Final Cut Quotes

“On March 11, 1980, Steven Bach was given some shocking news: Andy Albeck told him that David Field had handed in his resignation and was going to 20th Century Fox. It was announced in the press as being for the usual boilerplate “personal reasons.” But everyone at Fox soon learned the real reason for his fleeing United Artists (once principle photography had finally wrapped on Heaven’s Gate)…

DAVID FIELD: “Everyone thought it was because of Heaven’s Gate. In fact, it was because I could not go on working with Steven Bach.

”
― Steven Bach, Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists

“PAULINE KAEL: "In all probability Michael Cimino could read Steven Bach a lot better than Bach could read Cimino.”
― Steven Bach, Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists

“Vincent Canby’s overview may have been Olympian, but it was well informed. ‘“Heaven’s Gate’—the phenomenon not the movie— has been a long time coming, but to blame it on any one director or corporate management is vastly to oversimplify what’s been happening to commercial American movies over the last several decades … the cost of making a movie, even a modest one, has soared even faster than the cost of everything else in the economy,” he wrote, correctly pointing out that “the hits make more money than ever, while people won’t go to see a Hop even if it’s tree. The pressure to find movies with some kind of built-in appeal grows greater day by day. Thus the emphasis on sequels, on ‘properties’ that have been pre-sold as best-selling books or hit plays, by name writers, by casts with great film or television celebrity, or by the reputations of those directors who have become ‘bankable.’”....The weaknesses and foolishness of an entire industry had been focused and exposed by Heaven’s Gate and United Artists....”
― Steven Bach, Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists

“We seem to be in the ironic and paradoxical position of not really trusting the gentleman [Michael Cimino] with our money and, therefore, insisting that he take more.”
― Steven Bach, Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists