Steven Bach, a writer, film and literature professor, and studio executive, died last week of cancer, at 70. Born in Pocatello, Idaho, Bach moved to Los Angeles in 1966 and began working in public relations and as a story editor for various production companies. In the late 1970s, he produced Mr. Billion and Butch and Sundance: The Early Years, and was made vice president and head of international production at United Artists, working under UA President Andy Albeck. Albeck and Bach were in place when UA gave the go-ahead to Michael Cimino to direct his epic Western Heaven's Gate, which was in production, on location in Montana, from April 1979 until March 1980 and finally cost upwards of $40 million. (It was originally budgeted at $11 million and scheduled for a Christmas 1979 release.) The collapse of the movie at its first premiere screening in 1980 caused the implosion of UA, which was sold off by its parent company, Transamerica, to MGM, which discontinued its production arm. Five years later, Bach published Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of "Heaven's Gate", a witty, gracefully written account of his time at the studio. Writing in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael called Bach's book "About the only good thing that has ever come from the movie"; David Thomson called it "the best book ever written about the making of a movie. 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.”
In Final Cut, Bach covered the last couple of years of UA's existence, including his role in the making of other movies, such as Raging Bull, and other crises, such as the studio's unsuccessful efforts to maintain its relationship with Woody Allen. (A bunch of UA executives had left to form their own company, Orion, and were wooing Allen, who felt ties of loyalty to them.) The debacle in Montana figures in the narrative as a persistent, pesky irritation--Cimino was always a vainglorious pain in the neck, but after his previous epic, The Deer Hunter, won the Academy Award for Best Picture, he was considered a prestigious one--that steadily inflates into a full-blown migraine. Bach describes what happened, and he also makes it easier to understand how management let it happen--why, with so much else going on, they were slow to figure out how badly things had spun out of control and why they couldn't just fire Cimino when they realized that he was running amok. The book lives as a first-rate picture of what Hollywood moviemaking turned into during the period when studios were becoming the playthings of conglomerates, and an illustration of why this was not a happy development for the history of motion pictures.
Because Bach didn't go easy on himself in the narrative--both he and Albeck come across as considerate, intelligent, and decent men who were in over their heads practically from day one--the book also serves as a demonstration of why its author wasn't cut out for success in the movie industry. After leaving the business and writing Final Cut, Bach, who as a graduate student at the University of Southern California in the 1960's wrote his dissertation on the films of Josef von Sternberg, wrote a biography of Von Sternberg's star creation, Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend (1992), which he followed up with Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart (2001) and Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl (2007). He also taught at Columbia University and Bennington College.
