Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate is a masterpiece and the only big-budget Hollywood epic made since 1980 (other than Children of Men) that has examined and addressed actual social, political, and economic issues in an honest, intelligent, and informed manner. Sadly, though, the widespread popular impression of the film is of a big-budget disaster, created by a megalomaniac, with little or no artistic merit. Michael Epstein’s fascinating documentary Final Cut is historical revisionism of the best kind and a thoroughly enjoyable look into how moviemaking, even when it goes so tremendously right, can be perceived as having gone so horribly wrong.

The documentary begins as a comprehensive look at the history of United Artists (who produced the film) and how the studio became the prime place in the 1970s for films about uncompromising subjects by maverick directors. With Cimino fresh from sweeping the Academy Awards with The Deer Hunter, United Artists was eager to work on Cimino’s follow-up film, a years-in-the-planning dream project about a little-known episode in 19th-century American history, when Wyoming land barons hired mercenaries to systematically remove European immigrants from their land in every way imaginable. For sheer downbeat drama, it’s about as unlikely a subject for a big-budget Hollywood epic as you can imagine.

From this brief and effective overview, the documentary dives into the meat and potatoes of how Heaven’s Gate was made. By contrasting the views of studio executives David Field and Steven Bach with cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond and actor Jeff Bridges (among others), Epstein makes it clear how the film could be both a success artistically as well as a destructive entity — not just to United Artists but also to the future of artist-driven projects in the late 1970s. Rarely has the question of art versus commerce been addressed as comprehensively as it has in this film.

The most fascinating section of the film details the eviscerating reviews Heaven’s Gate received from critics such as Kathleen Carroll and Vincent Canby, which only added momentum to the film’s negative buzz. It becomes clear very quickly that spinning the film as a “disaster” was a calculated move, part of a wider effort on the part of Hollywood’s corporate culture to wrestle control of the filmmaking process away from the artists and place it in the hands of the accountants. The result: decades of empty entertainments like Footloose, Cocktail, and Transformers.

Art is never easy, especially when you’re using other people’s money. Final Cut ends with the question “Was the film worth it?” and perhaps that answer is best left in the hands of each individual viewer to decide. Whether you love or hate Heaven’s Gate, Final Cut is one of the best documentaries out there about the nature of creative desire and how creation always brings destruction in its wake.

Watch Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate online at www.youtube.com.