Creator / Michael Cimino (Director)

"Your favorite film is always the film you haven't made yet."

— Interview with The Hollywood Reporter, 2015

Michael Antonio Cimino (February 3, 1939 – July 2, 2016) was an American film director, screenwriter and producer. His career is best known for being probably one of Hollywood's biggest real-life Greek tragedies; directing, producing and co-writing the commercially successful Academy Award-winning film The Deer Hunter (1978), and following it two years later by writing and directing the infamous critical and financial failure Heaven's Gate (1980).

After a successful run as a director of television commercials, he moved into feature film in the early 1970s. He began as a co-writer for the films Silent Running and Magnum Force. He then made his debut as a director with Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, which he had also written the script for. He then directed The Deer Hunter, an epic and gritty film about three American steelworkers who participate in The Vietnam War. Despite some delays and cost overruns, the film was a critical and commercial success. The Deer Hunter earned five Academy Awards and Cimino gained a reputation for being one of the up-and-coming directors in Hollywood. Cimino was ambitious and the embodiment of The Perfectionist. His style favored making an Epic Movie with leisurely pacing and an emphasis on the visuals.

But Cimino's career fell even quicker than it rose. His next film, Heaven's Gate, was fraught with troubled production on a far greater scale. The press picked up stories of Cimino's hyper-perfectionist directing style. Allegedly, he delayed filming on one day until a cloud formation he liked matched what he wanted, ordered the buildings on each side of the set of the town's main street to be torn down and rebuilt three feet back from where they were because the street looked too narrow, even after one crew member pointed out that it would be easier and cheaper to just tear one side down and rebuild it six feet back, and took 36 takes of Christopher Walken taking off his hat. After a messy release that was nearly a year overdue, the film was a critical and commercial flop. It was a Creator Killer for both Cimino and United Artists and a Genre-Killer for both The Western (at least, for its classic era) and particularly the New Hollywood era. Never again would studios give directors so much control over the filming process.

In the next 16 years, Cimino directed four further films, but his career was punch drunk from Heaven's Gate. He was also hired to direct Footloose but was fired after four months for demanding a script rewrite. He was keen to make the film more epic in scope, but the producers feared a repeat of Heaven's Gate, and he eventually retired from directing in 1996. He had many unrealised ambitions (enough to have its own article on Wikipedia), including interest in adapting Crime and Punishment and The Fountainhead; some of these plans stretched into the final years of his life, long after his retirement. In later years, Heaven's Gate underwent a partial rehabilitation among critics. In 2012, Cimino attended the premiere of a well-received new edit of Heaven's gate at the Venice Film Festival. This edit was subsequently released on home video to much better reviews. However, Cimino's career would never see a revival; despite his continuing ambitions of returning to the director's chair he would die in 2016, remembered primarily as the man who killed the New Hollywood era and as the biggest cautionary tale against hubris in the film industry.

Not to be confused with the actor of the same name.

Filmography

• Silent Running (1972) - writer
• Magnum Force (1973) - writer
• Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) - director, writer
• The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) - script supervisor
• The Deer Hunter (1978) - director, writer, producer
• The Rose (1979) - uncredited co-writer^note Cimino wrote the initial screenplay with Bo Goldman and Bill Kerby when it was still a Biopic of Janis Joplin. The final fictionalized screenplay still drew heavily from the draft Cimino worked on.
• Heaven's Gate (1980) - director, writer
• Year of the Dragon (1985) - director, writer
• The Sicilian (1987) - director
• Desperate Hours (1990) - director
• Sunchaser (1996) - director, producer

---

Tropes and Trivia related to Cimino's works include:

• Artistic License – History: Both The Deer Hunter and Heaven's Gate haves examples of it. Heaven's Gate takes only the vaguest framework of the Johnson County War, and there's a lot of very intense debate about the kind of POW conditions depicted in The Deer Hunter, and there aren't any confirmed cases of Russian Roulette being played in that context.
• Auteur License: Got it after Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. Cemented it with The Deer Hunter. Promptly lost it with Heaven's Gate.
• Box Office Bomb: Heaven's Gate is the Trope Codifier, one of the biggest bombs in history, which, combined with Francis Ford Coppola's One from the Heart and widespread backlash against the indulgences of directors of the time, helped kill United Artists as a studio and the entire New Hollywood movement.
• Breakthrough Hit:
  • Thunderbolt and Lightfoot was this for Cimino as a writer-director, giving him the clout he needed to make his passion projects The Deer Hunter and Heaven's Gate
  • The Deer Hunter launched the careers of then-unknown stars Christopher Walken and Meryl Streep, giving them both their first Oscar nominations and Walken his first win.
  • Averted with Heaven's Gate, meanwhile, which was a major Star-Derailing Role for almost everyone involved. First off, Cimino effectively lost his Auteur Licence and Protection from Editors after it bombed, and was never again a major player in Hollywood; second, it killed the film career of Kris Kristofferson as a leading man; while he continued to appear in films afterwards, it was strictly in supporting roles, and thereafter focused mainly on his music career.
• Creator Killer: Heaven's Gate was this for Cimino - after its massive critical and commercial failure, Cimino was never again given the same kind of creative control or budgets. Most of his films since have been critically and commercially ignored.
• Ensemble Cast:
  • Heaven's Gate, which features Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, John Hurt, Sam Waterston, Isabella Huppert, Brad Dourif, Jeff Bridges, Mickey Rourke and Willem Dafoe, among others.
  • Downplayed with The Deer Hunter. The film stars Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, Meryl Streep and John Cazale, all big names today, but at the time, Oscar winner De Niro was the only one of the cast with any real star power - John Cazale, while well-known for roles in The Godfather, The Godfather Part II and Dog Day Afternoon, was hardly a box office draw; Christopher Walken had played in mostly bit-parts up to that point; and Meryl Streep only had two credited roles before The Deer Hunter. However, given the film's success, this doubles as a Star-Making Role for Streep and Walken, both of whom were nominated for Oscars for their performances (and the latter winning).
• Epic Movie: As deliberately-paced, wide-ranging stories that exceed three hours in length, both The Deer Hunter and Heaven's Gate apply, the latter moreso.
• Executive Meddling:
  • During the infamously troubled production of Heaven's Gate, Cimino was effectively given ''carte blanche'' to do whatever he wanted and no legal accountability for cost overruns or missed deadlines. However, once he turned in his 325 minute long cut of the film to executives at United Artists (which Cimino claimed was about 15 minutes too long), UA forced Cimino to cut the film down to a reasonable length.
    • When cut that was screened at the film's 1980 premiere ran 219 minutes, Cimino having chopped a solid 100+ minutes at UA's request. When this version was critically mauled,however, United Artists pulled it from release and took a hacksaw to it in an effort to make something salvageable for a wide release.
    • The version which went to wide release in April 1981 ran 149 minutes (less than half the length of Cimino's original cut), and died a quick death at the box office.
    • Note that this is likely an example of Tropes Are Not Bad, since Cimino's intended cut of the film was probably unfeasible.
  • During post-production on The Sicilian, Cimino (who was granted final cut in his contract on the provision that his film ran under 120 minutes) submitted a 150-minute cut and refused to make any further changes. When the studio demanded he trim it down, Cimino responded by cutting out all the action sequences, which got the film under 120 minutes, but angered the studio enough to take Cimino to court, where it was discovered that producer Dino De Laurentiis had attached a side-letter to Cimino's contract depriving him of final cut. The producers then trimmed the film to 115 minutes without Cimino's involvement.
• He Also Did:
  • His initial background was in visual arts, as a graphic designer and painter, even obtaining a Master of Fine Arts at Yale, and he kept painting through most of his life.
  • He briefly studied acting under Lee Strasberg in The '60s.
  • His career as a TV commercial director included some of the most famous and elaborate commercials of their era, like the United Airlines "Take Me Along" spot (In the Style of a Busby Berkeley musical number) and a spot for Kodak called "Yesterdays" (where a couple thumbs through an old photo album) that was so acclaimed a book was written about it. However, even then, Cimino had a reputation for difficulty and perfectionism.
• Oscar Bait:
  • The Deer Hunter was the Trope Maker. The producers, realizing that a dark and psychological three-hour examination of the horrors of the Vietnam War probably wouldn't do that well in a year dominated by comparatively fun blockbusters like Grease and Superman: The Movie, released it in select Los Angeles and New York theaters in late 1978. Once it was nominated for several Oscars, winning five (including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Supporting Actor for Christopher Walken), they capitalized on the Oscar buzz by expanding it to a wide release, and it became the 9th highest-grossing movie of 1978.
  • Heaven's Gate is probably the most famous example of blatant Oscar Bait Gone Horribly Wrong.
• Reclusive Artist: Interviews with Cimino were rare; he declined all interviews with American journalists for ten years following Heaven's Gate and he gave his part in the making of that film little discussion.
• Short-Lived, Big Impact: While Cimino was active from the late 1960s to his death in 2016, the period he is most well-known for as a major Hollywood director lasted roughly from early 1979 (when he got his twin Oscar wins for The Deer Hunter) and early 1981 (when Heaven's Gate bombed). In that time, he helped create a genre (war films about The Vietnam War), and helped kill another (The Western), and with it a studio (United Artists) and the New Hollywood movement.
• Troubled Production:
  • Heaven's Gate is practically synonymous with "ambitious films gone horribly wrong", to the point that it inspired an entire book, Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven's Gate^note  later re-subtitled Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate by Steven Bach, the only studio executive to be involved with the film from start to finish. According to Bach:
    • Cimino had wanted to make a film about the Johnson County War, an 1892 battle between rich Wyoming landowners and European immigrant settlers, since 1971; the good press surrounding his 1978 film The Deer Hunter and its dual Oscar wins for Best Director and Best Picture finally gave Cimino the industry clout to get United Artists to agree to finance the film, with initial budget estimates starting at $7.5 million but rising to $11.6 million by the time production began.
    • The first signs of trouble appeared during casting of the female lead. The male leads - Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, and John Hurt - were more character actors than box office stars when casting began in 1979, and UA hoped that they could bolster the cast's marquee power with a high profile lead actress, but after Jane Fonda and Diane Keaton rejected the role, Cimino insisted on little-known French actress Isabelle Huppert, whose English was hesitant and heavily accented. United Artists insisted that another actress be found; Cimino threatened (not for the last time) to take the film to Warner Bros., and UA capitulated (even afterwards, Bach at one point told Cimino to his face that his leading lady was so unappealing that the audience was going to wonder why Kristofferson and Walken "[weren't] fucking each other instead of her").
    • Filming began at Glacier National Park in Montana in April 1979 and was expected to finish in June, with a projected release date of December 1979. However, Cimino's almost fanatical dedication to his artistic vision for the film meant the shoot was five days behind schedule after just six days, and the delays and inflated costs grew from there. Getting to the filming site from the cast and crew's hotel in Kalispell took two hours each way. Many cast and crew members were on site (and on the payroll) for months just to complete a few hours of shooting. Cimino insisted on taking full advantage of the location's natural beauty by shooting many scenes at twilight, scenes which could thus only be shot during a time window of a few minutes each day. Cimino also insisted on countless retakes; a single-second shot of Kristofferson cracking a whip took an entire day and 52 takes to film.
    • The glacial pace of filming was not the only factor in the skyrocketing costs. Upon deciding that the spacing of buildings either side of a street on an outdoor set "didn't look right", Cimino ordered both sides torn down and re-built.^note  A crew member even pointed out, to no avail, that it would be easier and cheaper to just tear one side down and build it twice as far back. A 19th-century locomotive was shipped on flatbed rail trucks from Colorado; as it was too big to fit into the modern tunnels, it had to take a longer and more expensive route to Montana. Cimino put an irrigation system in the rocky field in which the climactic battle sequence was shot so that it would be green with grass at the beginning of the battle, and red with blood at the end of it. And of the masses of footage shot by Cimino, an unusually high fraction was printed for possible inclusion in the finished film (far exceeding the part of the budget devoted to printing); ultimately, of over 1.5 million feet of exposed film, 1.3 million feet were printed, amounting to 220 hours of raw footage.
    • To make matters worse, Cimino's contract stated that he would not be penalised for any cost overruns incurred in completing and delivering the film for its December 1979 release date, so while costs spiralled, he was protected from breach of contract lawsuits. He clashed repeatedly with UA executives, who at several points considered simply scrapping the film, unloading it on another studio (unsurprisingly, they couldn't find any takers), or firing Cimino and replacing him.^note  Bach mentions approaching "A Famous Director", widely believed to be David Lean, who refused to replace Cimino out of concern at incurring the wrath of the DGA (even his conversation with Bach was against DGA regulations, hence Bach does not name him in Final Cut); Norman Jewison was also approached but declined.
    • UA was able to cut one cost associated with Cimino, though. Wondering why they were paying so much money to rent the land they were filming on, they went to check the local tax records to find out who the owner was. It turned out that it was none other than Cimino himself.
    • Location shooting in Montana finally wrapped in October 1979,^note  By this point, local cars sported bumper stickers reading "To Hell with Heaven's Gate", and Cimino had a very public falling out with production manager and longtime friend Charlie Okun at the wrap party. with only a Harvard-set prologue and Rhode Island-set epilogue to film. However, Harvard refused permission to film on campus, so the prologue was instead shot at Mansfield College, Oxford.^note  John Hurt had returned to England in a hurry after filming wrapped in Montana to honour his commitment to The Elephant Man - a role he took to stave off the boredom of waiting long hours to do nothing on the Heaven's Gate set - and took a few days off to film his scenes in the Harvard segment. Though this was the only part of the shoot to finish on time and on budget, Cimino was refused permission to film near Christ Church on Sunday, and had to prepare and shoot the scene in secret just after dawn before the Sunday morning services. The final production budget came to nearly $40 million, over three times the original figure.
    • Despite Cimino's attempts at press secrecy, the film was already beginning to draw negative publicity during shooting. A freelance journalist landed a job as an extra, then sold the story about the catastrophic time and budget overruns.^note  Although the story did include some exaggerations; though the shoot ran behind schedule and over budget, the cast and crew were on generally friendly terms with each other throughout, but the journalist portrayed them as constantly fighting. With similar problems on UA's Apocalypse Now fresh in the press' memories, they began dubbing Heaven's Gate "Apocalypse Next". The shoot also attracted controversy for (mostly, but not wholly, exaggerated) claims of animal cruelty, with live cockfights being filmed,^note  Willem Dafoe made his (uncredited) feature film debut in these scenes; he later claimed that his role was supposed to be larger, but Cimino fired him in a fit of anger for laughing at a joke told by an extra during a prolonged lighting setup. livestock entrails being used for some of the gorier scenes, and a horse being killed during the filming of a special effects scene for the climactic battle sequence. The film is still on the American Humane Association's "unacceptable" list.
    • The sheer volume of raw footage meant that the Christmas 1979 release date had long since become unfeasible, and the date was pushed back to Christmas 1980. Cimino changed the locks on the editing suite to ensure that he could cut the film his way. His work print of the film, screened for UA executives in June 1980, was a staggering 325 minutes long; under threat of dismissal as director, Cimino agreed to cut the film down to 219 minutes for a trio of premieres in New York, Toronto, and Los Angeles in November 1980.
    • The New York premiere was a disaster, with the audience reacting with indifference to the story and struggling to hear the dialogue, and critics, led by Vincent Canby of The New York Times (who, in a much-quoted review, called the film "an unqualified disaster"), tearing it to shreds. A humiliated Cimino withdrew the film before its Los Angeles premiere, announcing that he wanted to edit it further.^note  Contrary to rumour, Cimino made this decision himself, not at UA's command. He finally trimmed it down to 149 minutes for general release in April 1981; this time, the critics were not so much merciless as disappointed, and the film, the final production and promotion budget of which came to $44 million, made just $1.3 million in its opening weekend and was quickly forgotten by audiences. Although it received a more positive response in France (particularly at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival) and the UK, its worldwide gross was just under $3.5 million.
    • The film left a veritable bloodbath of dead or dying careers in its wake. Michael Cimino is the most noted victim; he only made four further films, all largely ignored by critics and audiences. Kris Kristofferson's leading man potential withered, with all of his film roles afterwards being in supporting roles, and he turned his focus back to his music career. Although the film's effect on United Artists is sometimes overstated,^note  The studio had already been on unsteady financial footing for much of the late 1970s, prompting many employees to jump ship to form Orion Pictures; Heaven's Gate was not even UA's most expensive film, an "honour" that goes to Moonraker. it was an influential factor in its parent company, Transamerica, deciding to sell UA to MGM in 1981, ending its 62-year existence as an independent studio.^note  The cost overruns are also sometimes blamed for UA being unable to fund an Oscar campaign for Raging Bull, which lost Best Director and Best Picture to Robert Redford's Ordinary People. Heaven's Gate itself managed just one Oscar nomination in 1981, for Art Direction (which it lost to Raiders of the Lost Ark). Interest in Westerns also declined for most of the 1980s, and the film is generally credited with hastening the demise of New Hollywood and the auteur director movement.
    • The reputation of Heaven's Gate has, however, improved in the years since its initial release. Cimino assembled a 216-minute "director's cut" of the film which won acclaim at film festivals in 2012, and Kris Kristofferson and supporting cast member Jeff Bridges still speak fondly of their experiences making and seeing the film.
  • The production of Cimino's later film The Sicilian, while nowhere as well-known (or troubled) as Heaven's Gate, still deserves a mention:
    • The Sicilian was an adaptation of the Mario Puzo novel, and Puzo was paid $1 million for the rights. Producers David Begelman and Bruce McNall hired Cimino, but Cimino butted heads with Begelman over the screenplay and casting - Cimino wanted Christopher Lambert to play the lead, but Begelman (understandably) didn't want a French actor to play an Italian-American in an English-language movie. Begelman and McNall eventually caved so that production could move forward. Meanwhile, Gore Vidal had been hired for major rewrites, and sued the Writer's Guild of America and screenwriter Steve Shagan for a writing credit.
    • Production itself was relatively smooth, and, while the film did go over-budget and behind schedule, this was mostly because of delays that were out of Cimino's control. There was one exception - some shooting locations were controlled by actual mafia men, who were disrupting the shoot. Cimino suggested Begelman and McNall meet the criminals, which they did, finding out that the mobsters wanted parts in the movie. The producers decided to incorporate them in minor roles and as extras, which gave Cimino access to new shooting locations and local labour.
    • This relative smoothness was not to last - in post-production, Cimino disappeared for months in editing, finally delivering a 150-minute cut of the film which he refused to make any changes to. However, in his contract, Cimino had the right to final cut only if he delivered the film at under 120 minutes. Things got worse when the distributor, 20th Century Fox, flatly refused to distribute the film unless it came in under two hours. Once this information was relayed to Cimino, he became enraged, and, days later, he delivered a cut of the film with all of the action scenes removed, which brought it under 120 minutes but angered the producers.
    • Things really hit the fan when, in response to Cimino's cut, the producers took Cimino to court, claiming he had cost the studio money and violated his contract. The producers hired Burt Fields, a lawyer who had earlier represented Warren Beatty in his battle for final cut on Reds, and who, in doing so, established legal precedent that a filmmaker's contractual right to final cut was absolutely binding.
    • When producer Dino De Laurentiis was called to the stand to testify on whether Cimino was given final cut, De Laurentiis said:
    De Laurentiis - "Final cut? I no give-a him final cut"
    Fields - "But we've seen the contract"
    De Laurentiis - "Have you seen the side letter?"
    • Turns out, when Cimino signed his contract with De Laurentiis - a contract which did give Cimino final cut privilege - attached to it was a side letter, written by De Laurentiis, that stated Cimino did not have final cut on an earlier film, Year of the Dragon. The producers argued that, because Cimino withheld the letter, he was intentionally defrauding them. The judge agreed, and Begelman personally reinstated the action scenes and cut the film down to 115 minutes for release, without Cimino's involvement. The Sicilian was eventually released in 1987, to negative reviews and commercial indifference. A 149-minute "Director's Cut" did emerge, and, while it has received better reviews, with critics finding it more cohesive, reception was still average at best.
• Wag the Director: Clint Eastwood was apparently able to do this with Cimino on the set of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.
  Charles Okun, first assistant director - Clint was the only guy that ever said "no". Michael said "OK, let's go for another take." It was take four, Clint would say "No we got enough. We got it." [...] And if [Cimino] took too long to get it ready, [Clint] would say, "It's good, let's go"
• What Could Have Been:
  • Cimino was once attached to direct Footloose, but his behaviour during pre-production convinced studio executives, who didn't want another Heaven's Gate on their hands, that Cimino was more trouble than he was worth.
  • He claimed that he was briefly considered to helm The Godfather Part III.
  • His dream project was an adaptation of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Taking its cue from more than the novel, it was largely modeled on architect Jørn Utzon's troubled building of the Sydney Opera House, as well as the construction of the Empire State Plaza in Albany, New York. He wrote the script in between Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and The Deer Hunter, and hoped to have Clint Eastwood play Howard Roark.
  • He spent two and a half years working with James Toback on The Life and Dreams of Frank Costello, a biopic on the life of mafia boss Costello, for 20th Century Fox. "We got a good screenplay together," said Cimino, "but again, the studio, 20th Century Fox in this case, was going through management changes and the script was put aside." Cimino added, "Costello took a long time because Costello himself had a long, interesting life. The selection of things to film was quite hard".
  • He wrote a Janis Joplin biopic called Pearl, which eventually evolved into The Rose (about a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of Joplin).
  • In 1987, he attempted to make an epic saga about the 1920s Irish rebel Michael Collins, but the film had to be abandoned due to budget, weather and script problems. The film was to have been funded by Nelson Entertainment.
  • He started pre-production work on Santa Ana Wind, a contemporary romantic drama set in L.A. The start date for shooting was to have been early December 1987. The screenplay was written by Floyd Mutrux and the film was to be bankrolled by Nelson Entertainment. Cimino's representative added that the film was "about the San Fernando Valley and the friendship between two guys" and "more intimate" than Cimino's previous big-budget work. However, Nelson Holdings International Ltd. cancelled the project after disclosing that its banks, including Security Pacific National Bank, had reduced the company's borrowing power after Nelson failed to meet certain financial requirements in its loan agreements. A spokesman for Nelson said the cancellation occurred "in the normal course of business," but declined to elaborate.
  • One of his final projects was writing a three-hour-long adaptation of André Malraux's 1933 novel Mans Fate, about the early days of the Chinese Revolution. The story was to have focused on several Europeans living in Shanghai during the tragic turmoil that characterized the onset of China's Communist regime. "The screenplay, I think, is the best one I've ever done," Cimino once said, adding that he had "half the money; [we're] trying to raise the other half." The roughly $25 million project was to be filmed wholly on location in Shanghai and would have benefited from the support of China's government, which said it would provide some $2 million worth of local labor costs. Cimino had been scouting locations in China since 2001. "There was never a better time to try to do Man's Fate", Cimino said, "because Man's Fate is what it's all about right now. It's about the nature of love, of friendship, the nature of honor and dignity. How fragile and important all of those things are in a time of crisis." Martha De Laurentiis read his script for Man's Fate and passed on it. "If you edit it down, it could be a very tight, beautiful, sensational movie," she said, "but violent, and ultimately a subject matter that I don't think America is that interested in."

---