Bach went on to write Final Cut, a gripping insider account of the debacle, died on Wednesday at his home in Arlington, Vt. He was 70 and also had a home in Munich.
At United Artists, where he became senior vice president in charge of worldwide production in 1978, Mr. Bach had the misfortune to be associated with one of the greatest cinematic disasters in Hollywood history, the 1980 film Heavens Gate, a sprawling historical drama about range wars in Wyoming in the 1890s. Under the direction of Michael Cimino, whose film The Deer Hunter had recently won five Academy Awards, the film grew to enormous length the first version screened in New York ran three and a half hours and ended up costing $36 million, five times the budget of an average studio film at the time.
The reviews were savage, even after the film had been drastically shortened.
If the film was formless at four hours, it was insipid at 140 minutes. At either length it is so incompetently photographed and edited that there are times when we are not even sure which character we are looking at.
Roger Ebert
The box office was worse. It is as if somebody called every household in the country and said, There will be a curse on your family if you go see this picture, one United Artists executive said.
In the aftermath Mr. Bach was fired. He turned around and documented his experience in Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heavens Gate (1985), regarded as a classic insider account of Hollywood.
It is the best book ever written about the making of a movie, the It gives you an understanding of the battles, the egos, and how a film like that could come about. Its all the more remarkable because hes one of the stooges in the story: he let it happen, and he admits that.
David Thomson film critic
