In 1980 a single film bankrupted a legendary studio, ended careers and closed the door on an era of filmmaking, only to be hailed as a masterpiece decades later. This episode follows Michael Cimino from his 1974 directorial debut and the Oscar-winning The Deer Hunter to United Artists handing him absolute creative control and an $11.6 million budget for Heaven's Gate, a script written in 1971 as The Johnson County War that a western icon widely believed to be John Wayne had rejected.

We go to the Montana shoot where the crew nicknamed him the Ayatollah: roughly 220 hours of footage, a street torn down and rebuilt to be six feet wider, a tree transplanted into a courtyard in England, an irrigation system installed so battlefield grass would stay green, and weeks of stars waiting for the right clouds. Then the five-hour-plus work print, the N ...