Gates of Heaven (1978) on Netflix
NR19781h 25mDocumentary
Floyd McClure, a paraplegic, dreams of a cemetery where pets are buried with dignity rather than turned into glue. Cal Harberts and his two sons run a pet cemetery in California.
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- Netflix4.1/5
- IMDb7.3/106,701 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes90%
Trailer
Plot summary
Interviews alone carry the story; there is no narrator. In the first part, Floyd McClure, a paraplegic, describes his aim of giving pets a decent burial, an ambition he traces to the death of his collie and to the rendering plant nearby that turns animals into glue. His business associates and a manager at the rendering plant speak about him. Florence Rasmussen, an elderly woman whose house looked out over the cemetery, is interviewed between the two halves. The second part moves to the Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park, where Cal Harberts and his sons Dan and Phil run the operation, and where pet owners talk about the animals they buried there. The speakers return to questions about what happens to a creature after it dies.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Gates of Heaven (1978)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Director Werner Herzog pledged he would eat the shoe he was wearing if Errol Morris's film on such an improbable subject was completed and shown publicly. Herzog kept the wager, and the eating of his footwear became the short film Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.
- Production on Gates of Heaven was difficult: Errol Morris clashed with his cinematographer over the film's visual style and fired three of them before settling on Ned Burgess, with whom he later worked again on Vernon, Florida.
- Errol Morris had a falling out with his sound-woman while filming: when his subject Florence Rasmussen said "Here today, gone tomorrow, right?", the sound-woman answered "Wrong." Morris could not decide which offended him more, the interruption or the reply.
- Errol Morris got the basis for Gates of Heaven from a San Francisco Chronicle article headlined "450 Dead Pets Going to Napa Valley," about dead pets exhumed from one pet cemetery and reburied in another.
