In the kingdom of legendary Hollywood bombs, one reigns supreme. Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate is the movie that sank a film company, incinerated its director's career, and pretty much called a halt to a whole era of cinema.Cimino, who has died at the age of 77, never truly recovered from the Heaven's Gate fiasco. His monumental frontier western became a byword for profligacy, budgetary blow-out and box-office calamity.The ideal moment for a reappraisal, though, is right now. A new director's cut and digital restoration of Heaven's Gate, all supervised by Cimino personally, was released in 2013.It's easy to see how this majestically slow, exquisitely dressed, and extraordinarily expensive-looking vision of frontier life in 1890s Wyoming would have caused the panic it did - not because it's a bad film, but because it's an undeniably taxing one.Audiences in the 1970s had shown patience with the likes of Coppola's much-delayed Apocalypse Now (1979) - from which a similar disaster had widely been expected. But this was a level beyond: a near-four-hour period epic about an obscure land dispute, with none of the contemporary urgency that film boasted.UNDER FIRE: Christopher Walken in 'Heaven's Gate'United Artists had taken a gamble on the picture almost wholly because of Cimino's success with The Deer Hunter (1978), which went on to net him the best picture and director Oscars, and managed a super-healthy domestic gross of $49-million from a $15-million production budget. After this, he was, ever so briefly, the golden boy.The movie's budget was originally set at a wildly optimistic $7.5-million, 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.Steven Bach, then senior vice-president at UA, wrote unguardedly about the whole debâcle in his 1985 book Final Cut: Art, Money and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate:"[He] was building sets and rebuilding them," says Bach, "hiring 100 extras, then 200, then 500, adding horses and wagons and hats, shoes, gloves, dresses, top hats, bridles, boots, roller skates, babushkas, aprons, dusters, buck-boards, gun belts, rifles, bullets, cows, calves, bulls, trees, thousands of tons of dirt, hundreds of miles of exposed film... takes and retakes and retakes of the retakes. And retakes of those."When production at long last wrapped, nearly a full year after it was meant to, the executives settled in nervously for the first screening of Cimino's full cut. The one he showed them lasted five hours and 25 minutes.By the time of its New York premiere, on November 18 1980, the team had managed to wrestle it down to three hours and 39 minutes, but the audience, and the critics, were still aghast at the remote, painterly, high-handed non-event of a picture that had been placed before them."An unqualified disaster," declared Vincent Canby's scathing review in The New York Times, setting the tone for a first-wave critical response of almost unprecedented brutality. This was hubris coming home to roost - or to a roasting.UA withdrew the movie, cut it by a further 70 minutes, and crossed their fingers. But shorter didn't mean better. The movie's total domestic gross was a measly $3.5-million.Heads rolled. UA was soon sold to Kirk Kerkorian's MGM. And the legend of Heaven's Gate ballooned as a cautionary tale, not so much to ambitious visionaries with a faraway look in their eyes, but to studio bean counters of the future.Cimino, for his part, was unrepentant, and slammed Bach's account repeatedly as "a work of fiction". He was often asked to defend Heaven's Gate in interviews, and usually seemed tired of the subject. "Would you ask Picasso to explain Guernica?" was a typical response.Over time, in maybe the most revealing part of this whole saga, Heaven's Gatehas swum free of the opprobrium that attended its funding, production and release, and taken on the gleam of something salvaged, like sunken treasure.When the 219-minute cut was eventually reassembled and screened in Europe, the French took a great shine to it. British critics, too, as august as Derek Malcolm, Nigel Andrews and Philip French, are all on record as fervent admirers.The drive to rescue the movie's reputation, dogged and admirable though it might be, can never undo the plain facts that Cimino wrecked his prospects and scuttled a studio making it.Was it worth all this? Could he have made an equally fine, or in fact a better movie, on budget and on time, without such fatal dereliction of self-control?The case of Heaven's Gate proves that you don't always have to think of the terms "catastrophe" and "classic" as incompatible. Just this once, you're permitted both.- ©The Daily Telegraph..