ABSTRACT
United Artists’ historical legacy as a director-run studio was severely tested by Heaven’s Gate. As Michael Cimino’s film ran disastrously over-budget and over-schedule, it attracted increasingly negative press. By the time the film was withdrawn from its brief theatrical run and returned to the cutting-room in late 1980, Heaven’s Gate had become a paragon of directorial excess, and its studio was embroiled in financial turmoil. This chapter charts the immediate fallout from the Heaven’s Gate saga, as United Artists’ parent corporation Transamerica put the studio up for sale, leading to the MGM/UA merger of May 1981.
The troubled production and distribution of small-scale, idiosyncratic films like Cutter’s Way (Ivan Passer 1981) suggests that the failure of Heaven’s Gate marked the end-point of a particular brand of auteurism, which UA had successfully championed throughout the 1970s. The newly amalgamated MGM/UA found more reliable returns from the ongoing series of James Bond and Rocky sequels throughout the 1980s. This chapter undertakes a discursive analysis of trade paper coverage, tracing the production, distribution, and reception of key UA films, revealing the studio’s institutional instability throughout a decade marked by shifting governance and corporate ownership. What emerges is a picture of a studio in the midst of an identity crisis, finding its most stable profit streams by reiterating increasingly streamlined instalments of established film franchises, as the industry itself was reshaped by a succession of mergers and acquisitions.
