Regardless of production issues, it was up against tough competition!
1980 was saturated with more than one of that recently found Hollywood treasure-trove genre, the Star Wars- and Jaws-style blockbuster.
1980, that cusp between two very divergent eras (a more liberal recession-wracked decade, the 1970s and another w/ an assertive neo-conservatist bellicosity ,the materialistic '80s, featured seemingly no end of "blockbuster" flicks as well as some movie classics, all with A-tier stars and very charismatic music credits: The Blues Brothers, The Shining, Raging Bull, Xanadu w/ Olivia Newton-John and a Gene Kelly comeback, Superman w/ music by Star Wars and Jaws' John Williams, another Star Wars sequel, Flash Gordon, Fame (another popular musical), Coal miner's daughter and even the B-grade Alligator.
Even from across the Atlantic competition was tough w/ Handmade's The Long Good Friday and the Elephant Man into the mix.
There was a recession and 1980 movie-goers had limited choices for limited budgets in those days where there were no or few video rentals!
Aside from Cimino's or the production's excesses, the studio must've been to blame for not marketing, positioning and timing it properly for a competitive movie going market.
Highly recommended for courses on American film - it's an auteur movie, a [neo-]western, and interesting in its own right.
I am not sure about the pacing of the film, but I think the ponderous or contemplative pacing was a mark of its era (the decade or so extending from the late 60s to 1980/81) rather an aesthetic turned conventional dramatic device. The story itself is compelling but I don't know if the pacing helped it much, as Cimino seemed interested also in his meditations on the American wild west of Wyoming in the 1880s, in addition to telling the story of the Johnson County War between big ranchers and immigrants and small ranchers.
The sound is indeed spectacular. The soundtrack on this film (I mean the background sounds and their mixing with the music, score and dialogue) was quite a piece of work. I usually don't notice sound mixing in a movie, but here the sound mixing sorts of imposes itself. Watch for example of intricate mixing of sound in the roller skating scene, and at the station where the Rancher gives a speech to the posse he raised against the immigrants. The quality of sound is another part of the perfectionism evident everywhere in this production.
The perfectionism of Cimino extends to the meticulous realism he was after, albeit an idealistic realism, also not uncommon at the time with directors of his caliber. The sets and scenes are put together with near ethnographic care. More on this later in my gripes. But for all this attention to realism it just isn't gritty enough, and the events aren't urgent enough, that's why I qualified Cimino's realism as idealistic and rather a product of its time - that belated wave of American neo-realismo, largely among America's Italian-American master filmmakers. It was idealistic and has not aged very gracefully - compared to treatments like Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America. Both Cimino and Leone are romantic realists all right, but Leone's is more timeless somehow.
Given such a big vision like Cimino, many of its scenes are big, involving wide spaces, and a large number of extras. This production consequently is a big one.
It is no great wonder they overshot their budget, but it seems to me also there was quite a bit of room of waste too. I read somewhere that the director ended up with over 100 hours of footage. That's huge, considering that Sergio Leone, when done shooting his masterpiece "Once Upon a Time in America", had ended up with about 10 or 12 hours.
Gripes: There was the music of the opening sequence, rather fit for an audience in an old folks' home in Lithuania, than the Star Wars and the disaster movie decade (and antihero decade) generation. Then there was the obligatory 13 (count them Thirteen) minutes of some ceremony important in the life of the protagonist(s). In the deer hunter it was the ukranian wedding, in this Led Zeppelin or Titanic of a movie, it was the Harvard graduation celebrations or commencement, constructed and set and cinematographed with ethnographic precision.
While watching the signature Cimino opening (with the rather goofy but trendy-at-its-time premise of starting a dramatic story with a character running to a catch an event) I couldn't help but wonder how much money went into that scene alone. Location shoots, lots of extras arrayed in various localities, in the chapel, in the park, through the streets, etc. How many takes and how much film stock was wasted on getting just the right amount of agitation in the audience at the chapel, befitting a group of graduating Harvard kids? What was Cimino thinking? I know the Deer Hunter worked or seemed to work, being a ponderous movie about the horrors and damages of the Vietnam war to American society (interestingly from an unexpected pointview, ukrainian immigrants). in 1978, It also fit in with the wave of auteur cinema sweeping the box offices. Perhaps more importantly it had the charismatic presence of no less than de Niro, the anti-hero of the decade, and Walken, balancing off each other.
But this ballooning film makes me ask myself, what was Cimino thinking? What made him think that audiences high on disco and cocaine and Star Wars and disaster movies needed or wanted to watch such ponderous pace, such slow going expositions? I don't discount his artist's license to create whatever he pleases, but please, get funding from a cultural palace not from Hollywood.
I miss the UA logo, one of the best, and their portfolio, also one of the best, among the studios of the time. How and why they didn't see this box-office train wreck coming befuddles me.
While I gotta hand it to Cimino for his sincere of idealistic realism, and for constructing beautiful scenes and tableaux worthy of great painters. Indeed many long-shot and extreme-long shot scenes make some of the most beautifully constructed photographic compositions in American cinema, full of meditative idealism, a gritty realism. But man, how was he allowed to completely ignore marketability in a profit-driven industry?
An even bigger mystery would be how given the failures of this Cimino production and Bertolucci's Neocente, how could another studio greenlight Sergio leone's Once Upon a Time in America.
