Heaven's Gate is a 1980 American epic Western film written and directed by Michael Cimino, starring Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, John Hurt, Sam Waterston, Brad Dourif, Isabelle Huppert, Jeff Bridges, and Joseph Cotten, and loosely based on the Johnson County War.

At a board meeting, the head of the Association, Frank Canton, tells members, including a drunk Irvine, of plans to kill 125 named settlers, as thieves and anarchists, with the help of the cruel Major Wolcott.

Averill receives a copy of the Association's death list from Minardi, a baseball-playing U.S. Army captain, and later reads the names aloud to the settlers, who are thrown into terrified turmoil.

Cully, a station master and friend of Averill's, sees the train with Canton's posse heading north and rides off to warn the settlers but is murdered en route.

Champion, realizing that his landowner bosses seek to eliminate Watson, goes to Canton's camp and shoots Morrison, the remaining rapist, then refuses to participate in the slaughter.

The coward mayor of the county, Charlie Lezak, proposes to deliver the people on the list peacefully, while the young pharmacist Mr. Eggleston claims that the only way to survive is to brace the weapons and fight the enemy army.

The next day, Averill reluctantly joins the immigrant settlers, with their cobbled-together siege machines and explosive charges, in an attack against Wolcott's men and their makeshift fortifications.

[8] The basic plot elements of the film were inspired by Wyoming's 1892 Johnson County War, the archetypal cattlemen–homesteaders conflict, which also served as the background for Shane and The Virginian.

[10] In 1971, film director Michael Cimino submitted an original script for Heaven's Gate (then called The Johnson County War), but the project was shelved when it failed to attract big-name talent, including John Wayne, who turned down the lead role.

In 1979, on the eve of winning two Academy Awards (Best Director and Best Picture) for 1978's The Deer Hunter, Cimino convinced United Artists to resurrect the Heaven's Gate project with Kris Kristofferson, Isabelle Huppert, and Christopher Walken as the main characters.

[28] Cimino shot more than 1.3 million feet (400,000 metres; nearly 220 hours) of footage, costing the studio approximately $200,000 per day in salary (equivalent to $720,000 in 2022), locations and acting fees.

[30] As a result of the delays, several musicians originally brought to Montana to work on the film for only three weeks ended up stranded, waiting to be called for shoots to materialize.

The experience, as the Associated Press put it, "was both stunningly boring and a raucous good time, full of jam sessions, strange adventures and curiously little actual shooting."

[32] As production staggered forward, United Artists seriously considered firing Cimino and replacing him with another director, implied in the book Final Cut to be Norman Jewison.

[33] Actor John Hurt reportedly spent so long waiting around on the production for something to do that he went off and made The Elephant Man (1980) for David Lynch in the interim, and then came back to shoot more scenes on Heaven's Gate.

The New York Times critic Vincent Canby panned the film, calling it "something quite rare in movies these days - an unqualified disaster," comparing it to "a forced four-hour walking tour of one's own living room."

[44] Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times issued a dissenting opinion when he reviewed the shortened film, becoming one of its few American champions and calling it "a true screen epic" while stating that in two decades as a critic, he had never felt "so totally alone.

"[49][50] David Thomson calls the film "a wounded monster" and argues that it takes part in "a rich American tradition (Melville, James, Ives, Pollock, Parker) that seeks a mighty dispersal of what has gone before.

[55][56][57] on August 30 in the presence of Cimino, followed one month later by screening at the New York Film Festival in the "Masterwork" lineup, along with Laurence Olivier's Richard III and Frank Oz's director's cut of Little Shop of Horrors.

The website's critical consensus reads: "Heaven's Gate contains too many ideas and striking spectacle to be a disaster, but this western buckles under the weight of its own sprawl.

While the money lost due to Heaven's Gate was considerable, United Artists was still a thriving studio with a steady income provided by the James Bond, Pink Panther and Rocky franchises.

During the 1970s, relatively young directors such as Coppola, Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, George Lucas, William Friedkin and Steven Spielberg had been given large budgets with very little studio control (see New Hollywood).

However, the directors' power lessened considerably as a result of disappointing box-office performers such as Friedkin's Sorcerer (1977) and Cruising (1980), Coppola's One from the Heart, and Cimino's Heaven's Gate.

The studios ultimately shifted focus from director-driven films and adopted high-concept features, epitomized by Jaws and Star Wars (both released before Heaven's Gate).

The American Humane Association (AHA), barred from monitoring the animals on set, issued press releases detailing the abuses and organized boycott picket lines.

The outcry prompted the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) to contractually authorize the AHA to monitor the use of all animals in all filmed media afterward.

[69] There are several different versions of the film: Notwithstanding the 325-minute "workprint" cut shown to executives in June 1980, Cimino had rushed through post-production and editing to meet his contractual requirements to United Artists, and to qualify for the 1980 Academy Awards.

[77] The 219-minute cut was reassembled by MGM archivist John Kirk, who reported that large portions of the original negative had been discarded, making this an all-new radical version using whatever alternative available scenes that could be found.

[77] The restored print was screened in Paris and presented to a sold-out audience at New York's Museum of Modern Art with a live introduction by Isabelle Huppert.

[81][82] On April 21, 2014, director, cinematographer, and editor Steven Soderbergh released an unofficial alternate cut of Heaven's Gate via his website extension765.com, under his pseudonym Mary Ann Bernard.