Background

Cimino, Michael was born on November 16, 1943 in New York City.

Education

Cimino earned a bachelor’s and then a master’s degree in art from Yale in the early sixties. He studied acting and directing with Lee Strasberg, and then worked in New' York on industrial films, documentaries, and TV commercials. As a screen-writer, he had a shared credit on Silent Running (71, Douglas Trumbull) and Magnum Force (73, Ted Post).

Career

The introduction to Clint Eastwood led to Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, which is expert, scary, and a rare example of character interplay in an Eastwood film. In the bracing 1970s, that kind of modest debut could set a guy up with a great challenge.

The Deer Hunter won best picture and best director; it made a lot of money at 183 minutes; it was the subject of bitter controversy, being deemed fascist, racist, historically inaccurate, and small-minded, despite its epic canvas.There were people in the first audience crving out with anguish, regret, and suspense. Few movies have ever stirred audiences so powerfully. And, upon consideration, it is a great picture, large enough to carry its Haw's.

Consider these virtues: the working-class setting, managed without condescension; the symphonic shift of tone and pace as it moves from steel-town doldrums to the fearful jungle of Southeast Asia; the desperate tension of the first roulette sequence; the group playing of De Niro, Walken, Cazale, Savage, and Dzundza; the forlorn attempt at something like love or comfort between De Niro and Meryl Streep; the primeval air of the hunting sequence; and the overall notion of a blinded, battered American self-belief struggling to move forward. The Deer Hunter is not politically correct, but it is one of the few American movies that understand the state of outrage and mistake within American hope. It is a picture to put beside Bonnie and Clyde, King Kong, and Birth of a Nation, monuments worthy of some shame and much exhilaration.

Its success changed the movie world, and led to one of the best pieces of contemporary movie history, Steven Bach’s Final Cut, a book one is ready to trust because it never denies the executives’ blame or Cimiuo’s creative urge on what became Heaven’s Gate. Egomania destroyed budget; United Artists succumbed; the film was a disaster, at 205 or 149 minutes. It seemed like a Western, as opposed to some mixing of Charles Ives, Edward Hopper, and Willa Cather. In its making, it paraded all the ordinary madnesses of Hollywood, and it showed how disastrous the cult ol the director had become: this was la pathologie des auteurs.

The full version survives on video, whereas it is very hard now to see the shorter form. Heaven’s Gate was poorly cast and badly written, and Cimino was, for the first time, the sole credited writer. The Harvard sequence is a perverse folly of delay; the violence sickens us without ever bringing moral pain. Still, anyone should be able to see the scheme of immigrant and individual against the capitalist system; and even with its handicaps, one feels the gigantic tug of faith and dismay about America. But the famous “beauty” is fatally apparent just because we have so much time to study it and no sense of its dramatic place.

Heaven’s Gate needed, let us suppose, the chance to start again (something painters and novelists take for granted). It needed Bedford and De Niro, instead of Kristofferson and Walken; it needed to shed an hour—something only possible in a restart and a script by someone like Richard Brooks, an old-timer and a taut storyteller. Then Cimino needed to be bullied, oppressed, and treated wretchedly, until he felt for the poor immigrants. But perhaps he wanted to make an impossible film.

The four subsequent films are by someone in hiding, at rest, or gone away. He wrote a novel, in French.

Works

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  • Heaven's Gate 1980
  • Thunderbolt and Lightfoot 1974
  • The Deer Hunter 1978
  • Magnum Force 1973

Personality

It should be recollected that when United Artists first sat down to consider projects with Cimino, his love script was a new The Fountainhead. The studio recalled King Vidor's earlier commercial failure with the Ayn Rand novel; they wondered if the “model” buildings Cimino talked about might not grow into real edifices.

They might have settled there and then for a modest city in the San Gabriel mountains, a retreat for jobless studio folks to go to. And moviegoers should treasure the detail that, in The Fountainhead, the rogue genius Howard Roark, the uncompromiser, thinks little of a decade here or there in the wilderness. But these days it takes a visionary to tell wilderness from sainted city. Meanwhile, Cimino is proverbial—a warning, to be sure, but a sultry beacon, too. If he ever reemerges at full budgetary throttle, his own career should be his subject.