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

[Moe Dickstein]

(Sorry this is a bit long - I'm bored stupid by blanket Olympic build-up stuff on radio and TV.)

Not at all! Utterly fascinating, and sounds like what I'd expect from the man. Everything I've read seems to indicate two sides to the man, one talented and charming and the other terribly self destructive.

 

[Paul Rossen]

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

I'm certainly no expert when it comes to all of this but I do recall prior to the opening of the film(don't remember if the premiere was 'rushed') Cimino was quoted as fighting with the suits at UA who wanted a shorter film. I recall rushing over to the Cinema 1 perhaps on its second day of release knowing full well it couldn't play long in 70mm after the scathing reviews. I guess I was correct though I do recall scatted applause at the end. There were so many 'epic' films I truly wanted to enjoy that ultimately disappointed me. Heaven's Gate was one of them.
The Leopard is imo quite a good film that tells a great story. My only complaint is that I thought the ball at the end was too long. Otherwise Visconti at his best(with a great score by Nino Rota). I like both versions.

 

[Peter Neski]

one of the easier oneshttp://www.hometheaterforum.com/content/type/61/id/164550/width/350/height/700

 

[AlexCosmo]

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).

Also, with the 3 versions of MR ARKADIN, this seems equally worthwhile to me.

 

[Paul Rossen]

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

I guess we'll find out pretty soon as Heaven's Gate is certainly on the way. I'm sure the film will look and sound as good as it could but it will be as interesting to see what supplements are included.

 

[Matt Hough]

Originally Posted by Peter Neski /t/318845/is-criterion-working-on-a-blu-ray-of-heavens-gate/60#post_3956457
one of the easier oneshttp://www.hometheaterforum.com/content/type/61/id/164550/

Yep, that definitely cinches it.

 

[Moe Dickstein]

Just watched the Final Cut doc. Fantastic stuff and would be a great loss to not have it on the BD. also, Jon Lovitz has to play Cimino in the film someone makes about this someday lol

 

[Vincent_P]

Just watched the Final Cut doc. Fantastic stuff and would be a great loss to not have it on the BD. also, Jon Lovitz has to play Cimino in the film someone makes about this someday lol

Not entirely joking here, I think Mike Myers would be better. He not only looks the part, I think he'd do a lot better at imitating Cimino's voice and vocal patterns.
Vincent

 

[rsmithjr]

Just watched the Final Cut doc. Fantastic stuff and would be a great loss to not have it on the BD. also, Jon Lovitz has to play Cimino in the film someone makes about this someday lol

I have always liked Bach, very perceptive person about film and film-making. Sorry we lost him.

 

[Moe Dickstein]

Not entirely joking here, I think Mike Myers would be better. He not only looks the part, I think he'd do a lot better at imitating Cimino's voice and vocal patterns.
Vincent

Lovitz in a wig is a dead ringer.
The voice would be off though.

 

[Peter Neski]

I don't think we will get much extras,They haven't done a really good sup in years, no point to get hopes up,While I feel Final Cut isn't bad ,its not great either,but at least I am sure
its cheap and they could afford it
I very much doubt they will have the budget to give this BR extras we all would want,like a real documentary,still file and deleted scenes (which I think they got rid of)
what we will get is a commentary ,that's one thing that doesn't cost that much

 

[Vincent_P]

You're just full of predictions, Peter. I disagree that they haven't done good extras "in years". Criterion commentary tracks are usually very good, and they do really good interviews, to boot. While the negative trims were supposedly thrown away, there's always a chance that Cimino kept a video copy of the workprint, i.e. Coppola and APOCALYPSE NOW. There wasn't much of substance cut from the film anyway, only a couple complete scenes in the script that didn't make the 219-minute cut.
Vincent

 

[Peter Neski]

well ,I don't think they can afford a new 2 hour documentary ,when have they done that?? Still files use to be why I got CAV lasers,yet Disney is the only studio that does those
on BR,Seems like when they include good Documentary's ,its because they bought the rights (Like that wonderful Doc on Spirit of the Beehive dvd

 

[Moe Dickstein]

Sorry but what more could you want in a doc than final cut? It's not like there were EPK guys running around the set.

 

[Peter Neski]

you want in a doc than final cut?
Well I would like to have that included,but I wish for something better,its one view point,

 

[Vincent_P]

I wonder if the FINAL CUT documentary will be included, though. I had read that rights issues precluded it from being screened widely- I believe it only played on Trio once, then a few one-offs at film festivals and a week or so in NYC along with HEAVEN'S GATE at the Film Forum back in 2004. Other than that, it disappeared except for the youtube upload from the Trio airing.
Vincent

 

[Moe Dickstein]

Well I would like to have that included,but I wish for something better,its one view point,

I get that - but what would make a better doc for this film than Final Cut, in your opinion? I'm genuinely curious.

 

[Richard--W]

one of the easier ones

That's definite.
I'm confident Criterion will do right by HEAVEN'S GATE. I couldn't hope for a better release. I can't wait to see the film in HD. I don't need the documentary, and if they include it I'll probably never watch it. I'd be surprised if Criterion didn't include both versions of the film.
Wouldn't it be nice if David Mansfield's soundtrack CD were re-issuedt? Out of print and pricey. I see it going for over a hundred dollars used. It contributes so much, and it's a moving listen even apart from the film. Mansfield is pictured in the cartoon above.

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.)

Wonderful post.
The one-sheets reflect the dignity of the film:

 

[Brianruns10]

I'm imaging a "Leopard" type treatment of this film. I don't think any analysis of the film can be complete without inclusion of the shortened general release version, and surely CC will include it as a supplement.
I'd love to see "Final Cut" included, as it's the definitive behind the scenes, making of, and a fairly balanced take on the film, defending it's virtues admirably.
Most of all, I dream of a Cimino commentary. It seems he's coming out of his shell somewhat, given he's slated to appear at the screening of the restoration, so maybe this'll happen...

 

[Vincent_P]

Cimino did a terrific commentary for the overseas release of THE DEER HUNTER.
Interesting to see that Cimino shares the music credit with David Mansfield in that early poster that Richard W. posted. I wonder what that was all about?
Vincent