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Steven Bach, Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate (William Morrow and Co., 1985) Reissued by Newmarket Press in paperback in 1999 Bach was hired as the head of production at United Artists (UA) in 1978; not soon after, he began overseeing production of Heaven's Gate (1980), the dark, anti-Western Michael Cimino movie starring Kris Kristofferson and Christopher Walken. That unqualified box office disaster ruined United Artists, the imaginative company founded in 1919 by Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. But Bach is a witty, open-minded, non-vengeful insider ("it's not every chronicler who can establish an agreeable rapport while casting himself in a pivotal foolish role," the Washington Post review reads). Bach is also a keen educator who casually and even engagingly reveals the minutiae of decision-making at UA (in four elucidating paragraphs, he manages to explain not only how but why UA president Andy Albeck allowed the distribution staff to have direct influence over aesthetic production decisions on individual movies). A level-headed but gripping and still cogent account of how outsized artistic ambition (Cimino's egotism wasn't initially disciplined by anyone at UA; his previous movie The Deer Hunter had just won five Academy Awards) and bottom-line business concerns can collide in volatile ways. Final Cut is considered one of the classic books about Hollywood. "If the book by Mr. Bach establishes anything, it is that the 'artists vs. accountants' scenario that surfaced in the wake of the debacle was greatly oversimplified," Janet Maslin wrote in her New York Times review of the book. "It cannot be said that Mr. Cimino merely hoodwinked a group of insecure businessmen who had no faith in their own judgment, since United Artists agreed to ''Heaven's Gate'' in full awareness of the abundant warning signals." The Washington Post called Final Cut "an authoritative account of the way Hollywood misfunctions." MORE: An essay by Bach on the controversy surrounding Leni Riefenstahl, his next biographical subject |
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