Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the Film that Sank United Artists

465 Pages·1999·2.08 MB·English

by  Steven Bach

This book is for my mother and father
AUTHOR'S FOREWORD
Orson Welles once observed that a poet needs a pen, a painter a brush, and a
fjmmaker an army. This has never been more true (or more expensive) than it is
today; nor has the military analogy ever been more apt. Wars, metaphorical and
real, are hell we know, not only for the foot soldiers who slog through the
trenches but also for the generals and chiefs of staff who get the glory or the
sack.
Heaven’s Gate was a movie about a war and was one itself; it had many
battlefields. One was literal, in Montana; another was economic, mainly in New
York; some were political in both Hollywood and New York; and all of them
were informed by personality.
More than a little havoc was wreaked, and more than a little rubble was left.
Falling debris from the collapse of a once-great company dazed participants and
onlookers alike, including many civilian bystanders, as unsure of what had
happened as were those correspondents gamely sending confused dispatches
back to the motion-picture and financial and, eventually, worldwide press.
Rebecca West once said she wrote to find out what she thought, and in some
measure the pages that follow are my attempt to find out what sense I can draw
from events that seemed as senseless at times to myself as they did to the press
and the general public. As both participant and witness to the non-sense I do not
shrink from the admission that 1 lobbed the occasional grenade into the chaos or
participated in skirmishes hack on the home front that did nothing to improve
conditions in the theater of war. It is hoped that the tone is less “confessional"
than frank and that the glimpses of life at staff headquarters and in the trenches
may reveal, now that the smoke has cleared, what happened and how, and maybe
even why.
These pages do not claim to be without personal viewpoint or to be exhaustive.
There is another war story that might well be written about Heavens Gate by its
chief general: that of the unwieldy war to create art from technology and
ambition and will. Its a tough battle to try to touch the human spirit with money,
machinery, and materiel. Victory or defeat in that war is in the eye or the heart of
the beholder, and the reader as viewer can decide for himself.
In the meantime, however, here are the spent shell casings, the bombs exploded,
the duds waiting or never to go off, the broad landscape of debris, the narrower
one of souvenir, all collected by a once shell-shocked observer and participant
after sifting through the rubble.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When I first went to work for United Artists in May 1978, William Goldman
urged me to keep a diary. I took his advice, and his appearance in those (and
these) pages is therefore his own fault. Not so, many others.
I also kept daily business journals, notes on telephone calls, meetings, and other
professional miscellany, usually in the sort of spiral-notebooks favored,
appropriately enough, by students. The cost of my education was high and borne
by many.
My two secretaries—Rica Joelson in the West and Anne Harkavy in the East—
devotedly maintained calendars, travel itineraries, and records of phone calls
made and received and saw to it that my personal files covering the events
narrated in this book were as orderly and as complete as 1 would ever want them
as memorabilia. I owe Anne and Rita much for their friendship and aid over the
years, but for nothing so much as their having unw ittingly compiled the basic
documentation on which this book is based.
I owe others, too. These pages could not have been written without the aid and
support, both factual and friendly, of many who, like the author, were
participants in or witnesses to the events here related. Some of them shared those
years on condition they not be thanked by name, a condition I hereby
acknowledge and respect. They know who they are and also, I hope, my
gratitude to them. Others, whose names follow, were in varying ways helpful in
clarifying issues, dates, moments, moods, and sometimes motives. They include
from United Artists and the movie: Andreas “Andy” Albeck, Joann Carelli, Bart
Farher, Joseph Farrell, Robert French, Gene Goodman, Tom Gray, James
Harvey, Allen Hightill, Lehman Katz, Derek Kavanagh, Roz Komack, Tambi
Larsen, Nan Leonard, Charles Okun, Kathi Page, Gerald Paonessa, Richard
Parks, Gary Schrager, Robert Schwartz, Hv Smith, Lois Smith, Dean Stolber,
and Anthea Sylberr.
Others who were helpful include Tom Buckley, Les Gapay, Sabrina Grigorian,
Leticia Kent, Paul Schumach, Fred Schuler, Syhelle Schuler, Gene Shalit, Kevin
Thomas, Johannes Waltz, and Jim Watters, Special help and support came from
Robert Doggett and James Kellerhals, and my gratitude and debt to them are
great.
Conversations are re-created in this book, reconstructed from memory, both
mine and others, and from the basic research materials already cited. In all but
the obvious one or two I was either participant or witness.
There are two important omissions to the sources utilized, both major
participants in the drama who chose nor to cooperate in its chronicling. David
Field wrote me after long consideration that he did not want to read or even to he
in the book. Michael Cimino was unresponsive to requests for interviews. Each
of them would perhaps write a substantially different account from the one found
here.
I also wish to thank the following people and organizations for their generous
extensions of time and help: Dan Black and Frank Miele ot the Daily (Kalispell)
InterLiike; William F. Conrod of the National Park Service; Mary Corliss of the
Museum of Modern Art Film Library; Dick Harms of Michigan State University
in East Lansing, Michigan; Kathleen Kimble of the (Montana) Missou/ian;
Carmelita Pope ot the American Humane Association; Chief Martin Stefanic of
the Kalispell, Montana, Police Department; and the sraffs of the following
libraries: Amerika Haus in Munich; Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy
of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles; New York Public Library,
particularly the Rare Books department; and the Osrer-reichisches Filmmuseum
in Vienna.
At William Morrow 1 am indebted to Sherry Arden, Lisa Drew-, Laurie Lister,
and Deborah Baker for their encouragement and attentiveness to this project.
Robert J. Wunsch (without whom this hook would never have been written) not
only led me to the typewriter, hut to my agent, Robert Lescher, who was both
spiritual father to the book and to its author as well.
And finally, for the kind of support, encouragement, patience, and loyalty that go
beyond definition and certainly beyond my ability to repay, two people who
lived through these events in different ways and who shared the burdens and the
occasional exultations: Maurice Pacini and Werner Rohr.
PROLOGUE: MAIN TITLE
The modern corporation depends for its effectiveness ... on the quality of its
internal organization, which is to say the extent and depth of the submission
of its employees. . . . High salaries are collected for such submission, but it
would be wrong to suggest that these are the decisive factor. Belief in the
purposes of the corporation—conditioned power—is almost certainly more
important.
—John Kenneth Galbraith, The Anatomy of Power (1983)
The old United Artists doesn't exist today, but on August 26, 1980, a hot, hazy
day in Los Angeles, it did, and 79 percent of the American people knew it did,
and 66 percent of them knew its principal occupation was the making of motion
pictures.
The figures were in a shiny dark green folder stamped " DENTIAL" in red,
CONFI
which had been assembled and prepared by the National Research Group, Inc.
for an audience of two. One copy was spread open on the coffee table in an
office in the wing of MGM s Irving Thalberg Building occupied by United
Artists West Coast operations.
I was trying to memorize these and other figures between spoonfuls of cottage
cheese and grapefruit sections ordered from the studio commissary. They had
been delivered by a white-coated Oriental waiter, a kindly, stooped man rumored
to have been hired as an extra in The Good Earth, whose English was inadequate
to his ever getting directions out of Culver City. It was partly as an antidote to
such Hollywood apocrypha that the market research firm had been hired to
compile the hard statistics before me.
The only other copy of the confidential report entitled “Public Recognition of
Motion Picture Corporate Names" was, l knew, being scrutinized from behind
large corrective lenses by Andreas ("Andy") Albeck, president and chief
executive officer of United Artists, now somewhere over the Great Plains
approaching the Rocky Mountains, Knowing Andy, l assumed he had already
committed the figures to memory, analyzed and weighed them, and found them
no more cheering than I. The figures concerned not only United Artists but all
the major motion-picture companies. Twentieth Century-Fox was best known
(90 percent), followed by Paramount (70 percent). But knowing the name was
one thing; knowing what it meant was something else again. The percentage of
people polled by the survey who were not absolutely sure what these famous
companies did for a living was substantial. Of the survey’s sample 34 percent
had no idea that United Artists w'as making movies, not to mention the 21
percent, the more than 45 million people in America who had never heard of us
at all. The numbers were humbling, as hard to swallow as my “Luciano Pavarotti
Diet Special."
My secretary, Rita, came in quietly and slid an airplane ticket into the breast
pocket of the blazer I had left hanging on the doorknob. Clipped to the ticket
envelope w’as an itinerary: "Western Airlines Flight 723, dep. LAX 12:35, arr.
SFO 1:40." Phone numbers I might need were neatly typed below that, followed
by the late-afternoon return flight information. She stole a piece of melba toast
from the lunch tray and announced through high-fiber, low-cal crumbs, “The
car.” Her rhumb jerked outside. She then closed the confidential report I
had continued to study, stuck it in my script bag, a handsome canvas and leather
affair that had been a gift from Michael Cimino the previous Christmas, a
“consolation prize" for the movie he wras supposed to have delivered at the same
time, which wasn’t ready yet. I used to joke when complimented on the bag,
"Yes, and it cost me only thirty-five million dollars." It was meant as an ironic
wisecrack, but it became gallows humor in time. Rita thrust the bag into my
hand and steered me to the door, looping the blazer over my free arm, and
walked with me to the hallway beyond the outer office.
As I walked backward, calling out last-minute reminders, I passed the two-by
three-foot still enlargements from famous movies made or owned by United
Artists that marched down the corridor in chromiumframed cadence. It was a
pleasant passage, long and cool and crowded with familiar faces: John Wayne,
Woody Allen, Bette Davis, Diane Keaton, Paul Muni, Liza Minnelli, Spencer
Tracy, Robert De Niro, Gloria Swanson, Jack Nicholson, Marlene Dietrich, the
Beatles. And at the end of the corridor, just before the heavy glass entrance
doors, were two other photographs, not from movies but about them. The
first pictured Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin and their associates,
posed around Krim’s desk in 1951; the second, grainy and fuzzy, revealed Mary
Pickford seated at hers, basking in the smiles of Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith,
and Douglas Fairbanks in 1919. Corporate photographs, both . . . united artists.
1 emerged from the Thalherg Building into an oppressive yellowish smog
through which even the wind-whipped palm trees half a block away on West
Washington Boulevard were dim shapes in the haze. Escaping for only a few
hours would be a relief. The car was at the curb, air conditioning roaring, and the
driver bullied his way through the back streets of Culver City to have me at the
Western Airlines terminal in ten minutes. On the way something nagged at me,
something dark and stately just outside the periphery of my memory’s vision. Of
course. Crossing the building lobby, 1 had glimpsed, as 1 did several times
each day, the bronze bust of Irving Thalberg, pedestaled there in memoriam. Use
that/ 1 wondered. How about the name of the building, too, and the dopey street
and bunga/ou' names: nee Way, the Gable Building, the Garland Building Or
"Mrs. Mayer’s Chicken Soup’ and "The Luciano Pavarotti Diet Special”? Hell, l
might as well claim Griffith Park is named after D.W. because it should be, even
though tt isn’t.
As I strapped myself into the seat on flight 723, the $35 million script bag under
the seat in front of me, 1 realized this was grasping at pretty flimsy straw's. Bur
flimsy straws were all 1 had. The figures from the National Research Group
w'eren’t going to help, and I needed help: I was flying to San Francisco to keep
them from changing the name of the company I worked for, United Artists.
In mid-flight I read the following:
Although United Artists and these other companies are well-known to the
general public, very few people are able to associate specific movies with
the producing companies. For example, only 4% knew tvho brought the
Godfather movies to the screen; only 6% knew who brought out Star Wars and
The Empire Strikes Back; 7% could identify who made The James Bond movies
and 6% Rocky I and Rocky II, and only 3% could correctly identify the makers of