Offering a rare and intimate look into the creation of one of Hollywood’s legendary epics, the Tamsen Gallery presents Inside Heaven’s Gate: Behind the Scenes with Susan Bridges, an exhibition that highlights both cinematic history as well as Bridges’s personal journey as a photographer whose lens brought out the emotion in the production.
Heaven’s Gate, with Academy Award–winning director Michael Cimino, producer Joann Carelli, and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Art Direction/Set Direction in 1982. The breathtaking scenery and grand sets provided an amazing backdrop for Bridges to shoot.
Bridges, whose husband, Jeff Bridges, was one of the film’s stars, was allowed in by the famously private director Cimino, and she was able to, almost invisibly, capture the essence of the grand sets and those involved in the film. “I was just around all the time,” she said. “They forgot about me a little bit. I was able to go places that I wouldn’t have gone without my camera…. I just went where I felt like going, where I thought there would be an interesting shot. It was so much fun.”…