Final Cut: Art, Money and EGO in the Making of "Heaven's Gate", the Film That Sank United Artists by Steven Bach

Final Cut: Art, Money and EGO in the Making of "Heaven's Gate", the Film That Sank United Artists by Steven Bach

Heaven's Gate is probably the most discussed, least seen film in modern movie history. Its notoriety is so great that its title has become a generic term for disaster, for ego run rampant, for epic mismanagement, for wanton extravagance. It was also the film that brought down one of Hollywood's major studios--United Artists, the company founded in 1919 by Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, D. W. Griffith, and Charlie Chaplin. Steven Bach was senior vice president and head of worldwide production for United Artists at the time of the filming of Heaven's Gate, and apart from the director and producer, the only person to witness the film's evolution from beginning to end. Combining wit, extraordinary anecdotes, and historical perspective, he has produced a landmark book on Hollywood and its people, and in so doing, tells a story of human absurdity that would have made Chaplin proud.

Steven Bach was born in the outskirts of Chicago, Illinois, in 1943. Before the suburbs crawled out of the city, living in the country near to huge farms allowed for contact with nature and life in general. The presence of a navy air training base nearby, with its practically weekly plumes of smoke, served as a warning that death was never far away. At the age of 11, I moved to East Tennessee, which was a huge cultural shock and a huge step forward in terms of being in touch with nature. This was a jungle in more ways than one when compared to Illinois.

Steven gravitated toward the company of the community's interesting artists as a teenager in a tourist town, and eventually became an artist himself. His work, which mostly consists of sculpture, has evolved through time to include a variety of mediums, including literature.