Great Writer and Cineaste

Despite his role in Cimino's Heaven's Gate, Steven Bach appreciation and understanding of film extends far beyond what he is most associated with. Final Cut is not only one of the most intriguing books on the industry, it is also an exemplary memoir and piece of non-fiction writing.

Steven Bach, Producer, Biographer and Memoirist, Dies at 70 March 28, 2009

By WILLIAM GRIMES

Steven Bach, who as a studio executive at United Artists took the fall for the colossal failure of the western epic “Heaven’s Gate” but 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.

The cause was cancer, said Robert Lescher, his agent.

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 “Heaven’s 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,” Roger Ebert wrote. “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.”

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 ‘Heaven’s Gate’ ” (1985), regarded as a classic insider account of Hollywood.

“It is the best book ever written about the making of a movie,” the film critic David Thomson said. “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.”

Mr. Bach was born in Pocatello, Idaho, and attended high school in Boise. After studying at the Sorbonne and earning a degree in French and English from Northwestern University in 1961, he taught American literature at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Ill.

In 1966 he moved to Los Angeles and, after working in public relations, earned a doctorate in film at the University of Southern California, writing a dissertation on the films of Josef von Sternberg.

For the next decade he worked as a story editor on theatrical and film projects with the producer Gabriel Katzka, and as executive story editor for Palomar Pictures International, which produced “Sleuth” and “The Heartbreak Kid.”

As a partner in Pantheon Pictures in the early 1970s, he helped produce the plays “The Comedians” and “Anna Christie,” with Liv Ullmann, on Broadway, and several films, including “The Parallax View,” “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” and “Mr. Billion.”

As vice president and head of international production at United Artists, Mr. Bach did more than preside over the “Heaven’s Gate” affair. He helped bring to the screen critically or commercially successful films like “Raging Bull,” “The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” “Stardust Memories,” “Annie Hall,” “Eye of the Needle,” “Cutter and Bone” and “True Confessions.”

No matter. Close proximity to “Heaven’s Gate” sealed his fate and that of the studio, which was sold to MGM while “Heaven’s Gate” was being shown at the Cannes Film Festival.

Mr. Bach, regarded as perhaps too much of an intellectual and a gentleman to run a studio, turned his hand to writing and teaching. He wrote three well-received biographies: “Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend” (1992), “Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart” (2001) and “Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl” (2007).

In the late 1990s he taught in the film program at Columbia University and for the last decade he taught film and literature at Bennington College.

He is survived by his companion, Werner Röhr.

He lived long enough to see critical opinion begin to shift on “Heaven’s Gate.” “That’s the final irony,” Mr. Thomson said. “I think it’s a much more interesting picture than its legend would lead one to believe. It wouldn’t surprise me if one day it’s regarded as a great film.”

The Greatest

A Swedish Director’s Literary Lens

By MIKE HALE

March 5, 2009
The New York Times

At the age of 77 the Swedish director Jan Troell — after a four-decade career that includes a best picture prize at the Berlin Film Festival, a Golden Palm nomination at Cannes and a best picture Oscar nomination — is among the world’s most distinguished filmmakers. He is also practically invisible in the United States.

Only two of his films, the well-regarded 1996 “Hamsun,” about the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, and “Hurricane,” a misfire from his brief sojourn in Hollywood in the late 1970s, are available here on DVD. His masterpieces — “The Emigrants,” “The New Land,” “The Flight of the Eagle” — have not been in print since the days of the laser disc.

It’s a state of affairs that can drive his American fans to distraction but that does not appear to hold any particular interest for Mr. Troell.

“I haven’t really thought about that,” Mr. Troell (pronounced tro-el) said by phone from his home near Malmo recently before politely moving the discussion to more relevant topics, like the opening in New York and Los Angeles on Friday of his latest movie, “Everlasting Moments,” a 2009 Golden Globe nominee for best foreign-language film. It will be the first Troell movie released in the United States in 12 years, but who’s counting?

Mr. Troell’s relative obscurity here might seem surprising given the splash he made in America with his third film, “The Emigrants,” in 1972. The story of 19th-century farmers making an epic journey from southern Sweden to the forests of Minnesota earned four Oscar nominations that year: for best adapted screenplay, director, actress (Liv Ullmann) and picture. It is still one of only eight foreign-language films to get a best-picture nod.

But possible reasons for his low profile, beyond the natural reserve evident in conversation, come to mind easily. There’s the Ingmar Bergman factor, for one thing. Perhaps there has been room in the American consciousness for only one 20th-century Swedish cinematic genius. Mr. Troell, of course, was quick to dismiss the notion that he had worked in his countryman’s shadow.

“I would prefer to say I’ve been in the sun of Bergman,” he said. “His films have always inspired me.”

And Mr. Troell has not been prolific, making 12 features in 43 years. He said that with documentaries and television films he had worked more or less steadily but acknowledged that his pace was deliberate.

“It has taken a very long time for several of the films to be financed,” he said, “mainly because I have not been what film companies usually are looking for. And I’ve been quite expensive sometimes too.”

That comes with the territory when you have a fondness for making long, meticulously designed period dramas like “The Emigrants” and its sequel, “The New Land,” both three hours plus, or the two-and-a-half-hour polar exploration story “The Flight of the Eagle,” set in 1897 and requiring the re-creation of a balloon flight over the Arctic ice cap. There are no car chases or costumed superheroes here, though Mr. Troell’s avoidance of mass-market material is paired with an extraordinarily accessible, straightforward narrative style.

“Everlasting Moments” is a period film too, set around World War I, though at 131 minutes it is practically a short by Troell standards. It differs from his earlier American releases in being primarily a domestic drama, tracking the life of a poor Malmo family.

But the themes of heroism and fearless exploration that run through Mr. Troell’s work are present in the character of the struggling wife and mother Maria Larsson, played by the Finnish actress Maria Heiskanen. Like the emigrant Karl-Oskar, the balloonist S. A. Andree and the aviatrix Elsa Andersson (in the 2001 “As White as in Snow,” never released in America), Maria is an adventurer, even if she travels nowhere. Her vehicle is the bulky camera she wins in a raffle.

For Mr. Troell the story of how photography changes Maria’s life was doubly appealing: the character was based on his wife’s great-aunt, and her journey mirrored his own.

“I started when I was 14,” he said. “I was given a used camera almost the same as the one she uses, 9-by-12-centimeter glass plate. For me it was a similar adventure as it must have been for Maria, the miracle, the mystery of the images coming in the red light” of the darkroom.

Mr. Troell worked as a still photographer and a schoolteacher before breaking into movies, and it’s tempting to see the mark of those professions in his filmmaking style: humanist, literary, cerebral yet fast moving, with a constant emphasis on clear storytelling.

It’s an aesthetic, and an ethos, summed up by the photography studio owner played by Jesper Christensen in “Everlasting Moments”: “What do you see as you look through the camera, Maria? You see a world, there to be explored — to preserve, to describe. Those who’ve seen it — they cannot merely close their eyes. You can’t turn back."

There are more explorations in Mr. Troell’s future, despite some issues with hearing and memory. (Asked what movies he’d liked recently, he said the titles rarely stayed in his head, but then quickly summoned up “Lars and the Real Girl” — “Really unusual” — and “Frozen River.”)

His new project, a script he is composing with the Danish screenwriter Klaus Rifbjerg, does not sound destined to raise his profile in the United States. It’s another period drama, set in Sweden during World War II, and its protagonist, the real-life anti-Nazi activist Torgny Segerstedt, is the most anachronistic of heroes: a crusading newspaper editor.

As if that’s not enough, Mr. Troell threw in a last notion: “I’m thinking of making this one in black and white.”