Michael Cimino, who died recently at 77, was often cited (and is now eulogized) as the man whose hubris singlehandedly ended the age of the auteur. This was an overstatement — there were deep forces at work, as ever, in the transition from the years of Coppola and Scorsese to the years of Jerry Bruckheimer. But Cimino’s famous studio-bankrupting turkey, Heaven’s Gate, really was a kind of Gladwellian tipping point, a hinge from the cinema of the ’70s into a very different world.
In our own era of tentpoles and sequels and reboots and endless “pre-sold” properties, I’ve often wondered what it would take to bring the entire blockbuster-industrial complex down. Could there ever be a Heaven’s Gate of the blockbuster era — a movie so costly and so disastrous that it forced a rethink, a reset, a return not to the auteur era but at least to the days when summer movies were actually original?
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