Further Reading
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
National Weather Service Web site. http://www
.weather.gov.
Stein, Paul.The Macmillan Encyclopedia of Weather.
New York: Macmillan Reference, 2001.
Victor Lindsey
See also Agriculture in the United States; Business
and the economy in the United States; Cold Sunday;
El Niño; Environmental movement; Farm Aid; Farm
crisis; Natural disasters.
Heaven’s Gate
Identification American film
Director Michael Cimino (1939- )
Date Released November 19, 1980
Significance Heaven’s Gatebecame one of the most
famous box-office flops in film histor y. The film’s well-
publicized demise helped end the 1970’s trend of young di-
rectors being given significant control of their films. It also
contributed to the demise of the United Artists studio.
Heaven’s Gatedramatized the 1892 Johnson County,
Wyoming, range war, in which rich cattle ranchers,
with the alleged approval of the U.S. government,
hired a mercenary army to kill immigrant farmers
homesteading on their grazing lands. Kris Kristof-
ferson played Jim Averill, a Harvard-educated mar-
shal vainly trying to prevent the bloodshed. With a
cast featuring Christopher Walken, John Hurt, Sam
Waterston, Jeff Bridges, and French actress Isabelle
Huppert, the gritty and violent film discarded many
standard Western conventions yet featured breath-
taking sequences like the Harvard graduation ball, a
frontier dance on rollerskates, and the climactic bat-
tle between immigrants and mercenaries. Director
Michael Cimino, who had won an Academy Award
forThe Deer Hunter(1978), was obsessed with detail,
sending production costs soaring to $36 million and
triggering prerelease press denouncing the large
amount of money being spent on a single film.
When the film finally premiered, American critics
condemned the three-hour, thirty-nine-minute epic
as pretentious, overlong, incoherent, self-indulgent,
and even un-American. United Artists, which had fi-
nanced the film, immediately withdrew it from re-
lease. While Cimino reedited the film in an attempt
to salvage it, the print and television media relent-
lessly ridiculed him and his movie, creating a perma-
nent impression in the public’s mind that it was one
of the worst films ever made. Rereleased in early
1981 in a two-and-one-half-hour version,Heaven’s
Gateearned only $1.5 million at the box office and
made Westerns unfashionable for a decade.
By 1981, Americans, deflated by recession and
the scandals of Watergate and Vietnam, no longer
wanted films that questioned the myths that had
built America. Escapist hits likeStar Wars(1977) and
Raiders of the Lost Ark(1981) presented a more ap-
pealing and comforting world of clear good and evil,
presaging the jingoistic machismo and outsized pa-
triotism of the Reagan era.
Impact The failure ofHeaven’s Gateprompted
Transamerica, United Artists’ parent company, to
sell the studio to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which in-
corporated the studio’s properties but did away with454 Heaven’s Gate The Eighties in America
Director Michael Cimino at the Berlin Film Festival in 1979.
(AP/Wide World Photos)