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Is Criterion working on a blu-ray of Heaven's Gate? (1 Viewer)

Peter Neski

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Paul Rossen said:
I did see it at Cinema 1 in NYC in 70mm and it deserves its reputation. That opening sequence goes on and on and on and the film goes downhill from there... That said the cinematography is good and the music score is interesting though repetitive.
Has anyone actually watched all of its 3 hrs and 40 minutes in one sitting? With the advent of home video and now blu-ray it could end up being a two parter if one has the patience of a s........
Talk about wrong theater for that film,not that I agree with your taste at all,but even I didn't like looking at the film in that Theater,when I saw it again at a big theater it looked a lot better
so many read that jerk for the Times,that they had his stupid ideas in their head while they looked at a huge film crammed into a little Art House Theater
 

Moe Dickstein

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Vincent_P said:
Yes, I have, many times.
I don't think discussing the film's merits (or lack thereof) is really appropriate for this Blu-ray thread. Might be a better idea to start a new thread in the movies section.
Vincent
Right, no discussion of Heaven's Gate in the Heaven's Gate thread. Got it.
Or is it just that you don't want to hear contrasting views... discussed in a discussion thread.
I've read Bach's Final Cut 3 times, Tried several times to sit through HG and never made it once, yet I own the Soundtrack and will be purchasing a Criterion BD at the first chance I get. I am utterly fascinated with this film.
I just don't like it that much.
 

Peter Apruzzese

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Peter Neski said:
Talk about wrong theater for that film,not that I agree with your taste at all,but even I didn't like looking at the film in that Theater,when I saw it again at a big theater it looked a lot better
so many read that jerk for the Times,that they had his stupid ideas in their head while they looked at a huge film crammed into a little Art House Theater
While not a giant house, the Cinema 1 did have over 700 seats. The Heaven's Gate presentation (I was at the first matinee on either the Monday or Tuesday after opening) was superb - probably the second or third sharpest picture I'd ever seen at that time. From memory, they had installed Zeiss 70mm projectors just for that engagement (obviously expecting a long run). When HG left, it was replaced by Apocalypse Now as it was the only title in the UA depot in 70mm.
 

rsmithjr

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Paul Rossen said:
I did see it at Cinema 1 in NYC in 70mm and it deserves its reputation. That opening sequence goes on and on and on and the film goes downhill from there... That said the cinematography is good and the music score is interesting though repetitive.
Has anyone actually watched all of its 3 hrs and 40 minutes in one sitting? With the advent of home video and now blu-ray it could end up being a two parter if one has the patience of a s........
I have only seen it in home video and all viewings have been in 2 or more settings. My work schedule often requires this. However, I prefer to be "trapped' in a theater because it forces me to get involved with the movie.
I tend to like movies that have long shots, slow cutting, a lot of effort to immerse you in a situation. I like epic films.
I did happen to watch about 1 hour of Heaven's Gate the other day on a copy stored on my DVR from the MGMHD channel. The part of the film with the immigrants in Wyoming. Some really great shots that make you feel a part of this immigrant experience, how hard it must have been to come from Eastern Europe and then try to fit into the American west. [Some similar scenes in How the West Was Won actually].
This film may not be for everyone but I have the feeling that there was an untapped audience for it.
 

Vincent_P

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Moe Dickstein said:
Right, no discussion of Heaven's Gate in the Heaven's Gate thread. Got it.
Or is it just that you don't want to hear contrasting views... discussed in a discussion thread.
I've read Bach's Final Cut 3 times, Tried several times to sit through HG and never made it once, yet I own the Soundtrack and will be purchasing a Criterion BD at the first chance I get. I am utterly fascinated with this film.
I just don't like it that much.
Actually Moe, that usually is the case around here. Contrary discussion is usually reserved for the movie discussion forum. Take a look around and you'll see that's normally the case.
However, I do find it interesting that you're fascinated by the film and plan to buy the Blu-ray even though you don't like it. I'll be very interested to hear your thoughts when the BD comes out. Have you seen the FINAL CUT documentary (based on Bach's book)? It's never been released on home video but is viewable on youtube and is very interesting, for somebody who's read the book and is fascinated by the film I highly recommend it.
Vincent
 

rsmithjr

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Moe Dickstein said:
Right, no discussion of Heaven's Gate in the Heaven's Gate thread. Got it.
Or is it just that you don't want to hear contrasting views... discussed in a discussion thread.
I've read Bach's Final Cut 3 times, Tried several times to sit through HG and never made it once, yet I own the Soundtrack and will be purchasing a Criterion BD at the first chance I get. I am utterly fascinated with this film.
I just don't like it that much.
I too like Bach's book and have followed the history of the film closely and with both amusement and sadness.
Just watching the film, it is hard for me to believe that it generated that much controversy. I can imagine it doing reasonable but not great business, getting many good reviews, and ending up losing money because of its unreasonable cost but being an artistic win of sorts.
The losses here are large: 1) the end of the auteurist 70's style of film-making, 2) the end or near-end of huge epics with an effort at intelligence, and 3) the end of slow-cutting and large vistas.
However, when the dust settles, with all of the history, politics, and controversy aside, you are left with what is on the screen.
Since the epic films of the 60's, the only movies that I would put into the same category as Heaven's Gate are Apocalypse Now, Gandhi and The Last Emperor, the last two of which won best picture Oscars. I am not sure it is that good, but it deserves the comparison.
 

Moe Dickstein

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Vincent_P said:
Actually Moe, that usually is the case around here. Contrary discussion is usually reserved for the movie discussion forum. Take a look around and you'll see that's normally the case.
However, I do find it interesting that you're fascinated by the film and plan to buy the Blu-ray even though you don't like it. I'll be very interested to hear your thoughts when the BD comes out. Have you seen the FINAL CUT documentary (based on Bach's book)? It's never been released on home video but is viewable on youtube and is very interesting, for somebody who's read the book and is fascinated by the film I highly recommend it.
Vincent
I just always assume that as long as the discussion is intelligent and respectful that we can all handle that, right?
I haven't seen the doc and hoped it would be part of the CC release. I will seek it out now on your recommendation. I often find myself more interested in the story behind certain films than the films themselves. Blade Runner is an example for me of that, and so is this film. Someone else mentioned Apocalypse Now - I'd rewatch Hearts of Darkness a dozen times before I could stand to sit through the film it's about again. Same with Ed Marsh's amazing "Under Pressure" about The Abyss.
I think there is a difference between liking and appreciating a film. I appreciate Wes Anderson films and I like thinking about them and examining them, but I don't particularly like them or get emotionally engaged by them. Whereas there are plenty of films that people would consider bad or inferior that I love just because I do (Say the 80's remake of The Front Page "Switching Channels"
There's room for all sorts of cinema love around these parts.
 

Moe Dickstein

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Peter Neski said:
problem with that Trio thing was no Cimino ,so it was only part of the story
I always wondered what on earth he could possibly say to defend his actions and choices. Perhaps he can't which is why he doesn't speak about it...
Knowing several people who knew Bach personally and well and have attested to his character, I tend to think he's got the right end of things in Final Cut.
 

Vincent_P

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He's talked about HEAVEN'S GATE since, though. He did a Q&A during a British screening of the long cut in the early 1980s and it was transcribed and published (I have the book packed away somewhere, can't recall the title right now), and a few years back he did a Q&A with Isabelle Huppert in Paris prior to a screening which can be read on-line. I think his lack of involvement with the FINAL CUT documentary comes squarely down to the fact that it was based on Bach's book. It should be noted that, as compelling as Bach's book is, Cimino wasn't the only one who had issues with it. David Field was also less than pleased with the book, and recounts a VERY different version of how Huppert got cast in the documentary compared to what Bach wrote in the book. The irony is that Field's version makes Cimino look worse than he does in Bach's book.
Vincent
 

Moe Dickstein

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Glad to have some experts here to learn from :). I definitely hope that we have some participation from Cimino on the Criterion edition. I believe the film is long enough for an in-depth commentary.
 

Vincent_P

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Here's the link to the "Paris master class" screening and Q&A from 2005: http://www.ecranlarge.com/article-details_c-interview-167.php
Vincent
 

AdrianTurner

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Vincent_P said:
He's talked about HEAVEN'S GATE since, though. He did a Q&A during a British screening of the long cut in the early 1980s
The whole Heaven’s Gate thing was, to me, an extraordinary experience.
In 1981 I was working at the National Film Theatre in London - my boss, the Programme Director, was an American, Ken Wlaschin, who used to give me whole months to choose the programmes myself. I also used to organise a regular series of on-stage interviews called The Guardian Lectures.
Anyway, I had read about this original roadshow version of Heaven’s Gate that had been shown in 70mm at the Venice Film Festival. I hadn’t seen it myself but I had seen the cut version in London and liked it a lot. So I contacted the London distributors UIP who handled the film and they agreed to let the NFT run this 70mm print for, I think, nine or ten performances. As far as the NFT was concerned, this was a departure from its usual repertory-style programming.
I also assembled an accompanying season of films called America, Americans - this included a variety of westerns, especially Shane, plus films about the immigrant experience as well as movies which seemed to me to have influenced Heaven’s Gate in one way or another. These included The Leopard, The Godfather Part II and The Great Gatsby.
We treated Heaven’s Gate as if it was a brand new movie, which is what it was. We gave it a press show for all the film critics and almost without exception the film garnered some fabulous reviews, chief among which was Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times. Cimino often joked to me about this - he liked the irony of financial paper supporting a film that cost so much. (Another great Cimino supporter was Alan Stanbrook of The Economist.) As soon as the programme booklet was published every screening sold out immediately. We added more screenings. Heaven’s Gate was a box-office smash!
Right from the start I wanted Michael Cimino to attend the screenings and do a two-hour interview on stage. I’d asked Nigel Andrews to chair this. Contacting Cimino was very easy once I had established a link to his co-producer Joann Carelli. She lived on the east coast and I’d call her up and she would put a call through to Michael and he’d call me straight back. I never had a home number for him and I wasn’t even 100 percent certain where he was at any one time. However, he was approachable, easy to chat to, and he said at once he would come over to London. We had quite a big budget for that sort of thing so we flew Michael and Joann over from the States and put them up at Claridge’s Hotel. Joann had a baby daughter with her. They seemed like a happy, successful couple. I never knew if they were a ‘couple’ or who the baby’s father was.
Michael was very smart. He wasn’t tall and he had this thick mane of black hair which made his head look slightly too large. He was slender, dressed expensively and wore the most amazing cowboy boots on his tiny feet. Understandably, he seemed fairly apprehensive about his visit but he gave quite a few interviews to the press, including one to the BBC programme Newsnight which was (and still is) the main daily political show. He was the perfect guest.
One night, Michael and Joann (plus baby) came to see Heaven’s Gate. My wife and I sat with them on the back row. It was incredible. Although the NFT didn’t have an especially big screen, the projection standards were state-of-the-art and this 70mm print looked and sounded unbelievably sumptuous. Those shots of Glacier National Park were stunning. The film had been shown a few times before this and the response was always the same: you could hear a pin drop until the intermission when there was spontaneous applause. And so it happened when Michael and Joann saw the picture. At the interval we whisked them upstairs and I noticed that Michael’s shirt was soaking wet from perspiration. He was in fact exceedingly nervous about the whole thing. He was also on the verge of breaking into tears. I think the whole thing suddenly came back to him with a force that he hadn’t experienced since the days of that infamous New York premiere. “You know something, Adrian?” he said, “This is the first time I have ever seen this picture.”
The next day was the on-stage interview with Nigel. Things got off to a tricky start. We ran a few clips of Michael’s other films, including the hunting scene in The Deer Hunter. Suddenly, some firecrackers were thrown in the auditorium and there was a sort of half-hearted demo from animals rights activists. Michael was being pursued by them for allegedly mistreating horses when filming Heaven’s Gate. This rather unnerved the already edgy Michael but after a few minutes things settled down, we had the demonstrators quietly removed, and for two hours Michael chatted with Nigel and the audience about the film and all the controversy of its making and unmaking. It seemed that everything Michael did was in some way controversial; ordinary was a stranger to him.
I saw quite a bit of Cimino in the following years. I saw him in New York at a production office where he introduced me to Oliver Stone and gave me tickets to see Dustin Hoffman in Death of a Salesman. We also had the most lavish dinner somewhere in Chinatown. I went over to LA to see the first cut of Year of the Dragon and had dinner at the DDL Foodshow with Michael, Dino de Laurentiis and Mike Medavoy. I remember having breakfast with Michael at the Bel Age Hotel when he tried unsuccessfully to conceal the fact that he had arrived in a golden Rolls-Royce convertible. He wore the same cowboy boots. I saw him several times in LA and in Paris for lunch at the Lancaster Hotel. In London it was another lunch at the St James’s Club when he brought Mickey Rourke along. I wanted to go out to Sicily to watch him work on The Sicilian but he wouldn’t agree to that - “When I’m on the set, I’m not the person you think you know,” he said.
He faded away after that and in recent years I’ve been quite shocked to see photos of him at various film festivals and, indeed, fresh interview footage of him for the DVD of The Deer Hunter. The car crash that was his career is one of the great tragedies of modern Hollywood. That guy had incredible talent. Incredible charm, too. But judging from those recent pictures, he's probably not the man I think I knew. Maybe never was.
(Sorry this is a bit long - I'm bored stupid by blanket Olympic build-up stuff on radio and TV.)
 

AlexCosmo

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Vincent_P said:
I hope they also include the short cut in HD, as it's a vastly different viewing experience and has several minutes of interesting footage missing from the otherwise far superior long version.
Vincent
I agree, I've never seen it but it seems like an important piece of the story that's gone missing.
 

Paul Rossen

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AlexCosmo said:
I agree, I've never seen it but it seems like an important piece of the story that's gone missing.
While I always thought that the long version was a mess I've always held the belief that there 'might' be a good film somewhere in all that footage. The cut version came and went as did the long version. But it would be interesting to see as many of the sequences cut down-especially the Harvard beginning and the shootout at the end. However, I would be very surprised if Criterion included the short version.
 

hguerth

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To Adrian Turner's post - Quote "Sorry this is a bit long". No - not at all ! Thank you very much for this breathtaking short story!
And it perfectly points to the point: Movies originally were made for the movie theatre, and not for our home settees (I'm sorry I have to say such horrible things in a home forum).
And maybe it helps to explain the extremely diverging reactions to such a marvellous work of art.
 

Vincent_P

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Brilliant post, Adrian! The Nigel Andrews Q&A (with the animal rights group interruption) is indeed the one that's transcribed in the book I have. Would you happen to know if a recording of it exists?
Vincent
 

Vincent_P

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Paul Rossen said:
While I always thought that the long version was a mess I've always held the belief that there 'might' be a good film somewhere in all that footage. The cut version came and went as did the long version. But it would be interesting to see as many of the sequences cut down-especially the Harvard beginning and the shootout at the end. However, I would be very surprised if Criterion included the short version.
Why would you be surprised? They did it with THE LEOPARD.
The interesting thing about the short version is not just that it's cut, but completely restructured, too. For example, a whole bunch of Chris Walken material is moved up to the beginning of the film (after the Harvard sequence). The Harvard sequence isn't as heavily cut as you might think- the main deletion is John Hurt's entire speech. It cuts from him being introduced by Joseph Cotton and walking up to the stage directly to the waltz (which begs the question, why did they leave the introduction of his speech in? Why not just go right from the end of Cotton's speech to the dance?).
The short version is really a mess, but a fascinating mess. Some of the added material would fit into the long cut very nicely. In the Q&A that Adrian discusses in his fantastic post, Cimino says that it was always his intention to make some changes to the film between it's "roadshow" engagement and the planned general release a couple months later. He said his plan was to do what Kubrick did with 2001- watch the film with some audiences and use those initial bookings as essentially an extended "preview", after which he'd fine tune the film for general release. However, the disastrous reviews out of New York prevented this and he wasn't able to approach the re-edit from the "fine tuning" standpoint he intended to. It instead became a panicked effort to "save" the film by cutting it down as much as possible.
Vincent
 

rsmithjr

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The difficulty with cutting a movie is that the film can have its own innate rhythms based on production and initial editing, and it takes a master editor to cut things out for time without damaging the film.
In the case of HG, it is hard to imagine the film without John Hurt's valedictory in terms of the flow of the story itself. The smug erudition he displays needs to be impressed on the viewer in order to appreciate the later dissipation of the character.
Almost everything in this film runs longer than it should but that is the way it was constructed. And I am a fan of long shots and slow cutting.
 

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