Why Michael Cimino’s Disastrous Epic Western ‘Heaven’s Gate’ Was Blamed for Ruining United Artists

https://www.indiewire.com/2022/03/michael-cimino-heavens-gate-book-excerpt-1234710106/

Despite the lackluster slate of films and the early write-off of “Heaven’s Gate”‘s $44 million loss, the studio still made a respectable profit of $22 million. United Artists was not bankrupt, or even heading in that direction. “With a nip of reorganization here and a tuck of new management there, no studio ever quite seems to go over the edge,” Aljean Harmetz said in the Los Angeles Times. In fact, United Artists did not slow down after the debacle — they were still spending huge sums on acquisitions: $500,000 for the movie rights to Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff” and $250,000 for Truman Capote’s “Handcarved Coffins.” The most staggering buy was $2.5 million for Gay Talese’s giant nonfiction history of America’s sex life, “Thy Neighbor’s Wife.” It was widely regarded as unfilmable, and, indeed, it never was. Nor was the Capote book. “The Right Stuff” was eventually made, but by another studio.

The studio could have weathered the Cimino storm, but there were other factors over which they had no control. Transamerica had always been the parent company of a random group of businesses that included UA and Budget Car Hire. Now they were beginning to divest themselves of the companies that did not relate to their core product divisions — insurance and investment. Then there was the money: United Artists had been bought for $180 million twelve years before; now Transamerica sold it to Kerkorian for an astonishing $383 million. There was really no downside for them. Even Bach, contradicting his book’s Film-that-Sank-a-Studio subtitle said, “At that price, ‘Who wouldn’t sell?’”

Outside the industry, “Heaven’s Gate” seemed a small footnote to the sale. In a story about it, the New York Times mentioned the movie but said that United Artists had not been looking to sell — Kerkorian had initiated the talks with them. The news agency UPI reported the sale price but made no mention of the movie at all.

What could be laid at Cimino’s door was that United Artists had somewhat lost their appetite for filmmaking because of him. However, the wider damage to Cimino’s reputation had been done — the industry believed that he was totally to blame for a bankruptcy that did not actually happen. It still does. In 2016, the website Screen Rant included “Heaven’s Gate” in a list of movies that “bankrupted their studio.” Even one of the industry’s papers of record, The Hollywood Reporter, noted in 2020 that the movie, “earned a place of infamy for bankrupting United Artists.”