The Infamous "Heaven's Gate" airs tonight

I've heard it's hailed as some kind of artistic masterpiece in parts of Europe……Yeesh.

Wasn't there like a 15 minute shot of just a guy playing the fiddle or something in the original version?

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A movie so bad, a suicide cult was named after it.

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too soon

Remember in The Deer Hunter Cimino spent like 20 minutes just showing them dancing at the wedding reception. That was really the only slow part of that movie, but with Heaven's Gate the whole movie felt that way.

5 and a half hours long? Holy shite

Here's an excerpt from a recent article on the movie. I didn't know Cimino just died earlier this month. It's just a small window into how nuts the production was. Full Article: LINK

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The movie’s budget was originally set at a wildly optimistic $7.5m, with a release pencilled in for Christmas 1979. The very moment it went into production, this schedule and cost were exposed as pipe dreams. After six days of shooting in Montana, it was already five days behind – a pattern that continued for months as Cimino subjected his exhausted cast to take after take, and generally insisted on printing almost everything. Rumour had it that he wanted to surpass the one million feet of footage Coppola had shot on Apocalypse Now, just to prove himself king of the maverick auteurs. (He succeeded.) Horses were so traumatised on the shoot they needed extensive psychiatry afterwards.

Meanwhile, such was Cimino’s desire for a field of lush grass to host the climactic battle sequence, he built an entire irrigation system under a stretch of prairie without telling the men who were paying for it.

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I didn't know Cimino just died earlier this month.

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I just saw that, too.

However, anyone who saw The Deer Hunter realized he was walking the fine line between genius and folly - Heaven's Gate was kind of his "Apocalypse Now" - except Coppola put his own money into it and ultimately made it work. Heaven's Gate became an example of what not to do - and, in part led to the current film industry's risk averse/big budget films must be safe bets environment in which we get exclusively reboots/sequels or adaptations of source material with a built-in minimum audience.

It is almost certainly the most high profile economic disaster in the history of the film business - you've had a handful of movies since that have exceeded its losses, when adjusted for inflation, but only John Carter even flirts with being as well-known, big-budget bomb over the past 30 or 40 years.