Roman Polanski was born August 18, 1933 in Paris. The sordid details of his flight from the United States in 1978 have often overshadowed discussion of the director’s work, which at the age of 77, includes one of the best films of 2010. Is he a world class filmmaker? In the month of August, I take a look at ten directed by Roman Polanski.

Repulsion (1965)
Directed by Roman Polanski
Written by Roman Polanski & Gérard Brach and David Stone
Produced by Gene Gutowski
105 minutes

In the waking moments between Alfred Hitchcock and Michelangelo Antonioni, between Psycho and Blowup, there’s Repulsion, a stark and stunning British film that’s almost certainly a thriller, though it seems to be missing a murderer. Taking place in the psyche, the picture drifts away from art and provides intense audience appreciation by piling up a couple of bodies, as well as jolts of terror so virulent you might fly out of your seat. The English language debut of Roman Polanski and star Catherine Deneuve was initiated when producer Gene Gutowski introduced the filmmaker to Compton Group, a London based exploitation picture maker. Polanski & Gérard Brach whipped up a draft for a female psychodrama in 17 days, which Michael Klinger and Tony Tenser agreed to finance for £40,000. Polanski would ultimately bring Repulsion in for £95,000.

Despite the low budget, Polanski insisted on hiring Gilbert Taylor, who’d shot Dr. Strangelove and A Hard Day’s Night. The British director of photography amazed Polanski with his ability to calculate the amount of light needed for a given shot without using a light meter. It’s the self-assured precision of the film that holds our attention while nothing much happens for 45 minutes. Polanski dramatizes the tedium of a woman’s everyday routine and the heightened sense of her dreams so fluidly that we’re unsure what’s real and what isn’t. Praised as an accurate depiction of schizophrenia, the film is far from a clinical study and succeeds by being wet and wild with imagination. Polanski had help on his sophomore feature, with an eye catching credit sequence designed by Maurice Binder and a tumultuous jazz score composed by Chico Hamilton.

A Belgian living in London named Carole (Catherine Deneuve) ends another day at the salon where she works as a manicurist. On her walk home, the quiet girl is waylaid by Colin (John Fraser), an overeager cad who pressures Carole for a date, seemingly oblivious of her complete aversion to him. She returns to the shabby flat in South Kensington she shares with her sister Helen (Yvonne Furneaux) and is distressed to find a straight razor belonging to Helen’s lover in the bathroom. A married man who cancels the home cooked dinner Helen was preparing when he insists the couple dine out, Michael (Ian Hendry) finds his limited charms lost on Carole and suggests to her sister that she needs to see a doctor. Later that evening, sounds of Helen’s lovemaking awaken Carole and upset her.

Helen and Michael take off to Italy for a holiday, leaving Carole with cash to pay the late rent. Occupying the flat alone, her gradual descent into schizophrenia begins when she hears bells from the convent across the street tolling at midnight. So distracted at work that she cuts a client’s finger, she’s sent home. Running out of food, Carole’s delusions intensify. From the window, she sees a strange woman watching her flat. She begins to imagine cracks forming in the walls. A construction worker Carole has noticed on the walk home shoves his way into her room and rapes her. Men start visiting the flat at a very bad time for Carole, beginning with Colin breaking down the door for a chat and later, her landlord (Patrick Wymark), who suggests a way Carole could lower her rent. Both men leave the flat feet first.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average 3,844 users: 87% for Repulsion

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

What do you say?

Roman Polanski was born August 18, 1933 in Paris. The sordid details of his flight from the United States in 1978 have often overshadowed discussion of the director’s work, which at the age of 77, includes one of the best films of 2010. Is he a world class filmmaker? In the month of August, I take a look at ten directed by Roman Polanski.

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
Directed by Roman Polanski
Screenplay by Roman Polanski, based on the novel by Ira Levin
Produced by William Castle
136 minutes

Crafted with elegance and wit so assured that its style is nearly invisible, Rosemary’s Baby has earned its spot in discussions of the scariest film ever made. Ira Levin — whose debut novel A Kiss Before Dying was published to acclaim in 1953 — found inspiration in his wife’s pregnancy for a second novel in 1967. Film rights were obtained by William Castle, the director whose in-theater gimmicks for movies like House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler involved rubber skeletons flying over the audience or electrified seats. Unable to raise financing for Rosemary’s Baby, Castle partnered with Paramount Pictures, whose production chief Robert Evans agreed to split the profits with Castle, but refused to let the shlockmeister direct. Castle accepted the role of producer as Evans convinced Roman Polanski to adapt and direct Rosemary’s Baby.

One of Polanski’s few revisions to the novel was a brilliant one: embracing psychological horror and leaving it to the viewer decide whether Rosemary was the victim of witchcraft or her own prenatal paranoia. Richly designed by Richard Sylbert, the film was shot in 14 weeks: two weeks in New York for exterior shooting around the Dakota Hotel were followed by 12 weeks of interiors on the Paramount lot in Los Angeles. Urban legends supported by Castle that the picture was cursed neglect how gripping Rosemary’s Baby ultimately is without using elaborate special effects to generate unease. The dream sequences are effective because like the film, they unlock irrational fears we keep locked in our subconscious. Skillfully adapted and wonderfully cast, the ending ranks among the most gloriously black of all time.

Looking for an apartment to rent, Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) and her struggling actor husband Guy (John Cassavetes) follow a leasing agent (Elisha Cook) up to a 7^th floor unit of the “Bramford Building” in New York. The couple ignores the stories their erudite friend “Hutch” (Maurice Evans) shares about the building’s “unpleasant reputation around the turn of the century”, including tenants whose preoccupation with witchcraft earned it the name “Black Bramford”. Rosemary and Guy hear their new neighbors — bickering through the thin partition wall — before they see them. In the basement laundry room, Rosemary meets reformed junkie Terry Gionoffrio  (Angela Dorian) who was taken in by Rosemary’s neighbors and given a new lease on life. Not long after, Terry is found on the sidewalk, dead from an apparent suicide.

Rosemary finally meets her elderly neighbors Minnie (Ruth Gordon) and Roman Castevet (Sidney Blackmer) when the couple invite her and Guy to dinner. While her husband is quickly won over by the magnetic Castevets, Rosemary is suspicious of the strange potables and desserts Minnie pushes on her. Good fortune finds Guy when another actor suddenly goes blind, landing him the leading role in a play. With his career taking off, he suggests they have a baby. The night they conceive, Rosemary feels faint and experiences a strange dream. At the urging of the Castevets, she leaves her obstetrician for one the Castevets recommend, Dr. Saperstein (Ralph Bellamy). Alarmed by her weight loss and abdominal pain, Hutch delivers Rosemary a book that leads her to suspect those closest to her belong to a coven of witches who are keenly interested in her baby.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average 26,945 users: 83% for Rosemary’s Baby

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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In the month of July, I take a look at films released in my very favorite film stock and aspect ratio: black & white in anamorphic. Unless they’re being financed with credit cards, movies are rarely shot like this anymore because they’re impossible to sell to television. Yet these dreams sneak onto Turner Classic Movies every now and again …

The Innocents (1961)
Directed by Jack Clayton
Screenplay by William Archibald and Truman Capote and John Mortimer, based on the novel The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
Produced by Jack Clayton
100 minutes

Submitted in the category of greatest horror movies you’ve never seen is The Innocents, Jack Clayton’s exquisite, heart in a vise adaptation of The Turn of the Screw. The 1898 novella by Henry James had inspired a Broadway play by William Archibald in 1950 (titled The Innocents) and an NBC television drama starring Ingrid Bergman and directed by John Frankenheimer in 1959. Public domain in the United States, 20^th Century Fox owned international rights to James’ story and launched a film version as a British production. Archibald adapted his play, but once Clayton chose the project as his sophomore directorial effort, the director hired John Mortimer to contribute to the story. Clayton then turned to Truman Capote to flesh out a script, utilizing much of James’ dialogue but tweaking some of the action.

The Innocents is a thrill because it exercises artistic restraint, obscuring its images with space and shadow and inviting the audience to give the horrors substance. Under orders to shoot with “Cinemascope” anamorphic lenses Fox had developed and publicized, director of photography Freddie Francis (who’d move into the director’s chair for 15 years until David Lynch recruited him to light The Elephant Man in the same dreamlike fashion) generated claustrophobia with a special lens filter that created an iris effect, clouding the edges of the frame. The child performances are devilish, while Deborah Kerr is just nervous enough to imply that her character may not have both her oars in the water. Like Ridley Scott at his best, Clayton lavishes the film in striking detail and mood with a script that never strays into any blind alleys.

Unwilling to raise his orphaned niece and nephew, a London based man about town (Michael Redgrave) interviews Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr) for the position. Inexperienced as a governess, Miss Giddens seems to care enough about children for an uncle seeking a speedy replacement for the previous governess Miss Jessel, who has died. Sent to his country estate in Bly — which her employer describes as “a rather large, a rather lonely place” — Miss Giddens is relieved to get along so well with her adventurous young charge Flora (Pamela Franklin). The genial housekeeper Mrs. Grose (Megs Jenkins) confirms that like their uncle, the children can be quite charming and persuasive. When Flora’s brother Miles (Martin Stephens) is suddenly expelled from boarding school, he arrives at Bly for the summer, just as his sister oddly mentioned he would the night before.

Strange things begin to occur at Bly. Under glare of the sun, Miss Giddens spots a man watching her from a tower top. Climbing the stairs, she finds Miles playing there, alone; Mrs. Grose claims that other than two maids and a gardener, no one else shares the estate with them. Playing hide and seek with the children, Miss Giddens glimpses a woman wandering the corridor and while hiding downstairs, she comes face to face with the apparition she spotted on the tower, peering at her through a window. The man she describes to Mrs. Grose is confirmed to be Peter Quint (Peter Wyngarde), an ill-tempered valet who suffered a fatal fall outside that window. Discovering that Miss Jessel drowned herself after Quint’s death, Miss Giddens becomes convinced that the spirits have taken possession of the children in a bid to be reunited from beyond the grave.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 130 users: 86% for The Innocents

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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In the month of July, I take a look at films released in my very favorite film stock and aspect ratio: black & white in anamorphic. Unless they’re being financed with credit cards, movies are rarely shot like this anymore because they’re impossible to sell to television. Yet these dreams sneak onto Turner Classic Movies every now and again …

The Haunting (1963)
Directed by Robert Wise
Screenplay by Nelson Gidding, based on the novel The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Produced by Robert Wise
112 minutes

While The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers both inspired remakes that dragged great sci-fi concepts out into the deep end of the pool, Robert Wise’s The Haunting has always occupied those waters, lurking in an elegant cool that’s unique among cinema’s ghost stories. Wise came upon a book review of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House in 1957 and was apparently so spooked reading a copy on the MGM lot that screenwriter Nelson Gidding made the director jump when he burst into Wise’s office. Put in turnaround by United Artists, Wise was able to interest MGM in the property, but was offered a budget short of the amount he needed. Discovering that MGM-British Studios was willing to financing the film to the tune of $1.1 million– roughly $6.7 million in today money — Wise shot The Haunting outside London on soundstages at Borehamwood.

The Haunting is a reminder of a time when movies couldn’t count on gore, much less the color red, to scare an audience. Tension is achieved through performance and atmosphere. Julie Harris plays one of the all-time great nutters, a woman who’s been poked with so much psychic trauma that spirits in the mansion seem friendly by comparison. Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson and Russ Tamblyn roll through the delicious dialogue while managing to approach the material seriously. Collaborating with director of photography Davis Boulton, Robert Wise shot the film — his last in black & white — with anamorphic lenses by Panavision that seem to peek around corners. Without the money to showcase ghosts, the filmmakers embrace psychological horror and leave it to the audience to decide what’s real and what’s not, giving The Haunting mystique while tightening up its suspense.

Seeking a site to pursue his life’s work in the study of psychic phenomena, Dr. John Markway (Richard Johnson) arrives on Hill House, a remote New England manor built 90 odd years previous by Hugh Crain as a home for his wife and daughter, both of whom would die there under unusual circumstances. Sharing their fate would be Crain’s second wife, as well as a caretaker, who hung herself from a spiral staircase in the library. Warning him that no one who’s visited Hill House has stayed for more than a few days, its current deed holder Mrs. Sanderson (Fay Compton) is intrigued by whether life truly exists after death. She agrees to lease the house to Dr. Markway for his experiment on the condition that her foppish nephew Luke Sanderson (Russ Tamblyn) — next in line to inherit the mansion — be included.

Dr. Markway’s research team consists of the tightly wound Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris) and the cosmopolitan Theodora (Claire Bloom). Eleanor experienced paranormal activity as a child, while Theo is a skilled psychic. Luke has no truck with the supernatural and jokes about turning the house into a nightclub. Left alone by the husband-wife caretakers (Valentine Dyall, Rosalie Crutchley) who refuse to enter the house after dark, Eleanor and Theo are terrorized by banging outside their room. Dr. Markway and Luke report hearing no such noises. The next morning, “Welcome home Eleanor” is found scrawled in chalk above the stairwell. Eleanor becomes obsessed with staying in the house and when Dr. Markway’s wife Grace (Lois Maxwell) joins the ghost hunters, her jealousy tips her over into madness.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 254 users: 86% for The Haunting (1963)

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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In the month of June, Joe Valdez “takes over” programming of the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles with a series of double features on his favorite film themes.

Here’s Part 1 of a bill featuring our friends the pod people.

Body Snatchers (1993)
Directed by Abel Ferrara
Screenplay by Stuart Gordon & Dennis Paoli and Nicholas St. John, screen story by Raymond Cistheri and Larry Cohen, based on the novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney
Produced by Robert H. Solo
87 minutes

With a mean and lean resume that included Ms. 45, the pilot episode of Crime Story, King of New York and The Bad Lieutenant, director Abel Ferrara was as bold a bet as any to bring a point of view to the third film adaptation of Jack Finney’s 1954 sci-fi novel The Body Snatchers. With Warner Bros. footing a $13 million bill, shooting wrapped in April 1992 … then nothing happened. Invited to the Cannes Film Festival in May 1993, Body Snatchers opened later that year in France and Germany before the studio snuck it into a dozen U.S. theaters in January 1994. According to Ferrara, the film fell victim to new studio management that had no stake in its success. At 87 minutes, it’s easy to imagine outtakes laying in a vault somewhere that might give the movie depth, but with few exceptions, it’s a flat, lazy effort given a shoddy release platform to match.

Body Snatchers isn’t so much a clunker as it just moseys around the block before the driver puts it back in the garage. Making a military base the landing site of the pods this time around, the script ignores what might have been a potent examination of the nuclear family and its meltdown to focus instead on faceless men in uniform who were acting like pods to begin with. Dinner table concerns in Smallville, USA seem as alien to Ferrara as alien beings and not much energy or thought is put into making either of them very compelling.  The makeup effects by the father and son tandem of Thomas & Barney Burman are excellent. There’s also pleasure in watching the shit hit the fan without a single computer generated image, but casting an actor as gifted off-the-cuff as R. Lee Ermey is indicative of how poorly managed this entire project was.

When her father Steve Malone (Terry Kinney) is dispatched to a U.S. Army base to inspect chemical and biological weapons containment for the EPA, teenager Marti (Gabrielle Anwar) is welcomed by a wild-eyed infantryman who grabs her in a gas station bathroom and warns “They get you when you sleep” before he disappears. Ill at ease with her stepmother Carol (Meg Tilly), Marti marks time on base befriending a heavy metal girl (Christine Elise). At work, Steve is approached by Captain Collins (Forest Whitaker) head of the base medical corps, who reports patients with extreme delusional fixations in his infirmary. Some of them are afraid to sleep. Marti’s 4-year-old half brother Andy (Reilly Murphy) even bolts his preschool when everyone in his class but him produces the same finger painting.

Retrieving Andy and bringing him home to his sister is chopper pilot Tim Young (Billy Wirth). Before the flyboy and the new girl in town can get better acquainted, Andy walks in on his mom decaying in bed, replaced by an imitation exhibiting zero emotion. Marti is almost replicated by an alien pod sprouting in the attic above her. Steve grabs his children and bolts on foot, despite the growing realization that almost everyone on the base has been replaced by an alien invader. This includes General Platt (R. Lee Ermey) who has trucks loaded with pods bound for army bases all over the country. The survivors attempt to stay awake long enough to do something about it.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 170 users: 62% for Body Snatchers

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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In the month of June, Joe Valdez “takes over” programming of the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles with a series of double features on his favorite film themes.

Here’s Part 2 of a bill featuring super heroines.

Tank Girl (1995)
Directed by Rachel Talalay
Written by Tedi Sarafian, based on the comic strip created by Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett
Produced by Richard B. Lewis, Pen Densham, John Watson
104 minutes

To say that everything about Tank Girl works except for the script and the casting is another way to say that the movie doesn’t work at all, but this $25 million adaptation of the cutting edge British comic strip conjures a punk rock anarchy that not many big budget movies have the balls to go for. Director Rachel Talalay optioned the film rights to the Tank Girl comic strip appearing in the U.K.’s Deadline magazine, later published in the States by Dark Horse Comics. She pitched the property to Lightstorm Entertainment, then Amblin Entertainment, but neither James Cameron nor Steven Spielberg’s bunch were hip to the material. Talalay found a fan at MGM/UA in Alan Ladd, but by the time her picture began test screening, new studio management plucked the “hate me” pedal off the Tank Girl flower. It’s since cultivated a much deserved cult following on DVD.

The optimal audience for Tank Girl may be teenagers discovering punk rock or ska for the first time; the soundtrack featuring Devo, Iggy Pop, Björk and Hole is superlative. Where the movie suffers is casting. Despite the presence of Naomi Watts, the likes of Lori Petty, Ice-T and Malcolm McDowell indicates that filling roles became an act of desperation. Petty was a last minute replacement for Emily Lloyd, an OCD sufferer who refused to shave her head for the part. Out on a limb for its time, the riot grrrl heroine of Tank Girl and her gleeful irreverence are more cogent today as a unique blend of Gwen Stefani and Bart Simpson. Rachel Talalay’s lively mash-up of live action and animation pushes the set design by Catherine Hardwicke and costumes by Arianne Phillips into the foreground — Tank Girl has 27 wardrobe changes — while incidentals like story get shoved off a cliff, just like the comic.

In the year 2033, the cataclysmic impact of a comet has transformed the Earth into a giant sandbox. Survivors are at the mercy of the WP, an evil conglomerate that controls the planet’s water. WP’s interests are threatened by an elusive band of mutant kangaroo/human hybrids known as Rippers. Out of this wasteland on the back of a yak rides Rebecca (Lori Petty), a blonde skinhead with whirlwind fighting skills and a motormouth to match. Rebecca lives in a commune with her surrogate daughter Sam (Stacy Linn Ramsower) siphoning water illegally. Raided by WP commandos, Rebecca kills eight and is taken before Keslee (Malcolm McDowell), the megalomaniac who runs WP. Offered a job, Rebecca declines colorfully and is sentenced to hard labor in the WP mines, where she meets a mousy jet mechanic named Jet (Naomi Watts).

Freed from captivity after a Ripper raid, Rebecca and Jet confiscate a tank and a fighter jet respectively. A visit to an abandoned water park leads to an encounter with Sub Girl (Ann Cusack), who allows the ladies to customize their vehicles. Tank Girl and Jet Girl are born. Discovering that Sam is alive and in the custody of WP, the dynamic duo plots a rescue mission. They seek the help of the Rippers (Ice-T, Reg E. Cathey, Scott Coffey) whose base is revealed to be an old bowling alley. Tank Girl and Jet Girl pass their initiation rites and Tank Girl even falls in love with one of the mutant kangaroos, the dim witted Booga (Jeff Kober). Meanwhile, the evil Keslee has recovered from the raid by the Rippers with a new cybernetic arm and face and is revealed to be luring Tank Girl into a trap.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 326 users: 37% for Tank Girl

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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In the month of June, Joe Valdez “takes over” programming of the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles with a series of double features on his favorite film themes.

Here’s Part 1 of a bill featuring super heroines.

Supergirl (1984)
Directed by Jeannot Szwarc
Screenplay by David Odell, based on the character appearing in comics and magazines published by DC Comics
Produced by Timothy Burrrill
124 minutes (international version)/ 114 minutes (U.S. theatrical version)

Years before anyone had heard of Comic Con or knew what a “fanboy” was, Alexander and Ilya Salkind gambled $35 million — roughly $140 million in today money — that audiences would welcome an expansion of the DC Comics universe with a girl powered spin-off of their Superman film franchise that starred Christopher Reeve. Warner Bros. changed their minds about producing Supergirl and though TriStar agreed to distribute the picture in the U.S., when critics and audiences got a look at it in November 1984 the response was so middling that the Salkinds got out of the Superman business. A trifle silly and very definitely flawed, Supergirl doesn’t fly as high as Richard Donner’s Superman or Superman II, but it stacks up as the best super heroine adaptation anyone’s made yet (Barbarella, Red Sonja, Catwoman and Elektra are the also-rans).

It isn’t required that you be an 8-year-old girl or collect My Little Pony to enjoy the charms of Supergirl, but it probably wouldn’t hurt. Those who venture further are likely to find Supergirl’s sorceress adversary and the hunk they covet to both be super silly. Mysteries such as how Supergirl changes into her costume are left unanswered, but director Jeannot Szwarc evokes some of the charm of Hans Christian Andersen; contrary to the line on Supergirl, it’s no more campy than The Little Mermaid is campy. The picture is as lavish as it is elegant, with a triumphant musical score by Jerry Goldsmith, a candy color look by Alan Hume and spectacular crane and wire work, each and every one as astounding as anything in Superman. 19-year-old Helen Slater and costume designed by Emma Porteous are a sight to stop a train.

On the satellite world of Argo City, Kara Zor-El (Helen Slater) visits Zaltar (Peter O’Toole), an architect who has “borrowed” the city’s energy source, an orb known as an omegahedron that creates the illusion of life. When the orb is lost in the vastness of innerspace, Kara hops aboard an innerstellar capsule to retrieve it. On Earth, the omegahedron falls into the hands of a would-be sorceress named Selena (Faye Dunaway), who lives in an abandoned amusement park with her daffy sidekick (Brenda Vaccaro). On Earth, the blonde haired Kara discovers physical and intellectual abilities comparable to those of her cousin Superman. To fit in, she disguises herself as a brunette student named Linda Lee and enrolls in “Midvale High School” in Illinois.

Sharing a dorm room with Lucy Lane (Mauren Teefy) — kid sister of Lois Lane — Linda develops her powers of super strength, X-ray vision and super hearing. Meanwhile, Selena uses the omegahedron to throw a love spell on a beefcake landscaper named Ethan (Hart Bochner) and when he bumbles off, sends a bulldozer through Midvale to bring him back. Supergirl saves the town, but the witch’s spell makes Ethan fall in love with Linda. She traces the omegahedron to the old amusement park, but is unable to retrieve it from Selena when Ethan shows up and she has to protect him. Her powers growing stronger, Selena banishes Supergirl to the Phantom Zone. Reunited with the exiled Zaltar in the barren prison dimension, Supergirl looks for a way back to Earth to save both her adopted planet and her home world.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 192 users: 26% for Supergirl

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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Tightrope (1984)
Directed by Richard Tuggle*
Written by Richard Tuggle
Produced by Clint Eastwood, Fritz Manes
114 minutes

Like a quarter shining in the gutter, Tightrope could stand a polish, but if you catch it on a rainy afternoon or late at night, this unabashed B-movie offers spills and thrills aplenty. Escape From Alcatraz scribe Richard Tuggle took his cue from a series of unsolved rapes in the Bay Area. His research resulted in a cop thriller sold to Clint Eastwood under the condition the screenwriter be allowed to make his directorial debut. Tuggle’s struggles on the set threatened his job security on day 1, but DGA guidelines — amended after Eastwood replaced Philip Kaufman as director of The Outlaw Josey Wales with himself — mandated that Tuggle remain on and receive a credit for directing. Whether you believe Eastwood collaborated with Tuggle from there or it was more likely the other way around, whoever directed Tightrope managed a good film that occasionally flirts with being a very good one.

Tightrope could either be considered a Cannon Films styled cop thriller like Cobra or Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects made with a real script and much better actors, or it could be considered just another Cannon Films styled cop thriller. The business of a serial killing rapist on the loose in a Red Light District is routine, repetitive and almost completely indistinguishable for a hundred other bad movies and TV shows. Where the picture shows life are its domestic scenes — where Eastwood’s chemistry with his 11-year-old daughter Alison glows — and the cop’s relationship with a rape counselor played by Geneviève Bujold. Eastwood relocated the script from San Francisco to New Orleans, and the offbeat French Canadian actress proves as alluring as the city itself. The killer is given no substance, but since the family he menaces is something we care about, at the very least, Tightrope provides a riveting ride to the finish.

In New Orleans, divorced police captain Wes Block (Clint Eastwood) cancels plans to watch the Saints game with his two young daughters (Alison Eastwood, Jennifer Beck) when a prostitute is found strangled to death in her home. When another working girl turns up drowned in a bathhouse, rape counselor Beryl Thibodeaux (Geneviève Bujold) presses Block to involve her office in the investigation. Prowling the brothels of The Big Easy to interview prostitutes, Block finds the time to indulge his dark side with a popsicle sucking tart (Rebecca Perle) and a nurse (Margaret Howell) among others moonlighting in the sex trade. Personal items Block leaves at his nocturnal activities — handcuffs, a necktie — begin to turn up alongside the bodies of the prostitutes he’s frequented.

Once she complains to City Hall about his lack of cooperation, Beryl Thibodeaux receives a visit from Block at the non-profit rape center she runs. The cop later seeks Beryl out at her gym and over an oyster lunch on the Mississippi, bluntly shares his attraction for her. She accepts his invitation to go trick or treating with his girls in the French Quarter and receives their approval to continue dating their dad. Meanwhile, Block and his partner (Dan Hedaya) trace glass fragments at the murder scenes to a local beer bottling plant. The killer responds by visiting Block’s daughters, killing their nanny and almost strangling Block. The cop narrows his manhunt onto one suspect in particular, but while he’s staking out the man’s apartment, the killer goes hunting for Beryl.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 11 users: 82% for Tightrope

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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Strange Days (1995)
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Screenplay by James Cameron and Jay Cocks, story by James Cameron
Produced by James Cameron, Steven-Charles Jaffe
Running time: 145 minutes

Should I Care?
For all those movie geeks wondering how cool it would be if James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow ever made a movie together — a sci-fi epic conceived, co-written and produced by the creator of The Terminator, Titanic and Avatar, say, put under the pressure cooker direction of the filmmaker who brought us The Hurt Locker — then fan boy, have I got a movie for you. Strange Days latches onto three potent ideas weighing heavy on the minds of its filmmakers in the early 1990s: better-than-virtual reality playback technology, police brutality and what the party of the millennium was going to look like. On a gut level, the movie is Space Mountain meets cyberpunk, grabbing us and rocketing us into a near future we end up being thankful to just be visiting. It’s a stiff shot of espresso, thick with brutal violence and sleazy characters that held little to zero appeal for audiences at the time, but at the very least, this is an exhilarating vision, more remarkable that it went into production before anyone (except maybe Cameron) had ever used email before.

Whether the writing or the editing is at fault (Howard E. Smith cut the movie with an uncredited Cameron), there is too much tech noir and not enough cohesiveness to make the film great. Juliette Lewis plays a super skank for all time and though fun to watch slink around, her character is never a girl we believe Ralph Fiennes would be smitten with. Fiennes — posed to become a star following Quiz Show — plays a sort of magician, tantalizing but difficult to care about behind all the smoke and mirrors. He’s paired with a chiseled Angela Bassett who seems capable of busting his nose open at any moment. The obligatory music biz subplot and shots of a militarized Los Angeles don’t feel very genuine, but as evidenced by cyber junk like Johnny Mnemonic, The Net or Virtuosity, Strange Days is not only more powerful than it needed to be, but deeper. Substitute YouTube for “clips” and the filmmakers might have been onto something here. Graeme Revell and French techno group Deep Forest take us into the near future with a musical score that’s nothing short of sublime.

So, What’s This About?
At 1:06:27 am on 30 December 1999, Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) samples the wares of a hustler (Richard Edson) who procures the illegal drug of the near future: “clips”, mini-discs formatted by the Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID), an apparatus that when fitted atop a user’s head, records directly off their cerebral cortex, using the optical nerve as a camera lens. Developed as an upgrade on surveillance wires, SQUID also permits users to “jack in” to clips of people’s personal lives and experience them raw. A former vice cop, Lenny is now a black market operator who traffics in these clips. He spends his personal time reliving happier days through clips of his ex-girlfriend Faith (Juliette Lewis), a rock singer who left him for music mogul Philo Gant (Michael Wincott). Lenny’s remaining friends are a wily ex-cop turned private eye (Tom Sizemore) and stoic bodyguard Lornette “Mace” Mason (Angela Bassett) whose protection service caters to VIPs visiting anarchic Los Angeles.

As millennium celebrations near and tensions between Angelenos and the LAPD boil under the surface, a prostitute friend of Faith’s named Iris (Brigitte Bako) begs Lenny for help. While he uses the encounter as an excuse to contact Faith, Iris is raped and strangled by a killer who records the act with a SQUID and taunts Lenny by sending him a clip of the murder. Lenny and Mace discover that Iris was in possession of a clip of her own: the execution of a militant rapper named Jeriko One (Glenn Plummer) at the hands of two rogue police officers (Vincent D’Onofrio, William Fichtner) during a traffic stop. After the same cops come after Lenny and Mace, Faith admits that her record producer boyfriend’s paranoia drove him to use Iris to spy on Jeriko One with a SQUID. Mace considers going public with the clip of Jeriko One’s shooting, even if it ignites a revolution and burns L.A. to the ground. With Philo holding his ex-girlfriend, Lenny intends to trade the clip for Faith. But as the year 2000 approaches, nothing is what it seems.

Who Made It?
In 1985, James Cameron became intrigued with the idea of giving the film noir genre a high tech polish. Taking a central element of the genre, a big city loser seeking redemption, Cameron set his tale against a doomsday scenario rising out of the New Year’s Eve celebrations of the year 1999. He scribbled less than five pages of notes and put the script idea — which he was calling The Magic Man — aside. Cameron rapidly transitioned from the unexpected success of The Terminator, his first real film as a writer-director, to one groundbreaking science fiction thriller after another: Aliens, The Abyss and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, placing him among a filmmaking elite after five credits as a director. In late 1992, with millennium approaching and Cameron already committed to direct True Lies next, he pitched The Magic Man to his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow, who’d just directed an action film Cameron script doctored and executive produced titled Point Break.

Kathryn Bigelow grew up in Northern California. Planning to emulate her father — an aspiring cartoonist who managed a paint store — Bigelow studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute and through a scholarship to the Whitney Independent Study Program, moved to New York. One day, she took in a double bill of Mean Streets and The Wild Bunch and decided to study filmmaking. A well received short film at Columbia in 1978 titled The Set-Up led to a feature film in 1982: the brooding motorcycle melodrama The Loveless, which Bigelow cast Willem Dafoe in his first film. Near Dark, Blue Steel and Point Break placed her in the rarified air of women directing action films in Hollywood. Budgeted at roughly $42 million, Strange Days was Bigelow’s most ambitious project to date. The intense mix of sci-fi, film noir and social commentary failed to draw a wide audience, but has grown in status as a cult classic among critics and moviegoers.

How’d They Do It?
Nine years before Strange Days would go into production, James Cameron started with what amounted to five pages of handwritten notes. In the introduction to the published version of his “scriptment”, Cameron wrote “In this preliminary sketch, the story consisted of a street hustler, a loser name Lenny Nero, who is squired around the urban decay of future L.A. by an unwilling limo driver, a woman named ‘Mace’ Mason. He is a black market buyer and seller of human experience, recorded and played back directly into the brain, and he enters a dance of death with a psychotic killer, who seems to be homing in relentlessly on Lenny’s ex-girlfriend, Faith, whom Lenny has difficulty protecting because she won’t have anything to do with him. I called it The Magic Man, because Lenny can get you anything, like magic. I never got around to writing it, at least not that decade. The remarkable thing , when I look at those pathetic handwritten scrawls now, is how the basic template of the story never changed, despite the long odyssey of getting from those notes to a shooting script in 1994.”

He continued, “Sometime in late 1992 I pitched this idea to Kathryn Bigelow. It had lain dormant all those years as one of those things that I knew I would get around to sooner or later but never did. I began to worry that if I waited too long, the millenium would no longer be far enough off to be science fiction. So with two directing projects looming in front of me (True Lies and Spiderman) which would take me into the mid-nineties, I decided to let another director take over a piece that was near and dear to me. Kathryn, with her edgy visual style, was the obvious choice.” In addition to being her ex-husband, Cameron had enjoyed collaborating with Bigelow on Point Break and trusted her ability to shoot a film on schedule and on budget, which was more than Cameron could say for himself. He added, “In addition, she is that aria raris in mainstream filmmaking — a director who cares deeply about the characters while approaching the material with an intensely visual style. Fortunately, Kathryn liked the pitch and turned down her other offers, agreeing to sit and wait while I wrote the script.”

Discussing her fifth film for the press kit in 1995, Bigelow recalled, “It was a tremendous piece that offered so many opportunities. When I first became involved with Strange Days four years ago, I saw a way to draw one possible future, think about it and maybe derail it; imagine it and feel it as you watch. Is this the end of the world or the beginning of another one? That’s the core of Strange Days and what moved me –compelled me — to make it. Those themes, and these characters: a hustler with an undiscovered conscience and a guide through the underworld who has the strength, and the love, to survive. The interlocking story of Lenny and Mace becomes a parable in noirish disguise, a story about the pervasive need to watch, to see. It calibrates the fragile balance between viewer and viewed, screen and audience, spectacle as medium and subject. It puts us all in the picture.” Bigelow waited while Cameron labored over a draft for what was turning into the most densely plotted and character driven script he’d attempted.

Cameron recalled, “I couldn’t crack the plot to save my life. Kathryn had added her own spin to the piece, opening up the story and giving it thematic weight by having the murder tapes lead inexorably to an explosive incident involving the LAPD and a potential race riot of Biblical proportions. This concept fit well with my idea for a megaparty that teeters on the edge of complete social collapse, but it was proving very snaky trying to integrate it with the film noir erotic-thriller love story.” Over five weeks beginning in January 1993, Cameron broke through eight years of creative dithering with what he came to refer to as a “scriptment”. Running 131 pages in this case, Cameron elaborated, “So what you have in your hands is at once a kind of pathetic document; it is as long as a script, but messy and undisiplined, full of cheats and glossed over sections. But it is also an interesting snapshot of formatting a moment in the creative process. It contains notes and references and textures that do not exist in the finished script. It takes the time to gaze around at a grim future world and paint it in neon colors, it gets the mood first, then tells the story.”

Due to his commitment to True Lies, Cameron wasn’t available to translate his scriptment into a first draft screenplay, He hired Jay Cocks to whip a script into shape. “Between Jay and Kathryn, ideas flew like crazy — visualize whirled peas. Their restructuring of my unweidly piece was efficient and focused, while retaining the style of the meandering, quirky dialogue. They wrote it down to a manageable length and shaped it into Kathryn’s vision. Though Jay and I did very little writing together, we are both proud of the collaboration.” Cocks had worked with Bigelow on an unproduced Joan of Arc epic titled Company of Angels that had Winona Ryder attached to play the martyred warrior. Of Strange Days, Cocks recalled, “We didn’t want to do tech and glitz. We wanted to do street. And we wanted to give a very vivid sense of a city in terminal social disorder. And a society really on the razor’s edge.” He added, “I came to this from more of a Raymond Chandler angle than a William Gibson angle.”

Finding camera equipment capable of simulating the near future world of Strange Days from the point of view of someone jacked into a SQUID became a formidable technical hurdle to bound before production could begin. In a lecture on the film’s opening sequence which is packaged as an audio commentary on the film’s laserdisc and DVD releases, Bigelow explained, “No existing camera was going to give me — I tested every camera out there, even the smallest, lightest one that was available to me, like an IMO, would give me that would replicate that kind of incredible mobility that the human eye has. When you just look around the room and you take for granted the kind of very fragile flexible mobility that the human eye has. So, we started out by realizing no camera would accomplish this that existed out there so we had no build a camera. This was about a year before we started to shoot. And we built a camera that literally could fit in the palm of your hand. It weighed 8 pounds, it was 35 millimeter, with interchangable lenses — prime lenses — and we outfitted it with a kind of modified Steadicam rig, which enabled you to give you the kind of fluidity of Steadicam.”

Bigelow added, “So I needed, if we simply did it handheld, you’d be throwing up in the audience watching that, I mean literally, you’d need airsick bags. I mean, this was just one challenge in making this. So what I did was I gave it a, there’s a piece of equipment that I used for Point Break — there’s a foot chase in that — called the pogo cam, which is a camera that weighs 18 pounds, which is gyro stablized, but it has no through-the-lens eyepiece, it has just a kind of wire on top of the camera so you kind of vaguely know what you’re framing. So I wanted to kind of give the Steadicam a pogo attiude and the pogo cam is just something you simply run with, it’s on a stick, camera’s on a stick, and it has a gyro stabilizer at the bottom. We kind of adapted some elements from the pogo cam to the Steadicam with this new 8 pound camera and there we finally had — this I’m talking a year, with a lot of experimentation — to finally have a camera that could execute this which I know looks really simple. But it wasn’t.”

Strange Days commenced shooting June 1994 in Los Angeles, with Cameron and Steven-Charles Jaffe producing under Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment banner for 20^th Century Fox. The 80-day schedule called for 77 days of night photography, including the massive New Year’s Eve bash. On Saturday, September 27, a four block area at 5^th and Figueroa in front of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel became New Year’s Eve 1999. Concert promoters Moss Jacobs and Philip Blaine were put on the payroll to organize an event, which featured performances by Dee-Lite and Aphex Twin and many more techno groups. With tickets running $10 a pop, the event was set to kick off at 9pm and run until dawn. Between 10,000 and 12,000 revelers showed up, two stadium sized video screens were brought in, several hundred fireworks exploded, 2,000 balloons released and a half-ton of confetti showered the scene. Jaffe recalled, “We had several hundred people organizing this, from our crew to security people to the police. It took a behemoth effort to pull this all together.”

Screened at the Venice Film Festival in September and New York Film Festival the following month, Strange Days opened October 1995 in the United States. Critics seemed won over by the director, if not her film. Janet Maslin, The New York Times: “One thing for certain about the furiously talented Ms. Bigelow: No one will ever say she directs like a girl … Only when it comes time to justify its excesses and deliver on a promise of wider revelation does the otherwise audacious screenplay by James Cameron and Jay Cocks look too specific and small.” Steve Davis, The Austin Chronicle: “Although there are some exhilarating moments here, they’re offset by frequent distractions: Lewis’ standard (and now boring) weird performance, an occasional lack of logic in the story line, a tendency to go operatic, and the overall feeling that the movie is unsure of where it is going.” Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “Strange Days does three things that will make it a cult film. It creates a convincing future landscape; it populates it with a hero who comes out of the noir tradition and is flawed and complex rather than simply heroic, and it provides a vocabulary … At the same time, depending more on mood and character than logic, the movie backs into an ending that is completely implausible.”

With $7.9 million at the U.S. box office, Strange Days was lumped in by The New York Times with several “big budget flops” released around the same time: Assassins, Jade, The Scarlet Letter. In an unspecified interview, Bigelow maintained, “If you hold a mirror up to society, and you don’t like what you see, you can’t fault the mirror. It’s a mirror. I think that on the eve of the millennium, a point in time only four years from now, the clock is ticking, the same social issues and racial tensions still exist, the environment still needs reexamination so you don’t forget it when the lights come up. Strange Days is provocative. Without revealing too much, I would say that it feels like we are driving toward a highly chaotic, explosive, volatile, Armageddon-like ending. Obviously, the riot footage came out of the L.A. riots. I mean, I was there. I experienced that.” She added, “The toughest decision was not wanting to shy away from anything, trying to keep the truth of the moment, of the social environment. It’s not that I condone violence. I don’t. It’s an indictment. I would say the film is cautionary, a wake-up call, and that I think is always valuable.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
Strange Days Press Kit

Strange Days. By James Cameron. Plume (1995)

Strange Days. DVD audio commentary by Kathryn Bigelow. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment (2002)

Heaven’s Gate (1980)
Directed by Michael Cimino
Written by Michael Cimino
Produced by Joann Carelli
Running time: 219 minutes (original cut)

Should I Care?
As the 1970s came to a close, five runaway film productions loomed on the horizon, piling up doom and gloom courtesy of the mainstream news media. Suffering from fiscal recklessness at best, studio mismanagement at worst, if the poor buzz was to be believed, these five big budget movies were determined to bankrupt Hollywood: Apocalypse Now, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, 1941, The Blues Brothers and Heaven’s Gate. Four of these would-be disasters quickly recouped their heavy costs at the box office. The one that didn’t make it into the black seems to have been conveniently lost in time along with its infamous director. That would be Michael Cimino and the movie would be Heaven’s Gate, a 3 ½ hour western of pictorial brilliance, almost unparalleled scope, outstanding performances and haunting grandeur. For all his excesses and notoriety, Cimino captures a certain lyrical beauty missing in epic filmmaking since the passing of David Lean.

It’s time to call Heaven’s Gate what it is: the last great American film of the 1970s. Cimino’s screenplay not only paints the Old West with the contours I imagine actually existed there — crowdedness and expanse, serenity and violence, beauty and ugliness – but fills that landscape with intriguing characters and dialogue of surprising depth. Kris Kristofferson leads a fairly overlooked cast of talented character actors, all of whom are elevated above the din and clamor of the massive production and are enabled to deliver excellent performances. Few movies recreate a bygone era with the detail of this one, with Vilmos Zsigmond overseeing the majestic cinematography and David Mansfield composing a staggering musical score. Unlike so many turkeys that truly qualify for “worst ever” status, the craftsmanship here is never in question. For all the money spent on Heaven’s Gate, we can see exactly where the bucks ended up and why.

So, What’s This About?
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Harvard College graduating class of 1870 — which includes James Averill (Kris Kristofferson) — assembles to hear their class orator Billy Irvine (John Hurt) speak. Irvine rejects the high-minded ideals sewn by the reverend doctor of the university (Joseph Cotten), and advises his fellow classmates to merely rise no further than each of them is capable. 20 years later, Averill arrives by train in Casper, Wyoming after transporting an immigrant woman to St. Louis to be hanged. Averill is sheriff of Johnson County, pristine territory which more Polish, German and Ukrainian immigrants seem to be pouring into every day.

By the time Averill visits a saloon operated by his friend John Bridges (Jeff Bridges) in the town of Sweetwater, the sheriff learns that the local cattle association, led by the unscrupulous Frank Canton (Sam Waterston) has drawn up the names of 125 settlers suspected of cattle rustling or troublemaking and put them on a death list. The most efficient assassin on the cattleman’s payroll is Nathan Champion (Christopher Walken), who roams Johnson County executing immigrants who’ve stolen livestock. Meanwhile, Averill returns to his pastoral home and to his girlfriend Ella Watson (Isabelle Hupert), who operates a bordello and accepts stolen cattle as payment.

After adjourning to the town reception hall — Heaven’s Gate, which hosts music and roller skating — Averill asks Ella to leave the county, not wanting to tell her that her name is on the death list. Champion, who in addition to being one of Ella’s customers is also in love with her, offers to take her away under the protection of his men (Geoffrey Lewis and Mickey Rourke). She rejects both offers and chooses to stay in Sweetwater. Three mercenaries intercept Ella at her place of business and attempt to scratch her name off the death list. Standing behind Averill and Champion, the rest of the town elects to stay their ground and attempt to repel the invaders.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
In 1971, a filmmaker no one in Hollywood had heard of — putting his pictorial eye and camera skills to use in New York directing commercials for Kodak, Pepsi and United Airlines — wrote a screenplay titled The Johnson County War. The screenwriter was Michael Cimino and his script was loosely based on a range war that took place in 1892 between cattle ranchers and settlers, many of them immigrants, who flowed into Johnson County, Wyoming after passage of the Homestead Act. Producer David Foster set the project up at Fox, only to have production head Jere Henshaw put it into turnaround in 1972. Henshaw later told American Film, “It looked to us like a pretty downbeat story at a pretty heavy cost.”

An idiosyncratic caper Cimino wrote titled Thunderbolt and Lightfoot fared much better, with Clint Eastwood enjoying the script enough to gamble on the first time director. Co-starring Jeff Bridges, the picture was very favorably reviewed and a modest box office hit in the summer of 1974. Four years later, Cimino was riding a tidal wave of industry buzz for his second film, an ode to brotherhood and sacrifice set against the Vietnam War titled The Deer Hunter. Among those in Hollywood who were high on the movie was David Field, a production executive for United Artists, who later recalled, “We saw an advanced print of Deer Hunter — I don’t know how many weeks before it was released — and we were blown away.”

Cimino’s agent submitted a package for his client’s next film — The Johnson County War — to United Artists. The studio’s head of production Danton Rissner read the script in August 1978 and responded coolly it. His story department concluded: “If it were not for Cimino, I would pass.” What distinguished the script from the typical western was its assertion that the United States government had sanctioned the range war in what amounted to ethnic genocide. Rissner remained dubious that theater exhibitors would welcome such liberal revisionism of a fading genre. But by September, UA agreed to a pay-or-play package of $1.7 million for The Johnson County War: $250,000 for Cimino’s script, $500,000 for Cimino’s directing services, $100,000 for Cimino’s producing partner Joann Carelli and $850,000 for Kris Kristofferson to star, all to be paid whether the movie was made or not.

Cimino continued to tune his script. He inserted a prologue introducing the characters of Averill and Billy Irvine at Harvard 20 years before the events in Wyoming, and added a brief epilogue, taking place 10 years after the range war. Averill is moored in a yacht off the coast of Rhode Island, still haunted by the events of the film. The script concluded with the quote, “What one loves about life are the things that fade.” Cimino had also arrived on a new title, and in April 1979, one week after The Deer Hunter won five Academy Awards including Best Picture, principal photography began on Heaven’s Gate. Glacier National Park in Kalispell, Montana had been selected as a filming location and a release date of December 1979 set. The accelerated schedule dictated a budget of $11.5 million, $15 million at most.

Recalling Cimino’s exacting work methods, director of photography Vilmos Zsigmond stated, “It was very unusual the way he worked. He would actually paint by selecting extras and put them in the right place in a set. It was like a painter would paint them. He painted by picking up people and put them into the right place. Then, once we started to shoot, you know, sometimes we would go for three takes, sometimes you would go for ten takes. And many, many times you had to go for forty takes.” In the first six days of shooting, Cimino had fallen five days behind schedule, with roughly 90 seconds of usable footage in the can. After 12 days, Heaven’s Gate was 10 days behind schedule.

In his book Final Cut, Steven Bach recounted the expenses that began accumulating: “It was true, as later press reports informed, that Michael Cimino was building sets and rebuilding them, hiring 100 extras, then 200, then 500, adding horses and wagons and hats, shoes, gloves, dresses, top hats, bridles, boots, roller skates, babushkas, aprons, dusters, buckboards, gun belts, rifles, bullets, cows, calves, bulls, trees, thousands of tons of dirt, hundreds of miles of exposed film, and all this mattered economically. But what mattered most was that what he was adding was takes and retakes and retakes of the retakes. And retakes of those. Michael Cimino was taking — and retaking — time. Getting it right.”

To get it right, Cimino was shooting as many as 30 takes of shots and printing nearly every one, burning through $200,000 a day and $1 million per week. Actor Brad Dourif recalled, “I’m not used to seeing fifty seven takes. I’m really not. I’m not used to doing a minimum of thirty-two takes. He wanted to try a bunch of different ways. It was like workshopping on film, you know, we did the happy version, we did the crying version, we did the furious version. I mean, each scene was taken to these degrees, beyond which you weren’t going for the ultimate take, you were going for a lot of choices.” At its current pace, Heaven’s Gate was on track to exceed its budget by 500% and end up costing United Artists a then stellar sum of $35 million.

The studio got its first peek at Heaven’s Gate on June 6, 1979 when Bach and David Field made the trip to Kalispell to view about 30 minutes of the film. Bach recalled, “The footage was ravishing. There was nothing that anybody on Earth could say to criticize the footage, so we knew it wasn’t the case of a production that was falling apart. We never thought it was a case of Michael sitting in his trailer eating chocolates and watching television when he should have been out on the set. That was never the issue. The issue was we didn’t agree that you could take this much time to achieve perfection. And if you continue to take this much time to achieve perfection, you’re going to break our bank and there’s not going to be any company to release the picture.”

Jeff Bridges later offered his recollection of the production by stating, “From somebody on the outside it would look like it was almost too much, but it never appeared that way to me. It was like, this guy really cares.” But with John Hurt due to start work on The Elephant Man in October 1979 and the mountain roads in Montana closing for winter, Cimino heeded United Artists’ pleas to pick up the pace. UA pushed the release of the film back a year, settling on Christmas 1980. The studio planned exclusive reserved seating 70mm print engagements in New York, Los Angeles and Toronto for November 1980. Heaven’s Gate would then expand to additional cities in December before a general release in February 1981 to benefit from the many Academy Award nominations the film industry would naturally bestow on the picture.

On June 26, 1980, after eight months of editing, Cimino was ready to show United Artists the film. Studio executives assembled in Los Angeles for a private screening. Bach recalled, “I thought Michael looked exhausted, truly, truly depleted. I remember asking, ‘How close are we to a final cut?’ And he said, ‘It’s a little long. I can lose maybe fifteen minutes.’ And we sat down and we watched the movie. And the movie that we saw was five hours and 25 minutes long. The battle sequence alone was as long as most feature motion pictures. I was angry, I was angry, I was angry. The company had been put through turmoil … And the internal hope that had kept us all going for those two or three years at this process now — which was that it was going to be a masterpiece, and that would justify everything that we had gone through — was suddenly gone.”

By mid-October, Cimino had Heaven’s Gate down to 3 hours and 39 minutes. No one at United Artists bothered viewing his cut until its public unveiling in New York one month later. Jeff Bridges recalled, “I can remember going to the first screening, the premiere in New York, and we were all very excited and Mike was quite anxious because I don’t know if he even saw the film before it was shown, you know, it was wet right out of the soup. He had just put it together and just barely made the deadline to get it all together. And the movie comes on. I remember my first impression of seeing it was, you know, kind of the splendor of it was wonderful, but the rhythm of it was so unusual and so kind of slow and not what you expected to see that the audience certainly was frustrated. And you hear that [smattering of applause] terrible applause at the end. Ugh, it was terrible.”

The next morning, Michael Cimino, Joann Carelli and Bridges were on their way to Toronto for the next screening when they picked up a copy of the New York Times. The opening paragraph of Vincent Canby’s review read: “Heaven’s Gate fails so completely, you might suspect Mr. Cimino sold his soul to the devil to obtain the success of The Deer Hunter, and the devil has just come around to collect.” Brad Dourif recalled, “Well I read Vincent Canby’s — I don’t read reviews, that’s the first thing — I read Vincent Canby’s because it actually had the line in it, ‘like being given a four-hour tour of your own living room’ and I just wanted to see how bad a review could be and it was really scathing. Angry review. I mean, basically, everything that people hated about the direction of film was piled onto Michael.”

Interviewed by Jean-Luc Godard in 1982, film critic Pauline Kael defended the stoning Heaven’s Gate was given in the mainstream media. “I did think Canby’s review was rather brutal. On the other hand, the fact is the picture does not have one good scene, or one good character, and it goes on for several hours. I think it’s very interesting visually, but there is nothing that can carry it with an audience. If the company had thought that the critics were wrong, they would have put in millions in advertising and they might have recouped on the picture. A lot of terrible movies get by if the companies believe in them … But they were dismayed because they could see the justice of what the reviewers were saying, that there was nothing there.”

Steven Bach disagreed. “I think the critics were reviewing the production history. They were rewriting their reviews for The Deer Hunter, which they thought they had over praised. They were getting back at what they perceived as hostile treatment from the director. I think they were slapping United Artists for having allowed this to happen. But I never felt that there was a real serious attempt to see what is this picture trying to do and does it succeed on its own terms. It didn’t succeed on the terms they wanted to lay on the picture and that was what they were writing about, was their terms for the picture, not the picture’s terms.” After playing for a week in New York, Cimino took out ads in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter asking UA to withdraw the film from release so he could rework his 219-minute cut.

A 149-minute version of Heaven’s Gate opened in 810 theaters nationwide in April 1981. But audiences ignored it completely, buying $3.4 million in tickets in the United States. Tom Brokaw introduced a segment on Heaven’s Gate for the NBC Nightly News by proclaiming “a $40 million film from an Oscar winning director may be the biggest bomb in Hollywood history.” The loss to United Artists was tabulated at $44 million. Within a month, Transamerica decided it was done with the movie business and sold UA to rival studio MGM. Michael Cimino and Kris Kristofferson were at the Cannes Film Festival in May when the news broke. UA’s new president Norbert Auerbach maintained that while Heaven’s Gate had not been directly responsible for the collapse of the prestigious 62-year-old studio, the movie hadn’t steered UA away from disaster either.

Naturally, the first audiences to appreciate Heaven’s Gate were French. In December 1982, celebrated film magazine Cahiers du Cinema sponsored a screening of Cimino’s 219-minute cut in Paris. Word reached Los Angeles, where Jerry Harvey and Fred Grossbud of pay cable’s Z Channel persuaded MGM/UA to let them air the long version of Heaven’s Gate starting on Christmas Eve. It marked the first time a wide audience had been permitted to see the film at its original length. In the Los Angeles Times — whose film critic Kevin Thomas had been one of the few to submit a rave review of Heaven’s Gate while it was in theaters — Charles Champlin wrote, “Not a damn thing was gained economically by forcing Cimino to eviscerate his work, but audiences were denied the chance to see fully whatever it was that Cimino had in mind.”

In August 1983, England’s National Film Theatre booked the long version of Heaven’s Gate for six performances, with Cimino on hand to introduce the film. Derek Malcolm wrote in The Guardian: “The full version, I can assure you, is quite an experience – an extraordinary attempt to make a major American movie at a time when only the minors held sway.” The long version was released theatrically at the Plaza 2 theater in London, but its box office was so negligible that MGM/UA nixed plans to re-release the uncut Heaven’s Gate elsewhere. Michael Cimino — who has not directed since 1996 and refuses requests to discuss his infamous magnum opus — had this to say in 1990:  “I would respond to Heaven’s Gate the same way Jack Kennedy responded to the Bay of Pigs. I’d take full responsibility and all other questions are answered by the film itself.”

Where Are You Getting This?
Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven’s Gate by Steven Bach (1985)

Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate (2004), directed by Michael Epstein