>>Six is a nice number too.
>
>It's a brave man who admits liking "Heaven's Gate." It's on any list of Hollywood disasters.

I am somewhat prone to think that the disaster was a revenge. After telling the ugly truth about Vietnam in the Deer hunter, Cimino thought that he can go deeper in the past and tell some more of ugly truth - the initial accumulation of capital is crime over crime over crime, including well organized slaughter. Only when they have plundered enough, they start making legal, and property becomes sacrosanct. The property they robbed beforehand is now legally theirs.

And it was the time, the last echo of the sixties, when Hollywood had to allow authors some liberty, because the authors were making money. Hollywood was eager to go back to the true and tried cookie cutter and the proper order of things, where producers, lawyers and bankrollers have a final say on what goes and what not. Cimino was chosen as a scapegoat, an example of why letting directors make (decisions about their) movies is wrong. They don't like art, they like industry. Read the first critiques again - they mostly deal with the cost vs lack of popcorn inducing parts, i.e. they complain it's not a commercial movie, and that it's a director's indulgence. The intention to show that author's movie and then one that doesn't have the standard set of [s]features[/s] cliches (brawls, chases, explosions, shootings, guards being shot and not counted) is doomed to fail - and thus set the stage for the critiques to follow. Anyone trying to write against this stream saw the [s]writing on the wall[/s] graffiti and felt left out of the new mainstream... or joined the stream.

So the movie was doomed not on its merits, but on the times that were changing (for the worse, IMO).