On April 16, 1979, one week to the day after winning the Academy Award for Best Director for The Deer Hunter, Michael Cimino began principle photography on Heaven’s Gate. It would be one of the most controversial and least-seen motion pictures ever made. Delivered a year late and 300 percent over its original budget, Heaven’s Gate came to symbolize all the excesses of director-driven pictures. Final Cut tells the story of this most notorious and significant of all Hollywood failures; one that is said to have bankrupted the studio that produced it, United Artists, and marked the end of a golden era in American filmmaking. But Final Cut also makes the case that an important film was destroyed by the public’s fixation on the movie’s finances. It seeks to add balance to the story of Heaven’s Gate, to restore a lost epic and to challenge Hollywood’s current addiction to judging films a success of failure solely on their box office gross.