The 1980 movie Heaven’s Gate, a mega-flop filmed in Glacier National Park, was so wretched that it destroyed the director’s reputation, helped extinct United Artists, and sent Hollywood westerns to the doghouse.

As the saying goes, it seemed like a pretty good idea at the time. Back in 1978, director Michael Cimino talked United Artists studio into producing a major western film based on the Johnson County War, a late frontier era (1892) range war in which struggling immigrant ranchers fought an uphill battle against powerful cattle barons and their hired killers in Wyoming’s Powder River Country. It was David vs. Goliath with rustling, lynching, a sheriff’s posse, the Sixth U.S. Cavalry Regiment, and scenic grandeur thrown in for good measure.

Cimino would direct this big-budget epic, and boy, did he ever look like a sure thing. Everything was breaking right for him. His 1978 movie The Deer Hunter, now a classic, would walk away with the 1979 Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. He was a man with the Midas Touch.

With a big story, a big director, and a big budget, it wasn’t hard to sign up actors who could carry the weight. The leading roles went to Kris Kristofferson, Isabelle Huppert, and Christopher Walken. The large supporting cast included such notables as Jeff Bridges, Joseph Cotten, Sam Waterston, John Hurt, Mickey Rourke, and Willem Dafoe.

Shooting got underway in April 1979 at Glacier National Park, a location that Cimino chose for scenic values, and despite terrible logistical problems (such as the lack of nearby housing for the cast and film crew). Things did not go well from the very outset. Early misgivings gave way to growing despair as the production assumed the tell-tale appearance of a slow-motion train wreck.

“Slow” is the key concept. The production fell seriously behind schedule almost immediately and never achieved a comfortable stride. Cimino’s overbearing style angered and frustrated the cast members, yielding an atmosphere in which finely-tuned teamwork became impossible. The filming was much more than routinely difficult, and production costs skyrocketed to around $200,000 a day. This led United Artists bigwigs to rue the fact that they had given Cimino what amounted to a blank check.

When the last of the film was finally in the can, a production that was originally budgeted for $11.6 million cost nearly $30 million to shoot and racked up another $10 million or so in other expenses. The final production cost amounted to over $120 million in today’s money.

Cimino seemed to lose his sense of “enough” while making this film. He shot an astonishing 220 hours of film to create a movie he first whittled to a hideously long 5 ½ hours and then to a studio-ordered 3 hours and 39 minutes.

United Artists released Heaven’s Gate in November 1980, but the studio might as well not have bothered. Getting theater audiences to sit through a very long film is one thing, but getting them to fork over their hard-earned money to sit through a very long and very bad film is quite another. Well before the long-overdue film premiered, word had gotten around that it was a stinker. Film critics savaged it, and the only buzz the movie ever got was bad. The box office in the U.S. was less than $3.5 million, making Heaven’s Gate one of the worst flops in moviemaking history.

The aftermath was not pretty. Michael Cimino’s reputation was ruined; Heaven’s Gate even earned the poor guy a Golden Raspberry Award (Razzie) for Worst Director (1982). United Artists, though not financially ruined, ended up being sold off and obliterated for reasons that included being responsible for the Heaven’s Gate fiasco. The western movie genre, which Hollywood had been resurrecting in the 1970s, was dealt a blow from which it has not yet fully recovered. Studios, appalled by the freewheeling spending of Cimino, Francis Ford Coppola, and some other directors, tightened budget controls and looked much closer to the bottom line. To prevent the sort of flagrant animal abuse that occurred during the filming of Heaven’s Gate, the movie industry struck a deal with the American Human Association to have the AHA monitor animal use in all filmed media.

Heaven’s Gate has been variously called a complete failure, a cinematic waste, an unqualified disaster, and the worst movie ever made. On the strength of this we think it’s fair to say that it was the worst movie ever filmed in a national park.