My Year of Flops (39 page)

Battlefield Earth
opens in a fanciful world where mankind has been defeated by a race of nine-foot-tall aliens from the planet Psychlo, whose gnarled appearance suggests what Klingons might look like if they took their fashion cues from the leather daddies in
Cruising.
Humanity has finally shaken off the highfalutin plague of book learning and stuff knowing and lingers in a caveman-like state of superstition and ignorance. Rather than invoke the wrath of demons and monsters, men hide in caves and eschew all but the faintest traces of civilization.

Travolta plays the head villain, a cackling dandy named Terl looking to maneuver his way out of an unwanted position as the head of security for an obscure mining planet called Earth. Where other, less visionary science-fiction movies waste their time with laser-gun battles, thrilling chases, and exotic worlds rich in spectacle,
Battlefield Earth
devotes much of its running time to corporate maneuvering among nine-foot-tall alien management types. This decision pays huge dividends when Terl's superior cackles that rather than giving Terl a reprieve from doin' time on Planet Earth, “We've decided to keep you here for another 50 cycles. With endless options for renewal!” Director Roger Christian repeats “With endless options for
renewal” three times for effect. Who needs Wookies when you have characters talking about endless options for renewal? Sadly,
Battlefield Earth
really is all about Terl's plans to move up the Psychlo hierarchy through Machiavellian politicking, deceit, and blackmail.

Rather than wait out his 50 cycles and endless options for renewal, Terl concocts a harebrained scheme: He'll trick puny man-animals like Barry Pepper's intrepid hero Jonnie into mining gold for him, then use the rewards to fund a lavish life back on Planet Psychlo. But since no one believes a race as primitive as man-animals can operate complicated machinery, Terl hooks Jonnie up to a deus ex machina contraption that teaches him about flying and the Psychlo language and throws in the collective knowledge of the universe as a bonus. Jonnie quickly evolves from caveman simpleton to supergenius.

Who could have guessed that Terl's savvy plan to give Jonnie all the tools necessary to destroy him and Planet Psychlo and reclaim Earth would backfire? But that's just what happens: Johnnie decides to embiggen humanity by sharing his knowledge. Before long, the puny man-animals have hatched a plan to cast off their alien slave masters once and for all.

Any movie that relies on the presence of an all-the-knowledge-in-the-universe machine to advance its story isn't distinguished by brilliant plotting. So what is
Battlefield Earth
's strength? It isn't dialogue. Here are some choice lines:

Terl's bickering banter with Iago-like sidekick Ker (Forest Whitaker) is the stuff of middling sitcoms. (“After
Homeboys In Outer Space,
the out-of-this-world laughs continue with Terl and Ker in
Those Crazy Psychlos!,
only on UPN!”)

It's a measure of the public's indomitable affection for the icon behind Vinnie Barbarino, Vincent Vega, Tony Manero, and Danny Zuko that our love affair with Travolta survived
Battlefield Earth
. And
Moment By Moment
. And
The Experts
. And
Perfect
. With
Battlefield Earth,
Travolta attained pop-culture immortality. He's proved that no film can destroy him, not even this one.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Fiasco

Animal-Abusing, Studio-Wrecking, Career-Killing Case File #81: Heaven's Gate

Originally Posted November 1, 2007

Steven Bach's fascinating, maddening book
Final Cut
chronicles the making and unmaking of the 1980 film
Heaven's Gate
from one of the least interesting possible perspectives: that of a United Artists executive despondent over spiraling costs and angry at an arrogant director who'd gone upriver and taken much of the studio's money with him. It's like reading an account of the sinking of the
Titanic
from the perspective of the guy who owned the company that made the boat.

Reading Bach's book, I felt powerfully conflicted. Critics almost invariably side with filmmakers in their battles with studio executives. For filmmakers are artists, and they don't need some Captain Bringdown in an expensive suit telling them what they can or can't do with the studio's money. And executives are supposed to be well-paid philistines with calculators for hearts.

But what happens when a filmmaker genuinely goes mad? Hollywood films don't exist in a vacuum. When a production like
Heaven's Gate
spirals out of control, companies go out of business (
Heaven's Gate
essentially killed its studio, United Artists, though MGM later
revived it), ambitious filmmakers get rejected by executives terrified of green-lighting the next
Heaven's Gate,
and good, hardworking people lose jobs.

Some creatures lost more than just their jobs. The American Humane Association, which was barred from the set, accused Michael Cimino of slaughtering, maiming, or abusing animals during the production, primarily horses. You can indirectly thank Cimino for those “No animals were harmed in the making of this film” disclaimers at the end of films. The AHA's review of the film states, “The animal action in the film includes an actual cockfight, several horse trips, and a horse being blown up with a rider on its back. People who worked on the set verified more animal abuse, such as chickens being decapitated and steer being bled in order to use their blood to smear on the actors instead of using stage blood.” It ends, “The controversy surrounding the animal action in
Heaven's Gate
prompted the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Alliance Of Motion Picture & Television Producers (AMPTP) to contractually authorize AHA oversight of animals in filmed media.”

Then again, has great art ever been produced that didn't involve staging cockfights, decapitating chickens, blowing up horses, and bleeding cows? I'm pretty sure all those things happened during the filming of the first three Muppet movies.

It's fitting that the original title of
Heaven's Gate
was
Johnson County Wars,
since the production resembled a war more than a typical movie set. Cimino kept an armed guard by the screening room to prevent executives from meddling with his vision, and he directed while wearing an admiral's cap and wielding a gun full of blanks. In the battle of
Heaven's Gate,
whom do you side with: the company man or the madman? Captain Willard or Colonel Kurtz? The man with the lunatic vision or the executive with shareholders to answer to?

Heaven's Gate
helped kill the auteur-driven American cinema of the late '60s and '70s. It became the ultimate cautionary warning, a campfire tale senior executives tell junior executives to scare the bejeesus out of them during corporate retreats.

Watching
Heaven's Gate
today, it's easy to see why Cimino could look at dailies and think he had a masterpiece. It's equally easy to see how Bach could look at those same dailies and sense a looming financial disaster. From a creative standpoint, funding a movie like
Heaven's Gate
was risky. From a financial standpoint, it was insane.

With
Heaven's Gate,
Cimino went from being one of the hottest filmmakers alive to persona non grata. He went from auteur of the future to dead man walking. His career and reputation never recovered from the one-two punch of the film's legendarily troubled filming and box-office death. Cimino hasn't directed a film since 1996's barely released
The Sunchasers
. Rarely has a filmmaker fallen so far so fast. Cimino could have resurrected his career with 1984's
Footloose,
but he was fired after the shoot threatened to turn into
Heaven's Gate: The Musical
.

Yet today,
Heaven's Gate
stands as a stirring testament to Cimino's superlative gift as a cinematic stylist. It's a film of rare beauty and scope, a feast for the eyes and a harrowing, unflinching meditation on the cruelty of capitalism. It rivals William Friedkin's
Sorceror
in its bone-deep cynicism and eviscerating take on the free market's coal-black heart of darkness. In
Heaven's Gate,
being poor and an immigrant is a crime punishable by death, and the lives of the poor have less value than the cattle they steal to keep from starving.

The director's cut of
Heaven's Gate
begins with a series of stunning setpieces set at the Harvard graduation of James Averill (Kris Kristofferson) and his dissolute chum Billy Irvine (John Hurt), the booze-sodden class orator and class cutup. From the first frame, Cimino's roving camera goes anywhere and everywhere, panning endlessly and ecstatically across lushly orchestrated processions and a dance where the camera becomes a silent partner to the boozy, bleary graduates reveling in a hard-won sense of accomplishment. Cimino conveys in deliriously cinematic terms the pomp and grandeur of an Ivy League graduation. It's the benediction of the next generation of American aristocrats, filled with lawyers, senators, and other masters of the universe.

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.