Pulled From The Heavens

It seems peculiar today but throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s film criticism actually carried weight and film critics remarkably wielded power. Film geek critics were household names and filmmakers either dreaded their reviews or relied on them to help motivate audiences toward their films and push their films in a positive financial direction. A great review by a popular critic could push a film that was hanging on the fence of being a hit or a miss into respectability, in turn sending enough new audience members that movie’s way to make a major difference in its total box office tally. One bad review by a respected critic couldn’t exactly make a big studio movie bomb but it could give it enough of a ding to a film where it effected its overall standing in uppity film fan society. It also could be the difference between the life and death of a small independent film. If all major critics or most of them were to saddle one film with bad reviews because of bandwagon jumping in film criticism and copycat groups, it would mean certain demise to that movie’s high hopes in the theaters. That very thing happened in 1981 with the film criticism community’s excoriating of Director Michael Cimino’s 1981 Western “Heaven’s Gate” The reviews weren’t just bad they were relentlessly critical and continuous to a point to where they were unscrupulous. They became personal and cruel. The critics weren’t just displeased they were angry, they were vicious, malicious and they were out for a blood-soaked revenge. However, the result in an ironic twist of fate like a reminiscence of ripples in a pond coming back at you after you throw a rock into the water, it was a total backfire. Critics so entitled to get their payback screwed themselves over for the next ten years by having to sit through studio designed rot that they hated and helped create. The utter destruction of Michael Cimino and Heaven’s Gate may have made them feel good venting their frustrations and castigating someone they perceived as self-indulgent, pretentious, overpaid and given too much authority but it also had major consequences and none of them good were good for critics. It led filmgoers and film critics to the decade’s long crap fest that they would have to endure. Film critics were so utterly disturbed with their hatred toward Heaven’s Gate that they even went back and changed the positive reviews they had given Michael Cimino’s previous film The Deer Hunter and changed them into negative ones. That’s the level of insanity, depravity and abhorrence that was rage boiling inside of them. That’s probably where they crossed the line from constructive criticism to all out self-appointed avenging angel bluster. It certainly didn’t come from a place of intelligence; it was reckless narcissism. They went full throttle into it with gusto. They weren’t just beating down Cimino they were clocking Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Terrence Mallick, Milos Foreman, Hal Ashby, John Cassavetes, all the auteur directors who had pissed them off the previous decade with their decadence. These directors had been too free in their minds, and they were going to make sure the party was over. It was maddened and heedless and for all their vengeance pursuing troubles, their chosen profession, of sitting in a dark theater and watching movies and getting paid for it received commerce disguised as art, instead of the art that had the ability to create commerce that they claimed that they wanted. With the great assistance from the critic’s businessmen were able to take much more control and tried to shortcut the art of film. They tried to replace a singular creative voice with savvy, commercial industry voices. After they beat Cimino senseless Critics themselves were punished by their own hand with bad movies to watch. It hurt and they yelped loudly like hit dogs, about bad writing, directors who had no vision, thrown together empty films that looked bad, sequels, 3-D movies, and 3-D Sequels. They were forced to sit through dreck and grumbled about cookie cutter films that were made by people who just didn’t seem to care at all. Hollywood began the era of the formula picture and test screenings and critics nagged and whined and shouted and protested all through the 1980’s. Totally oblivious that it was all over something that they were very much complicit it. Film critics aided by a news media who always need to get their shots in knocked themselves in the head with the hammer they used to pound away and mutilate one film. A movie ticket purchase is very much analogous to a vote at the ballot box. It lets studios and the companies that run them know what kind of film people are willing to buy a ticket to see. They wanted to know what people would put up with not necessarily what they like. If enough people buy a ticket to a particular film, it’s just like holding a sign up to the studio that says, “Give us another one” “Four More Years” You’re going to get movies that are similar, complete rip-offs, and sequels, and remakes. The movie almost solely credited for Hollywood Producers and CEO’s putting the clamps down on directors that they felt were so out of control that they replaced them with ideas that were put together by producers themselves was “Heaven’s Gate.” Producers hired writers to bandage a wound that they saw as losing the auteur director. They would seek out all the help they could in the form of using focus groups and audience screenings where audience members watching a movie were given a scorecard in which they could basically vote on a movie’s qualities or lack thereof. Audience members essential looking to spoon-feed themselves their cinematic meal instead of having the chef make them his own recipe. Instead of a director coming to the studio with an idea studio executives and producers took their ideas mostly based on audience scores and previous hits to a director who they knew they could control them and their idea. This also allowed them to fire directors much easier and replace them with a new one. Since it had been virtually impossible for producers at Fox to fire Michael Cimino from Heaven’s Gate because he was the only one who knew what the picture was. They couldn’t just throw a commercial director in his place and order them to finish this other man’s vision. It would almost be like waking someone up in the middle of the night, taking them out of their bed and putting someone else in pajamas and sliding them under their blankets and asking them to complete someone else's dream for them. That just wasn’t going to work. They were determined to never allow that to happen again. Never let a director have the upper hand. Critics took all the frustrations they had in the world at the world out on this one film and director. They attached Heaven’s Gate to things that had nothing to even do with it. Critic Gene Shalit asking Cimino in an interview “how many hungry children he thought the movie’s budget could have fed” If they had just been able to sit through one film that they didn’t like they could have gotten a decade’s worth of film that they did. But the idea of all the money and the ego kept gnawing at them and they just couldn’t restrain themselves and the need to assert their own egos onto the issue. It was a coordinated dose of payback that was ridiculously trite, totally manufactured and excessive. Today conversely the film critic wields very little power. They once had to ability to make or break a movie over their knee but breaking Heaven’s Gate over their knee too many times not only caused the downfall of the quality of films Hollywood would produce it also took that ability away and caused the demise of the film critic as we know it. It broke their knees. Once household names very few people have any idea who they even are anymore. Audiences have taken over rating films for the rest of the public who may even be interested in seeing them. We still have the box office score like the super bowl, but Citizen Criticism has replaced the stuffed shirt, pompous and prickly film critic who wrote mini novel long essay for a big city newspaper and had their own movie review show on the side. They released a book a year at least of their updated movie reviews and even made cameos in some movies and television. You could pull any movie critic today out and put them in from of the camera and most people would have no clue who the hell they even are either by name or face. Recognition for the film critic died with end results of Heaven’s Gate. Watching critics so joyfully blast holes through Cimino’s film and being completely oblivious to the fact that they were killing their own profession was quite a sight to witness. They bit off their nose to spite their face. All they had to do was say they didn’t like it but they went on and on about the horrors of movie business and wasting money and bloviated about bloviated budgets they tied Heaven’s Gate to all of the country’s problems. They hammered on and on about overpaid actors and directors. Well now in return we have even more overpaid movie executives who can’t make a good movie. For twenty years they had to sit through watching crap just to see their occupation dry up and become a relic of the past. Looking back on it today it seems even more silly and useless how extremely Critics and news outlets took taking this one movie to the cleaners. Taking turns body slamming it and punching it in the face. Soon they had so many bad movies they couldn’t even possibly keep up with condemning all of them to that degree. There are literally thousands of movies that followed it that are worse than Heaven’s Gate. Movies that deserved an even bigger ass kicking yet they went by and continue to pass by virtually unscathed because all the venom was used up and remains as poisoning that one film. They body slammed Heaven’s Gate and in return got a mealy pop culture fantasies like Young Guns, bloated epics like Wyatt Earp, and Horizon: An American Saga. Instead of Michael Cimino making one expensive western that bombed you have Kevin Costner doing it multiple times, is that really better? While the excoriating of Heaven’s Gate, which gets most of the credit or blame, other factors and films played a major role in Hollywood ripping back control from the director as well. 1979 saw the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War Epic Apocalypse Now. The making of the film was rife with trials and tribulations. Going way over schedule and way over budget. The media harped away as production days on location in the Philippines broke records. The anger outlet always went back to the film’s director. The target was clear, it was Coppola and he was out of control. It was ammunition for the media and critics to load up on and aid them in their eventual attacks on Cimino. It’s all projected by critics and the media as evil, and everything done on purpose just to be wasteful and mean. Despite Critics and the media putting on a show that the making of a movie that is spinning out of control needed a Prema donna director to cause when they know full well that all they need to do is look back at 1963’s Cleopatra. There was no singular auteur young director to solely blame so critics simply blanked that part out. Cleopatra was one of the major reasons Studios began to let directors take over creatively to begin with. Too many hands involved, too many differencing opinions and the lack of one singular creative vision to focus the production wrecked Cleopatra. Like everyone and everything Hollywood is destined to repeat history. The bottom line of Hollywood is that it’s not your money and they’re responsible for how it’s spent, and they have mountains of it and the money simply can’t be used for other things just because you may want that. With a final budget of $44 Million Heaven’s Gate went in to gross only $3,484,331. Critics helping to push out the creative voice in favor of businessmen changed the entire directory of where film and the film business was going knocking completely off course. Film critics egos are so big and they’re filled with such reckless narcissism I think if you asked those same critics today whether trashing Heaven’s Gate was worth it or not they’d still give it all two thumbs up.