Steven Bach

“She attempts to give the impression of untiring activity, thereby underlining her importance. Meanwhile her colleagues calmly and expertly get on with the job at hand.”
― Steven Bach, Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl

“Vincent Canby’s overview may have been Olympian, but it was well informed. ‘“Heaven’s Gate’—the phenomenon not the movie— has been a long time coming, but to blame it on any one director or corporate management is vastly to oversimplify what’s been happening to commercial American movies over the last several decades … the cost of making a movie, even a modest one, has soared even faster than the cost of everything else in the economy,” he wrote, correctly pointing out that “the hits make more money than ever, while people won’t go to see a Hop even if it’s tree. The pressure to find movies with some kind of built-in appeal grows greater day by day. Thus the emphasis on sequels, on ‘properties’ that have been pre-sold as best-selling books or hit plays, by name writers, by casts with great film or television celebrity, or by the reputations of those directors who have become ‘bankable.’”....The weaknesses and foolishness of an entire industry had been focused and exposed by Heaven’s Gate and United Artists....”
― Steven Bach, Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists