Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the Film that Sank United Artists

This is one of the best books I have ever read about Hollywood & the making of a movie, in this case, Michael Cimino's "Heaven's Gate." I waited until I finished reading the book to watch the movie. Wow. This book delves deep into the making of HG & the mind of Michael Cimino. I am really surprised that a watchable movie was salvaged from this train wreck of a process. Sit back & relax as Steven Bach helps you with your journey from Hell's abyss to Heaven's gate.

Steven Bach is correct in using William Goldman's quote about Hollywood in his introduction ("No one knows anything."). What follows with Final Cut happens because the executives took that attitude to heart, and sometimes, for good reason.Cimino maneuvered the UA executives, including Bach, into making a movie they didn't believe in because they didn't believe in their own judgement on the script. They didn't step in when the production got out of control beecause they didn't trust their own judgement on what was happening on location in Montana. They didn't demand a proper edit of the movie because they didn't believe they could find any other talent to solve the problem. They didn't pull the movie because they didn't trust what their eyes told them: the movie was awful.The above paragraph is harsh, and there are examples upon examples of studio heads pulling the plug on what became magnificent movies. These examples, however, are like fortune-tellers proclaiming their successes when they get something right. The fortune-teller did get that one prediction right, but no one remembers the hundreds of times that the fortune-teller was wrong because no one points it out, especially the fortune-teller. In Hollywood, the talent doesn't want the failure pointed out, and the executives don't either since their jobs are on the line.None of the above is a criticism of this book. In fact, it gives a wonderful insight into how disasters like "Heavan's Gate" can happen. It is written well, and I came away with a much better understanding of the process by which movies get made. It also gives insight into the difference between honest artists who sometimes fail (Woody Allen, Martin Scorcese) and poseurs who bluff their way into creating disasters (Cimino).

I thought this book was well executed and detailed. The author lived in a world of artists and power brokers. The insight was thoughtful, honest and fair to participants. I thought he would go on about drugs and wasted lives, but no he presented the directors as simply human. Heavens Gate is a wonderful film and every dollar spent id seen on screen. Michael Cimino had a vision of the film he wanted to make and sometimes that vision conflicted with necessary business side of movie making.I share the authors enjoyment and appreciation for Woody Allen and every single movie he has ever produced. I fear the world will too soon forgot these characters in this book. Read this one.

To my suprise one of the best "business" books I have read. Goes beyond the "glitz" of Hollywood and covers some of the serious people in the business of making movies. Actually purchased to get the full story on Michael Cinimino's Heaven's Gate. It does not disapoint

So much has been written about Michael Cimino's "Heaven's Gate" that few people recall the film itself: a bloated, aimless, wandering and unfocused epic about the Johnson County "war" of the late eighteen hundreds. The book's story of wretched excess, greed, artistic ambition run amok and misguided faith in that ambition mirrors the story of the making of Fox's "Cleopatra" in 1961. Though "Heaven's Gate" has a devoted cult following today, such admiration is common to reviled works: people have a tendency to champion projects that "nobody else got" because it makes them feel elevated from the common wisdom, or a part of an exclusive culture of appreciation. Sadly, Cimino's film doesn't warrant such revisionist thinking. The book explains in excruciating detail the process by which a small, personal project became one of the grandest flops in the history of Hollywood. Equally culpable in this fiasco are the men and women who allowed this director to squander the millions spent, even after it became apparent that the film was a disappointment by the kindest standards. Far from being a lost opportunity (the story of the Johnson County war has been done several times, in films like "Shane") "Heaven's Gate" is probably the best known example of the kind of apalling waste that drove the film industry into the sad state it has fallen to. The author accepts his share of the blame, and is astonishingly fair to Cimino, defending the director's vision, his decisions, and his intentions. But the end result (known to every film buff) hangs over the proceedings like grim death.

Overwhelming circumstances, but an important book for anyone in the industry, or who has family in Hollyweird.

Very informative and entertaining for anyone interested in the impact of the human factor on the multi-million dollar decisions made every day in producing Hollywood films.

There are so many typos in the kindle edition that it is almost unreadable. It's almost as if there was no editing or proofreading.

A great book for those who love the movies and how they were made back when they still made them.

A beautiful story of failed entrepreneurship

The book itself is well written and extremely interesting. Whoever converted it to kindle format though should be fired immediately. There are three to four conversion errors on almost every page. "I"s showing as "1"s. Words very obviously missread. You are frequently having to stop to work out what a word was supposed to be to make the sentence make sense. This book was obviously passed through some OCR software then published without ever checking if it came out allright.

Steven Bach does not know how to make short movies - and obviously not how to write short books either!! The book is about Heaven's Gate, but that movie is not mentioned before page 120. And for the rest of the book, there are an EXTREME number of details which are irrelevant. Like the movie, Steven Bach should have trued to cut the book by 50%!

Fantastic book, that describes the intricate workings on a movie set in great detail, and in a suspenseful way.