Steven Bach, a writer, film and literature professor, and studio executive, died last week of cancer, at 70. Born in Pocatello, Idaho, Bach moved to Los Angeles in 1966 and began working in public relations and as a story editor for various production companies. In the late 1970s, he produced Mr. Billion and Butch and Sundance: The Early Years, and was made vice president and head of international production at United Artists, working under UA President Andy Albeck. Albeck and Bach were in place when UA gave the go-ahead to Michael Cimino to direct his epic Western Heaven's Gate, which was in production, on location in Montana, from April 1979 until March 1980 and finally cost upwards of $40 million. (It was originally budgeted at $11 million and scheduled for a Christmas 1979 release.) The collapse of the movie at its first premiere screening in 1980 caused the implosion of UA, which was sold off by its parent company, Transamerica, to MGM, which discontinued its production arm. Five years later, Bach published Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of "Heaven's Gate", a witty, gracefully written account of his time at the studio. Writing in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael called Bach's book "About the only good thing that has ever come from the movie"; David Thomson called it "the best book ever written about the making of a movie. It gives you an understanding of the battles, the egos, and how a film like that could come about. It’s all the more remarkable because he’s one of the stooges in the story: he let it happen, and he admits that.”
Read More...