How to Play Hollywood Hara-Kiri

By RICHARD CORLISS

A film maker bites the bullet on his $36 million fiasco

It was not supposed to be a disaster movie. It was supposed to be a western. But when the New York critics saw Michael Cimino's $36 million Heaven's Gate at its first screening last Tuesday, they deemed it "an unqualified disaster." Executives at United Artists, who had bankrolled Cimino's eulogy to the Old West but never, until that moment, seen it in its final form, were scurrying to anxious meetings, acting out the rearranging-of-the-deck-chairs scene from The Titanic. Cimino must have wished he were in Airport--any airport. After all, his previous film, The Deer Hunter, won the Academy Award for Best Picture. This time out, he could only bite the bullet and petition his patrons "to temporarily withdraw [Heaven's Gate] from distribution to allow me to present to the public a finished film with the same care and thoughtfulness with which we began it." Within 24 hours, from his arrival in New York with the unseen film to his decision to withdraw and recut it, Cimino had gone from Heaven to Hell. And from nearly every movie mavin came the cackle of contumely: the arrogant director had committed career harakiri.

Even before Cimino's spectacular immolation, the evidence on the screen portended commercial disaster. Heaven's Gate is a serious western, a genre that has not spawned a popular hit in more than a decade. The film's stars--Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken and French Actress Isabelle Huppert--have never provoked stampedes to the box office, and they light no sparks here. The film moves at a glacial pace toward degradation and death: when the cavalry rides to the rescue, it saves the bad guys. The movie's narrative is as incoherent, its plot points as contradictory, its characters as inarticulate (and, through the wonders of Dolby Stereo, often as unintelligible) as those of The Deer Hunter, but without the Viet Nam film's claim of political significance. With its repetitions and ellipses, Heaven's Gate resembles random sequences from some lost eight-hour masterwork. As of this week, though, it is something sadder: a four-hour fiasco.

And yet there is grandeur in this folie. Cimino's voluptuous romantic imagination and the dusky imagery of Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond produced breathtaking panoramas of majestic landscape and milling hordes. A hundred happy couples waltz in circles within circles in Harvard Yard; 20 years later and 2,500 miles west, another hundred couples roller-skate to fiddle music in a cow-town grange hall. In Cimino's Wyoming, it is never high noon; everything happens in misty morning or dusty dusk, so the oblique, ruminative sunlight can memorialize every moment. Some viewers with educated eyes found scenes of beauty in Heaven 's Gate. Others wished they'd brought their Murine.

Perhaps lilies are more in order. "His life is on the line," said one U.A. executive of Cimino. "This is a tough town." Things may be tough for the U.A. brass too. The company has not had a single solid hit this year to erase the red ink from such bombs as Carny, Roadie and Those Lips, Those Eyes. Woody Allen's Stardust Memories, which cost $20 million, is a major box office disappointment. The studio's Christmas films were to have been Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull (which opened two weeks ago to strong critical and popular response) and Heaven 's Gate. Cimino and Steven Bach, U.A.'s production chief, will meet soon in an attempt to salvage the film. The challenge is to reduce the length of the film by at least an hour while clarifying the story line and giving the audience some characters or situations to care about. U.A. is expected to invest another $10 million for the reclamation project. The South Bronx should be so lucky.

In his statement, Cimino admitted that "the missing step of public previews clouded my perception of the film" and had made him "unable to benefit and learn from audience reaction." Now he has learned, but the lesson was prohibitive. Including advertising and interest costs, U.A. spent close to $50 million for the industry's most disastrous sneak preview .

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