Synopsis:

During the Johnson County War in 1890 Wyoming, a sheriff born into wealth does his best to protect immigrant farmers from rich cattle interests.

Intentions:

An attempt at recreating an earlier version of Heaven's Gate using all available footage from both the theatrical and director's cuts.

Change List:

There are only a few cuts in this edit because most of the changes are additions. Here's a basic list: 1. Added the overture and original UA logo at the beginning taken from the Capelight release 2. Inserted two shots of Averill looking up at a painting and one shot of a bored professor yawning from the theatrical cut, requiring minor audio reconstruction 3. Inserted a shot of immigrants getting off the train from the theatrical, requiring audio reconstruction 4. Inserted the theatrical cut exchange about philosophy between J.B. and Averill featuring a reused shot of the latter to bridge the gap between it and the big man bursting through the door. 5. Moved a shot of cows grazing from the theatrical cut to include any possible footage of the "married man" sequence, which now flows into the spat between Nate and the other cattleman over Ella that occurs later in the director's cut. 6. Recreated the intermission from scratch due to it not being present in either release. Two instrumental pieces from the soundtrack are played here; one of which was used in the premiere version of the film and the other from a dvd release of said version. 7. Inserted the shot of Irvine pulling himself up after Canton slaps him from the theatrical cut and a deleted line of dialogue. Unfortunately, the cut line was unable to be found in 1080p, so I had to source it from a youtube clip that I upscaled. I tried my best to regrade it to fit in but the dip in quality is still somewhat noticeable. 9. Inserted the longer deliberation of the immigrants about whether to fight back from the theatrical cut. I had to use an alternate take of one character's dialogue to avoid repetition when cutting into the director's cut footage.] 10. Inserted Major Wolcott's death from the theatrical that was strangely absent from the director's cut.

Additional Notes:

Two Blu-rays were used for the edit; The 2012 Criterion release served as the base and additional footage was sourced from the German "DigiBook" release by Capelight. I tried my best to approximate the structure of the lost 5 hour workprint Michael Cimino screened for UA execs in June, 1980. Because of this, I opted not to use any of the audio overdubs recorded for the theatrical version and tried to recreate the grimy sepia-tone tint the film originally premiered with. In the case of a few scenes, I had to do some narrative restructuring so that their longer versions would be in the places originally intended. The missing two hours of runtime were destroyed in the initial editing process, so this is more or less the closest we'll ever get to the actual workprint.