as represented … Pinewood doesn't look like Egypt." Six months later: "Nothing going right here." A fortnight on: "We need an enormous number of wigs, which are not available." When Spyros Skouras, then head of Fox, arrived in London, he was presented, Wanger reports, "with a dossier compiled by his experts regarding the production, including a sheaf of weather reports on England for the past three years which indicated why the picture shouldn't be made here." (The change of location had little effect: "Now there is a tempest raging outside – the first in the history of Rome.")
One strike against the English weather was that "Elizabeth is liable to get pneumonia again". In the event, she did get it, as well as Asian flu, a banged nose, "swollen eyes", a "migraine headache" and a pair of infected teeth. At one point, she slipped into a coma. (Her tracheotomy scar is as big a feature in the film as the snakes and sticks and breastplates.) But neither the vulnerability of the star, nor her decision to leave Eddie Fisher for Burton, caused as much trouble as day-to-day contingencies. 29 September 1961 brought a not untypical predicament: "Circus owner, Ennio Togni – uncle of our production man, Magli – is suing us for $100,000 because we supposedly broke his contract for supplying us with elephants. He is also claiming we slandered his pachyderms when we called them wild."
Cleopatra ended up making $25m (£16.5m) – the biggest haul of the year, and the biggest loss. What Bonnie and Clyde taught Hollywood was not that you could make a Truffaut film in America – or that it is easier to make Texas look like Texas than it is to make Buckinghamshire look like Alexandria – but that you could make Cleopatra money on a $2m budget. The realisation formed the basis of a new studio model, in which executives bet on directors with a disquieting view of America and an irreverent approach to American genres.
But by 1980, after a stint in Hollywood, Pauline Kael thought that things had gone too far. "The director is on his own," she wrote, "even if he's insecure, careless or nuts." It was hardly a bold statement – Spielberg, Scorsese, and Bogdanovich had all had flops by then – but the claim received its most powerful evidence in November of that year, with the arrival of the New Hollywood's Cleopatra, a film that has become no less strongly associated with the cinema as a medium of hubris and grandiosity and practical difficulty and contractual wrangles and bad communication – Heaven's Gate.
United Artists were in a more confident position in the late 1970s than Fox had been two decades earlier, but if they weren't in need of a hit (James Bond and Rocky Balboa saw to that), they were eager – desperate – for prestige. The UA executives, newly installed after a shakeup by the owner, Transamerica, wanted a masterpiece, and they alighted on Michael Cimino, the director of The Deer Hunter and tipped to become an Oscar winner, as the man to deliver it. As things turned out, they received, at enormous expense, something quite different – a murky-brown, socially conscious western (exactly what the executives didn't want, and had kidded themselves they weren't getting) about a war between cattle barons and immigrants in 1890s Wyoming.
If the difficulties on Cleopatra had half a dozen sources, the challenges of Heaven's Gate can mostly be charged to the director, who was also the film's star attraction, and who performed all the auteur-ish equivalents of a rock star demanding yellow Smarties in his dressing room. As Steven Bach, head of UA's worldwide production at the time, recalled in his beguiling, rueful memoir, Final Cut: "Michael Cimino was building sets and rebuilding them, hiring 100 extras, then 200, then 500, adding horses and wagons and hats, shoes, gloves, dresses, top hats, bridles, boots, roller skates, babushkas, aprons, dusters, buckboards, gun belts, rifles, bullets, cows, calves, bulls, trees, thousands of tons of dirt, hundreds of miles of exposed film." But the atmosphere was essentially different from that of Cleopatra. "There was no chaos," Bach wrote, only "a calm, determined, relentless pursuit of the perfect."
It was a pursuit undertaken on shifting sands. How could a film achieve greatness if it didn't even achieve competence? In his straight-talking way, Bach pointed out basic misjudgments on Cimino's part. Of the female point in the film's love triangle, Isabelle Huppert, whom the executives had accepted under duress, Bach advised the director that she was so unattractive the audience "will spend the entire film wondering why" Kris Kristofferson and Chris Walken (credited under that name – and magnificent as a conflicted second-generation immigrant) are "fucking her instead of each other!" Of the large cast of immigrants, he said to an editor: "They're so strident and unappealing you start rooting for the mercenaries."
At a certain point, Bach and his fellow executives found themselves considering "the Cleopatra option": let the production continue uninterrupted and hope for the best. It was judged too big a risk, though in practice there was no real alternative. A contract that too politely requested that Cimino finish the film in time for a Christmas 1979 release, excusing any costs incurred in the effort to do so, had landed UA with a real problem. Short of firing the director – another option explored and rejected – there was no way of wrestling back control. Perhaps they should have been wary of bankrolling a film whose hero is a maverick contemptuous of power – a film in which it is not a figure of probity or discernment but a xenophobic murderer (Sam Waterston in a chilling portrait of entitlement) who announces, "unforced law is an invitation to anarchy". (Cimino, on the other hand, might have heeded the claim of the reverend doctor played by Joseph Cotten that "it is not great wealth alone that builds the library".)
As the product of a creative period associated almost exclusively with its commercial fate – losses of about $40m – Heaven's Gate has been a magnet for revisionists. Where Cleopatra is merely the cash cow that didn't produce, Cimino's film is accorded the kind of indignant respect felt towards films, such as Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons, misunderstood by a cynical studio and rejected by an ignorant public. But Cimino's perfectionism is too little evident in the higgledy-piggledy end product, and the claim that the "restored" 216-minute cut – still 100 minutes shorter than Cimino's original cut – is nothing but a wonder looks no less obstinate than the critic Vincent Canby's bloodthirsty claim, back in November 1980, that the version UA released and soon withdrew was "an unqualified disaster". Such over-correction threatens the film's chances of a stable afterlife; if the upswing in its reputation arose from the pleasant surprise that Heaven's Gate wasn't as hopeless as reported, then the new orthodoxy hailing a maligned masterpiece – rather than a work by turns dazzling and slothful – can only create fresh disappointment.
But we might as well take whatever we can from these films – as works of art or entertainment – since they have proved so ineffectual as cautionary tales. A kamikaze impulse, heedless of historical or personal precedent, seems to persist among everyone who commands a degree of power in the film industry. Harvey Weinstein – who was just getting going as a distributor of small films in New York as Cimino was burning through money, including "petty" cash running to the thousands, in Montana – has overseen disasters on both a Cleopatra and a Heaven's Gate model, allowing Martin Scorsese to overspend on Gangs of New York and co-producing the $80m musical Nine in an attempt to replicate the success of Chicago. An extreme ongoing case is that of Darren Aronofsky, whose first film Pi was shot in New York for $60,000, but who is currently making Noah, at almost 2,000 times the price; a film with as much water, as many animals, as many logistical possibilities as you could contrive to face. If it's true, as the screenwriter William Goldman claimed, that in Hollywood nobody knows anything, then surely it's a case of wilful ignorance.
• Cleopatra is showing at various cinemas. Heaven's Gate is released on 2 August Reported by guardian.co.uk 6 days ago.
Sexual intercourse must have been invented earlier in New York than in Yorkshire because all that Robert Benton could think about in 1963 was movies. One movie in particular. But it was not Hollywood's current grandest offering, Cleopatra, which Joseph L Mankiewicz directed for 20th Century Fox, with Elizabeth Taylor in the leading role. Benton was thinking about another love story – another portrayal of a woman loved by two very different men. The director was François Truffaut. The star was Jeanne Moreau. Benton saw Jules et Jim 12 times after it was released in the US, and his obsession was crucial to what happened next.
"You cannot see a movie that often without beginning to notice certain things about structure and form and character," Benton told the film critic Peter Biskind, speaking not as a cinephile but as a screenwriter and director whose career had got off to a terrific start with Bonnie and Clyde, the film he conceived in that same year 1963 with a colleague at Esquire magazine, David Newman. Benton learning so much from Jules et Jim is now seen as a turning point, or a point of no return, in the history of American cinema. Biskind's vibrant and anecdotal history of 70s Hollywood – Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998) – tells a story in which Jules et Jim is an enabler, Bonnie and Clyde a harbinger, and Cleopatra a corpse. Mark Harris's 2008 Scenes from a Revolution: The Birth of the New Hollywood opens with Benton at a screening of Jules et Jim during the period of "huge, unseaworthy battleships like Cleopatra". And David Thomson, in last year's The Big Screen, reminisces about "a stylistic urgency and a respect for behavioral daring" in the films of the French new wave that "put American cinema to shame in the somnolent season of Cleopatra, How the West Was Won, and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World".
At the time, Cleopatra's significance was commercial – it was the latest and, all too problematically, the largest of the Hollywood epics, delivered at a time when the studios were losing power. (In 1948, the supreme court had taken away their cinema chains; the arrival of television the same year didn't help.) But for Biskind and others, the film has an import as much aesthetic as financial – it was the greatest, if not the last, of the Hollywood stinkers, before the masterpieces arrived. (Harris asserts that not even the "makers" of films such as Cleopatra were "inclined to defend them as creative enterprises".) A symbol of leaden failure is useful in a story about wakeful dynamism, and, according to the obscuring logic of hindsight, Cleopatra must be as stale as Bonnie and Clyde – or Jules et Jim – is fresh.
But to watch the new 50th-anniversary print, which restores the film to its full four-hour length (Mankiewicz's six-hour version may never be reassembled) and something like its original splendour, is to be reminded that historians love a paradigm shift, and Hollywood historians more than most. Yes, the money was spent on horses and tunics and gold leaf, on chauffeurs and hotel suites – but it was also spent on choreography and music, on Elizabeth Taylor, Rex Harrison (Caesar), and Richard Burton (Antony). The script, written and rewritten by Lawrence Durrell among others, tells the whole story, from Caesar's first encounter with Cleopatra, to her death, via his assassination and the battle of Actium, and there are moments of trenchancy alongside the po-faced sermons and impudent chatter, with Roddy McDowall, a loathsome Octavian, delivering the most memorable speech ("Is that how one says it – as simply as that? … Antony is dead … The dying of such a man must be shouted, screamed"). VF Perkins, in his book Film as Film, written long before there was a New Hollywood narrative to defer to or confound, said that it was no surprise that "when Cleopatra finally emerged", it was "in many ways unsatisfactory and incoherent. The amazing thing was that there was actually a movie to show, and that so much of it was intelligent, witty and genuinely glamorous."
Amazing because of the "chaos" in which the film was born – what the producer Walter Wanger, in a downbeat diary mocked-up after the fact, called "melodrama not in the script". If Wanger didn't know at the start that the process would be long and painful, he twigged pretty soon. "Disaster!" cries the entry for 2 December 1959. "Nothing is right or as represented … Pinewood doesn't look like Egypt." Six months later: "Nothing going right here." A fortnight on: "We need an enormous number of wigs, which are not available." When Spyros Skouras, then head of Fox, arrived in London, he was presented, Wanger reports, "with a dossier compiled by his experts regarding the production, including a sheaf of weather reports on England for the past three years which indicated why the picture shouldn't be made here." (The change of location had little effect: "Now there is a tempest raging outside – the first in the history of Rome.")
One strike against the English weather was that "Elizabeth is liable to get pneumonia again". In the event, she did get it, as well as Asian flu, a banged nose, "swollen eyes", a "migraine headache" and a pair of infected teeth. At one point, she slipped into a coma. (Her tracheotomy scar is as big a feature in the film as the snakes and sticks and breastplates.) But neither the vulnerability of the star, nor her decision to leave Eddie Fisher for Burton, caused as much trouble as day-to-day contingencies. 29 September 1961 brought a not untypical predicament: "Circus owner, Ennio Togni – uncle of our production man, Magli – is suing us for $100,000 because we supposedly broke his contract for supplying us with elephants. He is also claiming we slandered his pachyderms when we called them wild."
Cleopatra ended up making $25m (£16.5m) – the biggest haul of the year, and the biggest loss. What Bonnie and Clyde taught Hollywood was not that you could make a Truffaut film in America – or that it is easier to make Texas look like Texas than it is to make Buckinghamshire look like Alexandria – but that you could make Cleopatra money on a $2m budget. The realisation formed the basis of a new studio model, in which executives bet on directors with a disquieting view of America and an irreverent approach to American genres.
But by 1980, after a stint in Hollywood, Pauline Kael thought that things had gone too far. "The director is on his own," she wrote, "even if he's insecure, careless or nuts." It was hardly a bold statement – Spielberg, Scorsese, and Bogdanovich had all had flops by then – but the claim received its most powerful evidence in November of that year, with the arrival of the New Hollywood's Cleopatra, a film that has become no less strongly associated with the cinema as a medium of hubris and grandiosity and practical difficulty and contractual wrangles and bad communication – Heaven's Gate.
United Artists were in a more confident position in the late 1970s than Fox had been two decades earlier, but if they weren't in need of a hit (James Bond and Rocky Balboa saw to that), they were eager – desperate – for prestige. The UA executives, newly installed after a shakeup by the owner, Transamerica, wanted a masterpiece, and they alighted on Michael Cimino, the director of The Deer Hunter and tipped to become an Oscar winner, as the man to deliver it. As things turned out, they received, at enormous expense, something quite different – a murky-brown, socially conscious western (exactly what the executives didn't want, and had kidded themselves they weren't getting) about a war between cattle barons and immigrants in 1890s Wyoming.
If the difficulties on Cleopatra had half a dozen sources, the challenges of Heaven's Gate can mostly be charged to the director, who was also the film's star attraction, and who performed all the auteur-ish equivalents of a rock star demanding yellow Smarties in his dressing room. As Steven Bach, head of UA's worldwide production at the time, recalled in his beguiling, rueful memoir, Final Cut: "Michael Cimino was building sets and rebuilding them, hiring 100 extras, then 200, then 500, adding horses and wagons and hats, shoes, gloves, dresses, top hats, bridles, boots, roller skates, babushkas, aprons, dusters, buckboards, gun belts, rifles, bullets, cows, calves, bulls, trees, thousands of tons of dirt, hundreds of miles of exposed film." But the atmosphere was essentially different from that of Cleopatra. "There was no chaos," Bach wrote, only "a calm, determined, relentless pursuit of the perfect."
It was a pursuit undertaken on shifting sands. How could a film achieve greatness if it didn't even achieve competence? In his straight-talking way, Bach pointed out basic misjudgments on Cimino's part. Of the female point in the film's love triangle, Isabelle Huppert, whom the executives had accepted under duress, Bach advised the director that she was so unattractive the audience "will spend the entire film wondering why" Kris Kristofferson and Chris Walken (credited under that name – and magnificent as a conflicted second-generation immigrant) are "fucking her instead of each other!" Of the large cast of immigrants, he said to an editor: "They're so strident and unappealing you start rooting for the mercenaries."
At a certain point, Bach and his fellow executives found themselves considering "the Cleopatra option": let the production continue uninterrupted and hope for the best. It was judged too big a risk, though in practice there was no real alternative. A contract that too politely requested that Cimino finish the film in time for a Christmas 1979 release, excusing any costs incurred in the effort to do so, had landed UA with a real problem. Short of firing the director – another option explored and rejected – there was no way of wrestling back control. Perhaps they should have been wary of bankrolling a film whose hero is a maverick contemptuous of power – a film in which it is not a figure of probity or discernment but a xenophobic murderer (Sam Waterston in a chilling portrait of entitlement) who announces, "unforced law is an invitation to anarchy". (Cimino, on the other hand, might have heeded the claim of the reverend doctor played by Joseph Cotten that "it is not great wealth alone that builds the library".)
As the product of a creative period associated almost exclusively with its commercial fate – losses of about $40m – Heaven's Gate has been a magnet for revisionists. Where Cleopatra is merely the cash cow that didn't produce, Cimino's film is accorded the kind of indignant respect felt towards films, such as Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons, misunderstood by a cynical studio and rejected by an ignorant public. But Cimino's perfectionism is too little evident in the higgledy-piggledy end product, and the claim that the "restored" 216-minute cut – still 100 minutes shorter than Cimino's original cut – is nothing but a wonder looks no less obstinate than the critic Vincent Canby's bloodthirsty claim, back in November 1980, that the version UA released and soon withdrew was "an unqualified disaster". Such over-correction threatens the film's chances of a stable afterlife; if the upswing in its reputation arose from the pleasant surprise that Heaven's Gate wasn't as hopeless as reported, then the new orthodoxy hailing a maligned masterpiece – rather than a work by turns dazzling and slothful – can only create fresh disappointment.
But we might as well take whatever we can from these films – as works of art or entertainment – since they have proved so ineffectual as cautionary tales. A kamikaze impulse, heedless of historical or personal precedent, seems to persist among everyone who commands a degree of power in the film industry. Harvey Weinstein – who was just getting going as a distributor of small films in New York as Cimino was burning through money, including "petty" cash running to the thousands, in Montana – has overseen disasters on both a Cleopatra and a Heaven's Gate model, allowing Martin Scorsese to overspend on Gangs of New York and co-producing the $80m musical Nine in an attempt to replicate the success of Chicago. An extreme ongoing case is that of Darren Aronofsky, whose first film Pi was shot in New York for $60,000, but who is currently making Noah, at almost 2,000 times the price; a film with as much water, as many animals, as many logistical possibilities as you could contrive to face. If it's true, as the screenwriter William Goldman claimed, that in Hollywood nobody knows anything, then surely it's a case of wilful ignorance.
• Cleopatra is showing at various cinemas. Heaven's Gate is released on 2 August Reported by guardian.co.uk 6 days ago.