Once upon a time, Robert DeNiro was an actor.
This was before the wave of terrible comedies he's starred in of late, and the wave of mediocre action films he appeared in before that.
DeNiro used to be an edgy and respected actor - to the surprise of anyone who's seen his work post 1995, in which he's contractually banned from being in a good film unless it also stars Bradley Cooper.
In 1978, he was in Michael Cimino's "The Deer Hunter," a story about soldiers in Vietnam who are captured and forced to play Russian roulette against each other for the amusement of the Viet-Cong. Whilst all of the captured soldiers find this process hellish and scarring, one man (Christopher Walken's character) finds that he can no longer feel alive unless he participates, and after failing to escape with his comrades, spends the rest of his life in underground roulette matches until DeNiro's character, plagued by survivor's guilt, travels back to South East Asia to seek out his friend and bring him home.
It's a psychologically complex and harrowing tale, riddled with high-caliber actors, that won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting actor (Walken.) I, for one, thought it sucked.
Don't get me wrong - the themes and basic plotline are superb. It just drags on and on, when it doesn't need to. I actually preferred the novelisation of the screenplay, based on the script, that clocks in around 180 pages. This means that you can read the book as fast as you can watch the movie. Try doing THAT with anything that isn't directed by Peter Jackson.
Fun Fact: You can write all of The Hobbit whilst watching the first two scenes of The Hobbit.
The writing should have been on the wall when it came to Michael Cimino and his overly long movies, but instead, he was treated as some kind of golden boy and as a result allowed to make a film called "Heaven's Gate."
"Heaven's Gate" is a legendary film for all the wrong reasons. Not to be confused with the suicide cult of the same name, the film deals with the real-life "Johnson County War" in Wyoming between settlers and land barons.
There are myriad stories about how much of a failure this movie was. As a film, it single-handedly bankrupted its own studio, United Artists, by running up a budget that quadrupled the agreed amount and then losing an estimated $39 million at the box office. Just how much money was pissed away by Cimino beggars belief. In an era when each foot of film cost money, Cimino demanded fifteen retakes of a guy mooning some settlers. He had an entire tree cut down, piece-by-piece, and then reassembled elsewhere just so it could be present in a shot. The film contains a five minute sequence of someone playing the fiddle on roller skates. Cimino once allegedly delayed filming until a cloud he liked the look of had drifted into shot.
As a result, "Heaven's Gate" is almost singlehandedly responsible for the current Hollywood system, in which the money men can dictate what does or doesn't happen in a film. As a result of its excesses, the film is four fucking hours long. During the interval of the premiere screening (again: it's four hours long) Cimino reputedly asked his publicist why nobody present was drinking the champagne, only to be told "because they hate the movie, Michael."
Yet it's just possible that "Heaven's Gate" and Michael Cimino were ahead of their time.
The cast of "Heaven's Gate" is pretty impressive by modern standards. Kris Kristofferson (who has been in a mixed bag of films, but is undeniably one of the greatest songwriters of all time) takes the lead, but also featured are John Hurt (who starred in "The Elephant Man" in between "Heaven's Gate" being started and completed, and won an Oscar in the process), Jeff Bridges (whose Oscar winning film "Crazy Heart" was in part born of him sitting around on set with Kristofferson), Christopher Walken, Brad Dourif, Mickey Rourke, Terry O'Quinn (John Locke from "Lost"), Ronnie Hawkins (founder of what would eventually become The Band) and Willem Dafoe.
It's Dafoe who struck my interest. In an interview many years later with Empire magazine, he said that Cimino's grand ambition was to have the film run so long, that as the conflict escalated, the background characters whom the viewer had become accustomed to would slowly whittle down. The screen would feel lonlier for the lack of people you had become, in cinematic terms, nodding acquaintances with.
This made me think that maybe - just maybe - the recent trend for long-form TV shows has redeemed Michael Cimino. At least a little.
I'm on record as saying that I hated "Breaking Bad" for its glacial pace, but in the most recent episode of "Game of Thrones," a background character was killed.
The character was killed off screen, and I couldn't tell you the name of said character, but when we (as an audience) saw the body, I was genuinely saddened. The character had clearly died bravely and in a noble sacrifice, and I vaguely recognised the person in question from the previous thirty-eight episodes.
This is exactly what Cimino had in mind for his sprawling cast and ludicrous run-time when he made "Heaven's Gate."
Is "Heaven's Gate" a shitty film? Yes. Once again, it features five minutes of someone playing the fiddle on rollerskates. There is no reason in the world to include that in any movie, unless it's a movie about rollerskating violinists, in which case you should probably pick a different subject anyway.
That does not, however, mean that the thinking behind it was all bad. It's just that the slow-burn effect which Cimino so singularly failed to create on the big-screen is tailor made for the small one.
TV really is the new cinema, in terms of character and impact. Sure, I didn't like "Breaking Bad," but had I been able to develop an emotional investment in it then it would have been heartbreaking for me to see any of the relatively small cast killed off, no matter how many hours it took to happen.
Admittedly, there will never be spectacle on the scale of "The Avengers" (which I loved) on the small screen, but as blockbusters become progressively dumber, how about we all make a deal? Movies can be big and stupid and feature a lot of explosions, and TV can be slower and smarter and make us care.
Occasionally, there will be crossover points (big, bombastic TV and smart, caring movies - ideally a mixture of both like "The Avengers" or "Thrones") but it's increasingly looking like a case of one or the other.
Choose your weapon.
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