The studios, after a decade spent floundering and playing catch up, got their act together. Investors were reluctant to back individual visionaries for fear of another Heaven’s Gate. The brief flourishing of director led productions which had grown up in the wake of the studio system collapse at the fag end of the ’60s, and had birthed amongst others the film careers of Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola, sputtered out. United Artists would collapse in the wake of what was considered at the time an unprecedented critical and commercial disaster. Cimino never made a successful film again. What is irrefutable is that the aftershocks felt in the wake of Heaven’s Gate’s capitulation were seismic. The film is often credited with bookending the decade of auteur-led productions during the New Hollywood era, that arguably commenced with Arthur Penn’s Bonnie And Clyde in 1967, and again, arguably, was snuffed out by Heaven’s Gate upon its 1980 release.

This was partly down to the terrible reception of Michael Cimino’s legendarily expensive and wildly overblown studio killer, Heaven’s Gate, which cost a fortune and tanked at the box office in 1980, thanks to an inflated budget, a protracted and problematic production, poor press and the director’s own obsessive and difficult personality. Thrillers and cop movies were the order of the day. Spaghetti Westerns, which emerged in the mid to late sixties, and the revisionist anti-westerns of the sixties and seventies, spearheaded by the likes of Sam Peckinpah, George Roy Hill and Arthur Penn, had also run out of steam. Hollywood was no longer churning out cowboy-related movies at the rate it had during ‘The Golden Age’. It’s fair to say that the Western genre, by the mid 1980s, was on the ropes. Ghosting through the desolate valleys of the late 20th century western

Pale rider on a pale horse