My Year of Flops: The A.V. Club Presents One Man's Journey Deep into the Heart of Cinematic Failure

by Nathan Rabin

  This luscious sustained glimpse of heaven makes the inevitable descent into hell all the more heartbreaking. The film then flashes forward 20 years to the wild frontier land of Wyoming, where James works as sheriff when not stealing drinks from his flask. To curb the theft of cattle, an association run by rich ranchers assembles a death list of suspected rustlers, anarchists, and ne’er-do-wells that essentially encompasses the entire county James serves. It’s class war at its most vicious and overt, legalized murder to be carried out by an army of professional assassins while the powers that be look the other way. Christopher Walken costars as Nathan Champion, the ranchers’ most brutally efficient enforcer and the third corner of a love triangle with James and French brothel keeper Ella (Isabelle Huppert). The cast is rounded out by a dazzling array of great character actors: Jeff Bridges, Brad Dourif, Joseph Cotten, Sam Waterston, Tom Noonan, Geoffrey Lewis, Richard Masur, Terry O’Quinn, and Mickey Rourke.

  Walken’s character receives a startlingly powerful introduction. At first, he’s seen only in shadow, reflected through a sheet hanging in the wind, an image of civilizing sophistication in his hat and suit. Slowly, a rifle’s outline emerges. Then Champion aims the rifle and blows a hole through the sheet and into the stomach of a knife-wielding immigrant, killing him instantly. It’s only then that we realize that Champion is the one doing the killing. He’s recognizable on-screen for only a split second, but that’s all it takes to establish him as a figure of heartless authority, a cold-blooded killer in an untamed land.

  For its first half, Heaven’s Gate leaps from one gorgeous, sustained setpiece to another, driven by an exhilarating sense of possibilities. Why shoot an elaborately orchestrated hoedown with a full band and extras in period costume when you can shoot an elaborately orchestrated hoedown with a full band and extras in period costume as everyone glides about on roller skates?

  Heaven’s Gate is a film to get lost in. Any individual image from the film’s first two hours could be isolated and hung on a wall at an art museum. It’s that gorgeous. So far, so good. Until the intermission, I felt like I was watching a masterpiece.

  The film’s tone shifts from dark to unbearably grim once Huppert’s Ella becomes the center of the action. Cimino excels at playing field general, a cinematic Patton commanding vast armies of extras, crew people, and animals soon to embark on trips to horse and chicken heaven. But that mastery abandons him when he’s shooting interiors where people do nothing more kinetic than talk about their feelings. Cimino isn’t helped by Huppert’s strangely inert performance, with its perversely affectless line readings. When painting on a sprawling canvas, Heaven’s Gate soars. When dealing with life-sized human emotions, it stumbles.

  The love triangle among James, Champion, and Ella is supposed to be the film’s emotional core, but within the context of an epic battle between warring historical forces, the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans. As a killer, Walken is riveting. As a genial gentleman suitor, he’s a stiff.

  There are essentially two kinds of revisionist Westerns: those that forthrightly confront the harsh realities of life in the Old West, and those that sadistically rub the audience’s collective face in the ugliest, most sordid aspects of Western life. For its oft-transcendent first two acts, Heaven’s Gate is the first kind of revisionist epic. In its final act, it becomes the second.

  In its remarkable opening sequences, Heaven’s Gate immerses audiences in a world of startling vitality and richness. Then everyone rapes someone or gets raped, then dies a horrible death. The film’s arc unwittingly echoes the arc of the New Hollywood of the ’70s. At first, it radiates all the promise in the world. Then it devolves into a grim, ugly, overblown mess.

  Though it was panned by critics and died at the box office, Heaven’s Gate’s critical reputation took a huge upswing when Los Angeles’ cinephile-friendly Z Channel played Cimino’s 219-minute director’s cut instead of the butchered two-and-a-half-hour version that bombed with audiences. The reviews were much more sympathetic, and people began to wonder if maybe Cimino was onto something all along.

  Today, Heaven’s Gate stands as a haunting, though profoundly flawed, elegy for a bloody and lost West, for a cinematic revolution on its last legs, and for one very talented, very troubled director whose untethered, uncontrollable ambition was both his greatest strength and his greatest weakness.

  Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Secret Success

  Tom Noonan On Heaven’s Gate

  Tom Noonan has led a dual existence as both a playwright/independent filmmaker (he won the Grand Jury Prize and the Waldo Salt screenwriting award at Sundance for his 1994 directorial debut, What Happened Was …) and as a popular character actor in genre fare, particularly horror films. The contrast between Noonan’s hulking frame and underlying gentleness was used to terrifying effect in Michael Mann’s Manhunter, which cast the towering thespian as a serial killer known as the Tooth Fairy. Noonan later played a goofy, lovable Frankenstein’s monster in the cult horror-comedy The Monster Squad and a shadowy figure harboring dark secrets in The House of the Devil.

  Tom Noonan: That was probably the worst experience I had in my adult life at that point. Michael Cimino’s not a very nice person, at least he wasn’t when he made that movie, and I had seen Deer Hunter, which I actually saw again recently for the first time in 30 years. It’s such an amazing movie. I’d just started acting when I saw that, and I’d loved the movie so much. I thought, “Jeez, I would do anything to work with this guy.” And so I auditioned, and the audition was sort of normal. But I was in this play, [Sam Shepard’s] Buried Child, and they called me in May. I didn’t think we were going to shoot the movie that soon, and they called up and said, “You have to go to Montana the next day.” Or Wyoming, I can’t remember where it was. I said, “I can’t go tomorrow. There’s no stand-in. This is a really intense part. The play is a hit. I can’t just leave. I don’t want to do that.” So basically I lost the part. A few months later, they called up again and said, “You remember that we called you in May, well now it’s August, and Michael decided that he still wants to use you.”

  So he gave me a week, and I flew out there, and I went to the motel, and the three other guys that are in the scene with me had gone out in May and were sitting in the motel room for three months waiting to shoot the scene. He wouldn’t let them go back to New York, even though he knew he wasn’t going to shoot the scene. It was just crazy. He did that to all kinds of people. He kept sitting around in Kalispell, Wyoming, in these motels, people he knew he wasn’t going to use for months. Just to create this craziness. And the set was really dangerous. He used to wear this sort of admiral’s hat, like a navy admiral hat with the gold shit on it, and he would carry this huge blank gun, and he would fire it during scenes. He pointed a blank at my face once—which is really dangerous; you can kill somebody with a blank gun—like, threateningly. Like, “I want you to do this, and if you don’t …” He was really crazy.

  I mean, the best way to give you an idea of what the experience was like is that when I came back from shooting the film, six months later, I went to see Apocalypse Now. And the feeling you get watching that movie is what it felt like to be on the set of Heaven’s Gate. Really dangerous.

  Nathan Rabin: Reading Final Cut, Steven Bach’s book about the making of Heaven’s Gate, there’s the sense that they were analogous experiences. Francis Ford Coppola basically wanted to re-create Vietnam for Apocalypse Now, and it seems like Michael Cimino wanted to create the violent, destructive epic world of Heaven’s Gate on the set itself.

  TN: I don’t think there was any thought behind it at all. I think he was high and carried away with himself, and I don’t even think he really directed Deer Hunter. I think the actors did. I mean, hard to say.

  NR: Did you have a sense that he had a vision for Heaven’s Gate? It’s a beautiful film in many ways.

  TN: I watched part of it once. It’s sort of beautiful, it’s like a European sort of
Bertolucci Western. But personally, he was just really not a good person. I don’t think he was really into making it anything more than just sort of serving his ego and this crazy vision he had of himself.

  NR: Apparently at the height of his career, and his egomania, Peter Bogdanovich would direct from horseback. I think Raoul Walsh did it in the 1940s, so he thought, “That’s what I’ll do.” Wearing an admiral’s hat and wielding a blank gun sounds like a similar level of crazy.

  TN: Well, you’re in a little tiny room, too. I couldn’t even stand up straight in the room, because the ceilings were really low, and it was this log cabin. He’d do crazy things, like apparently they built a whole cabin. I don’t know if it was that cabin or another cabin, but he built this beautiful restored cabin, very authentic, and then they blew it up to see what it looked like when they blew it up, rather than waiting and filming it. Crazy things like that. Why would somebody possibly do that?

  Trapped In A World It Never Made Case File #94: Howard The Duck

  Originally Posted December 18, 2007

  It all comes down to the rat tail. Nothing better symbolizes George Lucas’ surreal disconnect from the world we live in, as opposed to the world inside his imagination, than the rat tail Hayden Christensen wears in Attack Of The Clones. But it could be worse. It’s possible that a heroic unknown soul fought a fierce battle to convince Lucas that he shouldn’t try to “update” the look of the Star Wars universe for its prequels and talked Lucas out of having the storm troopers rock acid-washed jeans or Zubaz track suits, but gave up on convincing him not to have the future Darth Vader don a hairstyle generally associated with insecure 11-year-olds circa 1983.

  Lucas is deeply plugged in to the cultural zeitgeist. Unfortunately, it’s the zeitgeist of 1937. While his peers were immersed in the sex, drugs, and rebellion of the ’70s, Lucas thought, “Gee whiz! I’m gonna make the science-fiction serial to top all science-fiction serials! It’ll make Flash Gordon look like yesterday’s news! And I’ll follow it up with a swashbuckling adventure about a daredevil archaeologist! Oh, it’ll just be the bee’s knees, I tell ya! And then maybe a murder mystery set in Radioland! Jumpin’ gee willikers, will it ever be swell!”

  By the time Attack Of The Clones went into production, Lucas probably hadn’t interacted with a human being not in his employ for decades. He undoubtedly now surrounds himself with an army of servant droids who carry out his every whim and protect him from interacting with the unpredictable creatures known as “humans.”

  It wasn’t always that way. Back in the early ’70s, Lucas teamed up with the husband-and-wife screenwriting team of Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, who seemed to have an inside line on how these mysterious “humans” talk and behave. Together, they wrote the script for American Graffiti. In appreciation, Lucas employed Katz and Huyck long after the rest of the world had forgotten them: He commissioned them to write a sequel to Indiana Jones. When the two couldn’t come up with a halfway decent script, he went ahead and had Steven Spielberg film what they’d written anyway.

  But it was all just a warm-up to 1986’s Lucas-produced Howard The Duck, the feature-film adaptation of Steve Gerber’s cult comic book. Gerber’s creation had serious underground cred before Lucas, Katz, and Huyck had their way with it. Howard ran for president in 1976, popped up in the fiction of Philip K. Dick and Stephen King, and was referenced in an early Pretenders song. He’d even been the subject of legal threats from Disney, which is the ultimate badge of underground respectability. Disney complained that Howard T. Duck infringed on Donald Duck’s copyright. As part of the settlement, Howard was forced to wear pants. For reasons I can’t get into, a lawsuit by Disney also forced me to wear pants. Fucking Disney.

  Gerber’s Howard comics knowingly played with comic-book conventions. But the character’s self-awareness of his medium appealed less to Lucas than the prospect of turning out a special-effects-heavy creature feature about a lovable anthropomorphic misfit along the lines of Steven Spielberg’s E.T.

  The Huyck-directed Howard The Duck begins by introducing its eponymous hero in his own world. Against a backdrop of smoky jazz, the camera moves deliberately around Howard’s apartment, lingering on posters advertising Mae Nest and W. C. Fowl in My Little Chickadee and Breeders of The Lost Stork, before panning to magazines like Rolling Egg and Playduck. A mere three minutes into being introduced to Howard The Duck’s comic-book universe, I was looking for a way out. See, Howard’s a three-foot-tall wisecracking duck who acts just like a person! That’s joke number one: the artless juxtaposition of man- and duckkind. For the next 112 interminable minutes, I waited patiently for joke number two. It never arrived.

  Howard is then sucked from his universe, past some disturbing anthropomorphic duck-women posing topless, and into ours via an interdimensional ray that drops him somewhere in the grungy depths of Cleveland. A narrator explains, “The cosmos: countless worlds upon worlds. Worlds without end. In these galaxies, every possible reality exists. But what is reality on any one world is mere fantasy on all others. Here all is real and all is illusion. What is, what was, and what will be start here with the words, ‘In the beginning there was Howard The Duck.’”

  In rapid succession, Howard is kidnapped by menacing new-wavers, gets thrown out of a club, and finds a friend in Lea Thompson’s Beverly. Thompson’s role was originally offered to a struggling hair-metal vocalist named Tori Amos, then of Y Kant Tori Read, but the offer was rescinded when Lea Thompson became available.

  Thompson’s role provides unique acting challenges, like the queasy-making scene where Howard begins (jokingly) hitting on Beverly and she “pretends” to reciprocate his affection. But before Howard can pummel away at a scantily clad, flirtatious Beverly with his sweaty, engorged, feather-encrusted member, she backs down and insists she was only kidding, thereby sparing filmgoers a sex scene of interest only to a handful of deeply disturbed fetishists.

  Howard The Duck has more on its mind than generating sexual tension between a three-foot-tall anthropomorphic duck and a rock vixen so dense she regularly transgresses the thin line separating spacey from mentally challenged. For it seems the ray that brought Howard to Earth has unwittingly unleashed one of the Dark Overlords of the Universe. In its bid for world domination, this Dark Overlord takes control of the body and mind of Jeffrey Jones, transforming him into a fiendish beastie with a sinister rasp that suggests he has also been invaded by the demon Pazuzu of The Exorcist II: The Heretic.

  The Dark Overlord subplot provides the film’s lone moment of glory. In its true form, the Dark Overlord ranks as a triumph of old-fashioned moviemaking magic, a nifty monster that looks like a fearsome cross between a Tyrannosaurus rex and a scorpion. In this lonely island of awesomeness in a sea of bad ideas, Howard The Duck briefly redeems Lucas’ regressive vision of a cinema rooted inextricably in the sugar-rush highs of his early years as a movie-mad kid. But no film should subject audiences to two hours of labored duck jokes for the sake of a cool-looking monster.

  Universal president Frank Price was asked to resign following Howard The Duck’s failure. In a noble act of executive seppuku, he acquiesced. Price got off easy: In many cultures, a man would be tarred and feathered for professionally midwifing such a film. If, as its narrator suggests, there are galaxies in which “every possible reality exists,” then in some alternate universe, Howard The Duck qualifies as a Secret Success instead of a Failure.

  Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Failure

  Pointlessly Postmodern Case File #103: Psycho

  Originally Posted January 20, 2008

  The triumph and tragedy of Anthony Perkins’ career is that he could never stop being Norman Bates. When you’re famous for playing a crazy baseball player (1957’s Fear Strikes Out), a crazy motel proprietor (1960’s Psycho), and a crazy crazy person (1968’s Pretty Poison), romantic leading-man roles are out of the question. The Tiger Beat demographic was forever out of his reach.

  The unexpected triumph of Vince Vaughn
, meanwhile, is that he couldn’t convincingly be Norman Bates even for 105 minutes.

  For Perkins, Bates was a cross to bear, an identity he couldn’t shed, a blessing and a curse. For Vaughn, the role was but a bump in the road, a part he played and discarded on his way to big paychecks for playing variations on his finely honed persona as the charmingly obnoxious overgrown frat boy who fucked your girlfriend.

  Bates haunts Perkins even in death. Watching Gus Van Sant’s interesting-in-theory, painful-in-practice remake of Psycho, I was struck by a strange notion: Why didn’t they have Perkins play Mama Bates’ skeleton? It would have been a big improvement over the skeleton they ended up using, which looks like it was stolen from a low-rent haunted house.

  All Van Sant would have to do is get some production assistants drunk, then offer to read their screenplays, and possibly even show them to his close personal friend Ben Affleck, on the condition that the PAs dig up Anthony Perkins’ corpse, slip a dress on his skeleton, and deliver it to the prop department. Some folks have no commitment.

  Van Sant’s perversely faithful yet strangely disrespectful remake of Psycho engages in a less elegant form of cinematic grave robbery. Van Sant famously vowed to make a shot-by-shot remake of Psycho that would be exactly like the original, except for the parts that would be different. It would be entirely the same, only not.

  Though the scripts and shots they chose are essentially identical, Hitchcock and Van Sant approached the material from antithetical places. When he made Psycho, Hitchcock was a classy filmmaker happily slumming with a nasty shocker shot on the cheap in black and white using the low-budget crew of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The brown paper bag of a title says it all: This was pure pulp, a cinematic gut punch from a filmmaker who generally opted for a more sophisticated brand of suspense.