Over the weekend we lost a giant of cinema when Michael Cimino passed away on July 2 at the age of 77. Some might wince at the word “giant” to describe Cimino’s work as a writer and director, but he made two masterpieces, and his decade-ish long run between Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) and The Year of the Dragon (1985) make Cimino one of the best directors to emerge from New Hollywood — the American films that span from the late 1960′s to the early 1980′s which represent cinema’s high-water mark.

For me The Deer Hunter (1978) is a masterpiece, and so is the version of Heaven’s Gate (1980) that re-emerged in 1982. However, in the end, The Deer Hunter made Cimino one of the most important directors of his generation and his follow-up, Heaven’s Gate, made him a legendary failure. Here’s Variety‘s word on the documentary Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate…

Vet documentarian Michael Epstein (“The Battle Over ‘Citizen Kane,’”) draws heavily from well-received 1985 book by Steven Bach, senior v.p. and head of worldwide production for United Artists when UA green-lit “Heaven’s Gate.” Taking its cue from Bach’s tome, pic renders production of ill-fated pic — originally budgeted at $7.5 million, but completed for $36 million — as a slow-motion train wreck.

Ultimately, however, Epstein comes off as appreciably more forgiving of Cimino’s fanatical perfectionism and “epic mismanagement,” even to the point of suggesting the original 3-hour, 45-minute version of “Heaven’s Gate” is, for all its many flaws, “a beautiful, ambitious film” that deserves critical re-evaluation.

Artfully entwining outtakes, production stills, film clips and newly filmed interviews with executives, actors and crew, Epstein methodically charts stormy progress of the initially promising project.

Fresh from his triumph with “The Deer Hunter” (1978), his Oscar-winning Vietnam War drama, Cimino was actively courted by UA and other studios eager to release the hot director’s follow-up opus. Bach recalls that, upon seeing “The Deer Hunter,” he was equivocal: “This is a potentially great filmmaker.” Right from the start, however, the former UA exec (who frequently appears on camera through “Final Cut”) had minor misgivings.

During pre-production, for example, Cimino insisted on casting French actress Isabelle Huppert as his female lead. When Bach (among others) complained that Huppert couldn’t speak English well enough for the part, Cimino steamrolled over all objections. After that, Bach claims, production went downhill, then off a cliff.

Here’s Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate…

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The comet Hale-Bopp was visible to the naked eye in the second half of 1996 but it disappeared into sunlight before re-emerging to the visible eye for the entirety of 1997, becoming the brightest object in the sky in the spring of that year. I remember going out night after night to spot the comet on its travels. It was a marvelous novelty to have this bright burning thing above my head every night, but others were even more moved: the Heaven’s Gate cult’s 39 members took their own lives on March 26, 1997 in a bid to have their souls ascend to an alien spacecraft they believed was hidden in the comet’s tail.

The Heaven’s Gate cult wasn’t really different from any other group that seeks to control people, but the cult’s relatively recent tragedy and the plethora of video the group recorded make their story one of the most interesting contemporary cases of its kind. Here’s a British television documentary that tells the tale of the cult’s cracked cosmology, the people who believed it, and their desperate last days…

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We hear the term “cognitive dissonance” thrown around a lot, but the phrase is often misapplied. It’s easy to understand what CD means when you know the strange story behind the origin of the phrase. Here’s the skinny from Slate…

The most famous study into doomsday mix-ups was published in a 1956 book by renowned psychologist Leon Festinger and his colleagues called When Prophecy Fails. A fringe religious group called the Seekers had made the papers by predicting that a flood was coming to destroy the West Coast. The group was led by an eccentric but earnest lady called Dorothy Martin, given the pseudonym Marian Keech in the book, who believed that superior beings from the planet Clarion were communicating to her through automatic writing. They told her they had been monitoring Earth and would arrive to rescue the Seekers in a flying saucer before the cataclysm struck.

Festinger was fascinated by how we deal with information that fails to match up to our beliefs, and suspected that we are strongly motivated to resolve the conflict—a state of mind he called “cognitive dissonance.” He wanted a clear-cut case with which to test his fledgling ideas, so decided to follow Martin’s group as the much vaunted date came and went. Would they give up their closely held beliefs, or would they work to justify them even in the face of the most brutal contradiction?

The Seekers abandoned their jobs, possessions, and spouses to wait for the flying saucer, but neither the aliens nor the apocalypse arrived. After several uncomfortable hours on the appointed day, Martin received a “message” saying that the group “had spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction.” The group responded by proselytizing with a renewed vigour. According to Festinger, they resolved the intense conflict between reality and prophecy by seeking safety in numbers. “If more people can be persuaded that the system of belief is correct, then clearly, it must, after all, be correct.”

When it comes to believing the outrageous, humans seem to have no balderdash threshold. Here’s a fun History Channel program investigating the history of UFO cults in the U.S. through the lens of the infamous Heaven’s Gate group…

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