WalstoneCounty.com

I've always believed that film critics do serve a purpose. No one has made that more clear than Pulitzer Prize-winner Roger Ebert. Although he has his share of embarrassing moments (this is the man, after all, who trashed Blue Velvet because it portrayed violence against women and who praised the 2004 Crash to the point where his descriptions of the film proved its inadequacies), he pointed out that a critic can never keep you from going to a bad movie, but they can sometimes be beneficial to the film industry by recommending films you'd normally never see. In a year like 2005 where there was a brief and powerful resurgence of quality Hollywood pictures, adaptations, genre pics and more, it was important to have people like Ebert champion Good Night and Good Luck along with the more mainstream products such as The Chronicles of Narnia: the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and King Kong.

Still, I often get laughed at when I use the critics to ward off bad movie-going experiences. My family and friends have always maintained critics are usually wrong. "Usually when they hate 'em, I always love 'em." This, from my Mother who finds regular "quality" programming with Lifetime films starring Meredith Baxter-Birney. But, often I agree with these critics, stand up for them. I feel like the lone dog being kicked around by viewers who seem to have a better time at the movies than I do. Of course, I've devoted my life to the entertainment industry as a writer of theatre and screen-plays and when I watch a film, I am not only looking a) to be entertained, but also b) to be challenged, and c) for them to teach me something about what to or (more exciting) what not to do when making movies. Partially, for this reason, I've always been a champion of underdog films—movies that critics and audiences love to pounce on, for whatever reason. Sometimes, I am a champion of a "craptastic" film—a movie that's so bad it's okay because it ends up being amusing anyway. Sometimes, it is a movie that critics are prone to hate, but audience members enjoy (Spider-man 3 is a good example of this). But, more often than not, I end up championing films that have tremendous quality, but have gone one or two steps in the wrong direction and find themselves in critical and audience oblivion. These films are the subject of this essay. And, if they are indeed pictures of quality, can millions of people be wrong when they chastise them?

Well, yes, in effect, they can. Arguably, the films that inspire the most controversy in terms of quality are pictures made by professional, respected directors who seem to have lost their minds, went over budget, or indulged their own right brain to a point where their movies are looked at as masturbatory exercises. There are some justifiable examples in this category. Steven Spielberg's 1941, Francis Ford Coppola's One From the Heart, Martin Scorcese's The King of Comedy, Robert Altman's Popeye, Roman Polanski's Pirates, Woody Allen's Stardust Memories, Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, Brian DePalma's Bonfire of the Vanities, David Lynch's Dune, Spike Lee's Girl 6. None of the great directors have been without their colossal failures and there are truly too many to mention. Now, all of the films listed above have their shining moments, but their problems are rarely disputed—even by the filmmaker.

But, there was one film that changed it all—it set the standard for good directors gone wild—and it also irrevocably damaged Hollywood's artistic heyday of the 1970's, ushering out the director-driven age and into the blockbuster era where films were judged solely on financial merit. That film was, of course, Heaven's Gate. Though there are no records of the history of this film better than Steven Bach's seminal book Final Cut, it is worth summarizing here to go further with the essay.

Michael Cimino began his career in Hollywood directing commercials and went on to become a successful screenwriter, co-writing the early science fiction epic Silent Running and the Clint Eastwood vehicle Magnum Force. In fact, he made his directorial debut for Eastwood, directing Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, a sleeper hit that led Cimino to pursue projects of his own inception. What would be his first project of this type was a huge gamble—a Vietnam picture (this was before Apocalypse Now, Platoon, or Full Metal Jacket had made it a worthy film subject) that ended up going extremely over-budget. Cimino even had to steal the negative to make sure his cut would be distributed rather than a truncated version finished up by the studio. Still, with all of these problems, The Deer Hunter became a legendary film-often making it very high on lists of great movies. Cimino seemed to be picking up where Terrence Malick left off, composing film symphonies with little dialogue and sequences of hypnotic and grandiose power. It also featured hallmark performances by Robert DeNiro, Christopher Walken, and Meryl Streep. It won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director and Cimino was the talk of Tinseltown.

The company that was trying to lure Cimino to their studio was United Artists, who were in charge of the James Bond franchise, Woody Allen's first serious movies, and a host of other worthy projects. They bought Cimino along with his long-gestating project entitled The Johnson County War—based upon a minor historical skirmish in the early years of the Wyoming territory. United Artists had, in fact, turned it down years before, but were now expecting Cimino to bring the same magic touch he had with The Deer Hunter to this revisionist Western—even though the Western was almost a dead genre.

Cimino was responsible for Walken's early triumph and brought him back as a headliner on his new movie—along with Kris Kristofferson, a successful Country/Western singer-songwriter who was also a budding movie star. But, his choice for a female lead was the first of many that sent shock waves within United Artists that they were not able to put a stop to. And why should they? Cimino had just won the Oscar. He was probably making out to be the next David Lean, for all they knew. Why should they deny him what he required? His choice of French actress Isabelle Huppert and the rest of his team—including composer David Mansfield and actors Jeff Bridges, Sam Waterston, John Hurt, Joseph Cotten, Brad Dourif, and Richard Masur—headed out West. Soon, news of the director's budgeting problems was reaching Hollywood. The UA Execs learned that by the sixth day of shooting, Cimino was twelve days behind schedule. And his budget began blooming from 20 million dollars and eventually up to nearly 45 million dollars (and this in 1979)!

After barring UA Execs from the editing rooms, Cimino turned in his completed picture (he said he probably could shave off fifteen minutes here or there) and they sat down for a film that ran five hours and forty-five minutes. Livid, and knowing that there was no way Cimino's somber epic could turn a profit, they made him cut it to three and a half hours. And it opened, as such, in 1980. Vincent Canby, in the New York Times, likened it to a four hour tour of one's own living room and deemed it "an unqualified disaster." This became like a news story rather than a review and soon Heaven's Gate had become synonymous with studios allowing directors to run rampant—although this was hardly the case. Soon after, the studios turned their backs on the filmmakers of the '70's. Coppola had nearly bankrupted United Artists a few years earlier with Apocalypse Now, Altman directed nearly two pictures a year that no one saw, Malick was gone, George Roy Hill and Peter Bogdanovich had lost their touch, it seemed. The era was over.

The studios basically turned to what we have now. Action films—epic is the word of the day now—the occasional romance or slapstick comedy. Directed by nameless, non risk-takers. (Note: Now, let's not be silly. We still have Peter Jackson, but the idea of this era of Hollywood being synonymous with Brett Ratner, Michael Bay, and Bryan Singer is chilling to the core.) The other great directors found their way through independent cinema. And, essentially, the blockbuster made it impossible for a small movie to see a release that used to guarantee it a spot in a theatre near you.

Now, one could blame the execs, one could blame Cimino. They all deserve some blame. But, then, you take a look at the finished product. 1980—and its subsequent 1981 re-cut of the film at an hour and a half— was not the end of Heaven's Gate. In the early nineties—with the commercially successful advent of cable television, the network Z released Cimino's three and three-quarter hour "director's cut." This essentially invented that term. People went wild. How did they miss this? Here was a truly ingenious film buried beneath press accounts of budgeting faux-pas. In France, Heaven's Gate was pronounced a lost masterpiece. Soon, Heaven's Gate's home releases and eventual re-release in theatres in 2005 led it to attain a certain higher place in cinema history. Though no one would equate it with The Deer Hunter, it is more connected to that film than any film Cimino released subsequently.

Yes, some studios allowed Cimino to make a film after Heaven's Gate, but it would cost him the greatest price an artist can relinquish—his own talent. His most successful film following The Deer Hunter is probably his high-powered adaptation of Roger Daley's novel Year of the Dragon (co-written by Oliver Stone—arguably the only new filmmaking talent to emerge from Hollywood in the 1980's). But, more often than not, Cimino would work as a hired-hand on films that no one had any faith in. He directed Mario Puzo's The Sicilian, the second film adaptation of Desperate Hours, and the New Age road movie The Sunchaser, which was put on a release straight to video. Cimino's name was still damaged, though, as a name synonymous with over-budgeting (he was fired from Footloose because of his production demands) and cuts that were deemed too long by the studio (Leonard Maltin gave the theatrical release of The Sicilian *1/2 stars whereas Cimino's original cut added a second star).

After having read Final Cut, I decided to pop in Heaven's Gate. I remember the first hour of the film as one of the most challenging I've ever had as a viewer. "What was I supposed to think of this? Why are we in the tenth minute of this sequence? Why am I talking so loud?" As I watched Joseph Cotten's "Reverend Doctor" deliver a speech in the style of nineteenth century oration, I thought to myself I was either watching one of the best movies I'd ever seen or one of the worst. By the end of the tragic and beautiful epilogue of the film, I had switched quite quickly to the former. I also could not believe the film did not do better than it did.

When we deem a film as "bad," is it our fault? Are we simply expressing outwardly our own faults as viewers? Are we really allowing the director to take us on a journey? Are we not trusting him/her just because it's not as (on the surface) exciting as Star Wars? These were my questions behind Heaven's Gate. In 2005, to coincide with the re-release of the film, documentary filmmaker Michael Epstein toured his adaptation of Final Cut around to the film festivals. It was, finally, our chance to see Kristofferson, Dourif, Bridges, the Execs at U. A.—all the important people behind the movie (except Cimino)—talk about their experience on the film. Epstein's film turned out to be a little more balanced, in some ways, than Bach's book. While Bach begs the question (as he did on camera) that if Heaven's Gate was really that good, wouldn't people have gone to see it(?), Epstein posits Heaven's Gate as itself a victim of its own creators—a masterful film born out of a media event that it could not escape.

But, Bach's question is an interesting one. If Heaven's Gate was the masterpiece some think it is, how did so many critics not see the glimmers of that master work? Going back to Ebert, this is a critic who normally does not jump on media bandwagons. After all, during the critical fury over Martin Brest's Gigli, Ebert stepped up as someone who (although he agreed the film didn't work entirely) thought it was an interesting comedy whose characters were an attempt to do something unique within a convoluted story. Still, even Ebert passed on Heaven's Gate. So, how can millions of people be wrong?

Actually, in the case of Heaven's Gate, it is quite possible that millions of people did not see it. At least in its original release. It had openings in New York and Hollywood and then, in a crushing blow to his own artistic temperament, Cimino pulled the film to work on a (largely voice-over narrated) two hour version. This sort of editing (four editors are listed in the credits) for a film that is dependent upon its internal rhythms can be crushing to a director's vision. One could argue that it doesn't make any sense for the prologue of the film to last a half an hour, but I guarantee you if you remove one frame, the director has lost his hold over you. Does this mean Cimino should've had the license to spend that much time? Couldn't he have conceived of a prologue at half that length? Certainly, and perhaps that's what he should've done. But, for the film as it stands (and, thankfully, the shorter cut was never released for home viewing), it is as Cimino required.

Film is an odd and unique art form. Its dual origins are in performance and photography. Performance, historically, is an art that requires collaboration. Photography, like novel-writing or painting—is a largely solitary art form. One person has control over your experience. The convergence of these two art forms combine together create the art of film—where there are several directors who rely on collaboration and some who really don't give a shit as to what you think. There are great contributors who work on either side of this line. There are very few people as gifted as Martin Scorcese, but as a director, his heart is in the collaborative experience of making a film—even if the final cut is his. How many directors do you know, who, in their second renaissance, would spend their time being hired by an actor to direct star vehicles for their filmographies? And yet, that's what The Aviator is. Scorcese was hired to make it. Sure, it would be hard now seeing it directed by anyone else, but it began as a languishing star vehicle.

Then, there's the other side. It is not to say that these filmmakers do not count on or appreciate their collaborators, but they know what they want. On their sets, it is everyone else's job to assist in making that vision come to life. There is no better example than Stanley Kubrick. Time and time again, we listen to stories of his so-called abuse to actors such as Malcolm McDowell and Shelley Duvall and yet, watching his films you realize (as even Scorcese has attested) one Kubrick movie is like ten of someone else's. 2001: A Space Odyssey is unlike any other film, of course. It is a visual tone poem. There is an artist whose canvas stretches back as far as our prehistoric cousins to our technological future. It's amazing and beautiful. And yet, there's not one actor of any stature involved at all. If there were, it would, in fact, be detrimental to Kubrick's vision.

When you are alone in liking a film, it can be a devastating experience. At first, it's great because you feel like you've found this "buried treasure." But, when there are other people around and you are the sole champion of what is commonly regarded as a fatal mistake, it can be embarrassing. This is not so true of Heaven's Gate as the film is nearly thirty years old now—even though it's actions still hover over the movie business in a profound way. But, this can be true of a recent release. And Hollywood has never forgotten how to make a failure. What's rare, of course, is a truly interesting failure.

The most recent example, for me, of a film that strove for so much and yet became another media stomping ground was Oliver Stone's Alexander. Stone, as noted earlier, started his career writing screenplays, but then with the dual 1986 releases of Salvador and Platoon, became perhaps the best product of the studio system after Steven Spielberg. But, this was Spielberg with bile. Stone cut his teeth co-writing Year of the Dragon with Cimino and writing Scarface for Brian DePalma, but it was his unique combination of a sense of high tragedy, action adrenaline, and political backdrops that churned out a star-studded, award-winning list of films, including Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, and Natural Born Killers. As controversy was central to all of his hits, it would also be at the center of his failures and he was not a stranger to them. Everyone has to have failures, of course, and perhaps Stone understood the failures of films like his milquetoast adaptation of Eric Bogosian's play Talk Radio, his wildly uneven The Doors (which, nevertheless, garnered praise for its insanely talented lead Val Kilmer), or the unique, but critically maligned pulp noir U-Turn. But, if he created a film that he knew was among his best work, he would fail to understand why everyone turned against him.

Upon completing the nearly four hour minor opus Nixon, a friend of mine turned to me and said, "You know, I've sat through four hours of that and you know what I've figured out? Anthony Hopkins doesn't look a damn bit like Richard Nixon." Although the film achieves many things, this comment pretty much sums up the two primary reasons audiences failed to give Nixon the same praise as JFK—its unruly length and the unconvincing portrayal at the heart of it. Stone also railed against critics of Any Given Sunday. If his intention had been to portray football players as real, hard-nosed heroes rather than the Disney-fied athletes Hollywood regularly produced, why did nobody like it? But, it was the failure of his most-cherished project that elicited a great sadness for the filmmaker, who wanted nothing more than to bring one of the world's most interesting political leaders to life.

For twenty-five years, Stone had wanted to turn Alexander the Great's story into a film. This had been mentioned to Kilmer as a possible star vehicle for him, but it would take years and some international funding to make the film a reality. By that time, Kilmer was old enough to play the role of Alexander's father and one of Hollywood's favorite bad-boys had taken the lead as to what was surely going to be an epic picture.

Drawing from the best acting talent in Hollywood, Stone assembled Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie, Christopher Plummer, Jared Leto, and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers along with Kilmer and Colin Farrell to portray these ancient Greeks and their lust for an empire. A puzzlingly structured screenplay (with contributions by Stone, playwright Christopher Kyle, and Laeta Kalogridis) set out what was sure to be a lengthy screen epic. Using (by far) Stone's most complicated scenery constructions and action sequences, Alexander was turning out to be a movie that could only be made after Peter Jackson had stunned the world with the wars from The Lord of the Rings. Using computer technology to fill in the holes and a unique editing style that allowed for a film to be as multi-layered as the character he portrayed, Alexander was a real break-through for Stone. But, to the rest of the world, it was another epic in a long line of films made the same way, but by people of more simple narratives. Alexander would fall in second, third, or maybe even fourth to releases such as Troy, Kingdom of Heaven, etc. In fact, when the posters and artwork appeared for Alexander's release, it made it look like it was Troy 2: The Reckoning.

But, this was quite far from Troy. Stone was attempting something quite different—an action film with a solid metaphoric base and an almost academic intelligence. And no one—in America—was interested. Once again, Europe became a champion for the film. Greece had never had that much advance interest. Internationally, Alexander was the most financially successful film from America in 2004. At home, it's three and a half-hour length and resistance to typical screen story-telling gave it a spot that led it quickly out of theatres.

I remember wanting to see Alexander. I knew seeing it in the theatres would be better than home viewing. By the time I was able, it was gone. When it would resurface on DVD, there was a heavy campaign to make sure it was better understood. In a stunning (and to some, hilarious) move, Stone created a "Director's Cut" which was shorter than the original film. Though he had enough for a four-hour feature, he showed restraint and re-edited (& re-scored) some scenes entirely to clarify the dramatic action of the story. Thankfully, both versions of the film were released on DVD in 2005.

One of the major problems with Alexander's American release was, of course, Alexander's bisexuality. When viewed without first raising a stink, one realizes that Stone spends all of fifteen minutes in the original cut dealing with this (not even) sub-plot. The most shared by Farrell and Leto is a wimpy scene with a hug and a narrative derivation by Hopkins. Stone was, at first, publicly furious that this element of the film was causing Americans to proclaim the film Alexander the Gay. But, for his Director's Cut, even less time was spent developing the characters of Alexander and his effeminate sidekick. And, in an embarrassing faux-pas pointed out by Gay activist groups, the sex scene with Dawson was extended with more nude shots. Still, the streamlined Alexander (which you were able to view on one disc instead of two) was another aspect of a film that had a lot to say. Too much? Perhaps. But, this was not the end of Alexander.

In 2007, Stone released what one could call a Cecil B. DeMille version of his film. Since its release, he had had financial success with World Trade Center and was able to re-edit Alexander once again for DVD release only. Alexander Revisited is more than another Director's Cut, it is the version Stone maybe should have released. Still, it never would've worked in American theatre houses. Too long, too smart. Using a DeMille-like introduction and an "intermission," it was his final say on his Alexander, utilizing most of his shot footage and dividing up Alexander's story into a plausible three-act narrative without ever compromising the original vision (which some people claimed he had with his "Director's Cut").

Whether Alexander will be picked up by a future generation is, of course, impossible to tell. I have to admit, when I first saw the trailer with Colin Farrell on an elephant, I laughed. I wondered whether it would work. I think it does. I hope people remember it—it might be hard to with the media frenzy. Some day soon, Stone's penchant for controversy will find him with a hit again. Although getting stuffy in his old age, he's still a smart guy and knows how to make a movie.

After Heaven's Gate and Alexander, we find ourselves nowhere near the end of an unanswerable question. Can millions of people be this wrong collectively? It's been done before. Sometimes, it is hard to remember the individual has a voice when the culture at large is so damned loud (We know there were Germans who wanted nothing to do with Hitler). And we know that even the worst films (remembering these "good" and "bad" qualifiers are all objective) have their champions. I have friends who simply like watching movies and love everything that is released. They will always have more fun as viewers than I will.

Still, I tend to try and view films in their contexts culturally, annually—they dictate where films have been and where they're going, whether you like it or not. All art comes out of our impulse to improve what's been done before. Sometimes, filmmakers make mistakes. Sometimes, their films are taken away from them, re-edited, marketed improperly, or maybe there's just some jerk-off who works for the New York Times who doesn't know shit from Shinola. We have a world, fortunately, where films can be re-discovered—on television, with multiple DVD releases. We have a chance to be better, smarter film viewers even if the critics aren't really helping. We have the opportunity. Whether we take it is a whole different story.

A complete list of Lifetime Movies starring Meredith Baxter (nee Baxter-Birney) can be obtained at www.IMDb.com.