Michael Antonio Cimino ( , ; February 3, 1939 – July 2, 2016) was an American film director, screenwriter, producer and author. Notorious for his obsessive attention to detail and determination for perfection, Cimino achieved widespread fame with The Deer Hunter (1978), which won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.
With a background in painting and architecture, Cimino began his career as a commercial director in New York before moving to Los Angeles in the early 1970s to take up screenwriting. After co-writing the scripts for both Silent Running (1972) and Magnum Force (1973), he wrote the preliminary script for Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974). The latter became his directorial debut and one of the highest-grossing films of that year.
The accolades received for co-writing, directing, and producing The Deer Hunter led to Cimino receiving creative control of Heaven's Gate (1980). The film became a critical failure and a legendary box-office bomb, which lost production studio United Artists an estimated $37 million. Its failure was seen by many observers as the end of the New Hollywood era, with studios next shifting focus from director-driven films toward high-concept, crowd-pleasing blockbusters. More recently, however, Heaven's Gate has undergone a dramatic reappraisal, even being named by BBC Culture as one of the greatest American films of all time.
Cimino made only four subsequent films and grew infamous for the number of projects left unfinished due to his uncompromising artistry. In 2002, Cimino claimed he had written at least 50 scripts overall. Several of his ambitious "dream projects" included adaptations of the novels Conquering Horse, The Fountainhead and Man's Fate as well as biopics on crime boss Frank Costello and Irish rebel Michael Collins.
Early life
Cimino publicly shared few details of his early life and family background and is believed to have given false birth year information.
Cimino's presumed birth date was February 3, 1939. A third-generation Italian-American, Cimino and his two younger brothers, Peter and Edward, grew up with their parents in the town of Westbury, on Long Island. He was regarded as a prodigy in early private education, but rebelled as an adolescent by consorting with delinquents, getting into fights, and coming home drunk. Of this time, Cimino described himself as
<blockquote>"always hanging around with kids my parents didn't approve of. Those guys were so alive. When I was fifteen I spent three weeks driving all over Brooklyn with a guy who was following his girlfriend. He was convinced she was cheating on him, and he had a gun, he was going to kill her. There was such passion and intensity about their lives. When the rich kids got together, the most we ever did was cross against a red light."</blockquote>
His father was a music publisher.
In Cimino's final year at Michigan State, he became art director, and later managing editor, of the school's humor magazine Spartan. Steven Bach wrote of Cimino's early magazine work:
<blockquote>"It is here that one can see what are perhaps the first public manifestations of the Cimino visual sensibility, and they are impressive. He thoroughly restyled the Spartan<nowiki>'</nowiki>s derivative Punch look, designing a number of its strikingly handsome covers himself. The Cimino-designed covers are bold and strong, with a sure sense of space and design. They compare favorably to professional work honored in, say, any of the Modern Publicity annuals of the late fifties and are far better than the routine work turned out on Madison Avenue. The impact and quality of his work no doubt contributed to his winning the Harry Suffrin Advertising Award at MSU and perhaps to his acceptance at Yale University." During this time, he also took ballet classes and studied under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio once every week in order to better understand how actors performed.
Career
1960s
Within eighteen months of directing TV ads, he was hired by Madison Pollack O'Hare to work on special assignments involving "graphic design concepts and unusual approaches to live film". While there, he handpicked the best cameramen MPO employed to shoot his commercials, including Gordon Willis and Owen Roizman, before either rose to fame. He directed ads for L'eggs hosiery, Kool cigarettes, Pepsi, Canada Dry and Maxwell House coffee, among others. Although the ads he made were considered among the most prestigious in the industry, they became increasingly costly. "The clients of the agencies liked Cimino," remarked Charles Okun, his production manager from 1964 to 1978. "His visuals were fabulous, but the amount of time it took was just astronomical. Because he was so meticulous and took so long. Nothing was easy with Michael."
At the height of his commercial career, Cimino met Joann Carelli, then a commercial director representative, and the two began to date. To be more prolific, Cimino sought out collaborators to work with, including poet Thomas McGrath and playwright Deric Washburn, who had produced a one-act play off-Broadway. Washburn later recalled that there was always a big distance, socially, between him and Cimino:
<blockquote>"I remember trying to get to know him a little better. A friend had a house in Poughkeepsie, and I invited him up for the weekend. He shows up in his Rolls-Royce, and he's not comfortable there. But he wanted something from me, I think. Mike and I got closest when we started talking about a story. Then it was amazing. It was like one person. It was like a dance. We could boil together."</blockquote>
Thomas McGrath and Cimino co-wrote two scripts together, Paradise and Kef. McGrath also gave Cimino a copy of the 1959 Frederick Manfred novel Conquering Horse, tracing the history of the Dakota Indians in America before the arrival of the white man, which Cimino would go on throughout the rest of his life to try and make into a film.
1970s
By 1970, Cimino's agent Michael Gruskoff was approached with an offer from studio executive Ned Tanen to produce a slate of low-budget films for Universal Pictures, with Conquering Horse among them. The estimated budget for the film had gone far over what initially was projected, and would have cost Universal substantially more than their cut-off figure of $1 million to produce it. Moreover, Cimino wanted to shoot the film in black-and-white and use authentic Sioux dialogue, with subtitles. Shortly after the project was cancelled, Gruskoff assigned Cimino to help draft the script for a story outline by Douglas Trumbull for his science fiction film Silent Running, and he brought aboard Deric Washburn to help. The two morphed the script to be more countercultural. However, Steven Bochco was later brought in and rewrote the story to be less bleak and more "accessible" to a mainstream audience.
The following year, Cimino and Joann Carelli moved to Los Angeles where they rented a house in Hidden Hills that belonged to British director J. Lee Thompson. From this habit, the script for Thunderbolt and Lightfoot was born, which first began as a period story about the Irish outlaw folk heroes Capt. Thunderbolt and Capt. Lightfoot. Cimino gained representation from Stan Kamen of the William Morris Agency, who urged him to make it a contemporary story. Taking both their advice, Cimino took the spec script to Clint Eastwood, who loved it and wanted to direct it himself. In the film, Eastwood plays an aging Korean War veteran who, in the words of Cimino, "has lost his zest for life" and runs into an "exuberant, freedom-loving kid" (played by Jeff Bridges), who restores his youth.</blockquote>
George Kennedy and Geoffrey Lewis were also cast to star in the film, chosen for the primary reason that neither actor had ever done comedic roles before. Cimino had since compared their chemistry in the film to that of Laurel and Hardy. The film became a solid box office success at the time grossing $25 million and earned Bridges an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. and his first choice to play the character of Howard Rourk was Clint Eastwood. Taking its cue from more than the novel, Cimino's modern-day adaptation was largely modeled off of 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. "Making it a contemporary story meant that there was a lot of new work that had to be done [in adapting]," he said. According to Cimino, Eastwood turned the film down over concerns of being compared to his idol Gary Cooper, who had played the same character in the 1949 film adaptation. Over the years he continued to try to get it made, approaching different funding sources with copies of the script and each time rewriting it in the process. Cimino said they had come very close to doing it:
<blockquote>"We'd already shot two weeks of pre-production stuff, but because of various political machinations at the studio, the project fell through. This was just before David Picker left. He was the producer. There were internal difficulties, that's all. Nevertheless, I'd spent a year and a half of my life on something. It had been a difficult time. My father passed away while I was writing the screenplay. I kept working..." One film, Pearl, based on an unpublished book he wrote, was to be a musical biopic about singer-songwriter Janis Joplin. The film was made several years later under a rewritten script titled The Rose, with Joplin's name cut out after her family denied the producers the rights to her story. While Goldman received screenplay credit for his work, Cimino did not. Then, after meeting with James Toback, the two began work on The Life and Dreams of Frank Costello, a biopic chronicling four decades of the life of Mafia boss Frank Costello. Roy Scheider was initially considered for the lead role, but after he dropped out, Cimino took the script to Robert De Niro, who insisted that he accompany him for the location scouting. Because of the unstable political situation in Thailand and the subject matter of the material, Cimino had been warned not to fly the processed footage back in. winning five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director for Cimino.
The day after the Academy Awards, Cimino flew up to Kalispell, Montana to begin shooting his Western epic Heaven's Gate, which had been in pre-production for several months, finding locations, casting five hundred extras and building complicated sets. such as John Wayne, who turned down the lead role. Later, in 1978, after a print of The Deer Hunter was screened for the head of production at United Artists, they offered Cimino a two-picture deal. What he wanted to do was The Fountainhead, but UA showed disinterest. Instead, he resurrected his screenplay for The Johnson County War, which he promptly rewrote before it went into production in April 1979 with an assembled cast of Kris Kristofferson, Isabelle Huppert and Christopher Walken. Cimino gave UA the initial budget estimation of $7.8 million, even though the period detail required for the film was astronomical. Cimino, however, was intent on "painstakingly constructing his film according to photographs from the time" and immersing the audience into the world created in the film:
<blockquote>"I wanted you to feel what it was like to walk down a street in that period: to follow those noisy wagons, to cross all that activity, what you felt, what you heard. People made so much dust; my God, was it dusty! That makes the streets dirty... when hundreds of wagons go around, they raise dust. And very often, we took the time to record the background sound. In the store, for example, we recorded numerous conversations, with the intention of inserting them into the soundtrack later. This isn't general background noise; you hear people, in a corner, argue over the price of a knife, discuss the merits of a particular rifle... each of those people are engaged in a very specific activity and you hear them." removed in the 2012 restoration. "Afterward, we heard that terrible stuttering applause," said Bridges, "and it was that sinking feeling. We tried to tell ourselves, 'Well, maybe they liked it so much that they are stunned into silence.' " As a result, UA executive Steven Bach wrote an entire book devoted to the topic, Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists. Cimino referred to the book as "work of fiction" by a "degenerate who never even came on the set." Bach retorted when he told a reporter he didn't resent Cimino or wish the movie ill: "It would be like wishing ill of a corpse." The film, based on the Western novel written by Frederick Manfred, would have been a generational saga set in pre-white America that dealt with a young Sioux boy's rite of passage. "It's a story of the American Plains," said Cimino in 1982, "[taking] place in the Dakotas and Montana." with Buck Henry making revisions to the script. However, by 1981, Martin Scorsese had already entered negotiations to direct. According to Cimino, in his version he would have cast Andy Kaufman in the lead role as Rupert Pupkin. "I shot videotape of Andy for weeks," he said. His version was to have also starred Meryl Streep and Orson Welles.
Following Heaven's Gate, Joann Carelli quickly landed him a picture deal at CBS Theatrical Films to direct Nitty Gritty, described by The New York Times as "a black comedy about news reporting". The film was scheduled to be released in 1982, alongside a slate of films including Table for Five, however, Cimino's never went into production, just as with several of the other reported projects. It was later listed as a lost project of Cimino's by the Los Angeles Times, who reported that it had been retitled Live on Tape prior to being dropped by CBS. He also allegedly proposed his Frank Costello biopic, then retitled Proud Dreamer,
In early September 1982, Cimino approached short story writer Raymond Carver and his wife Tess Gallagher (both fans of Heaven's Gate) to rework a screenplay based on the life of Fyodor Dostoevsky, in hopes that he would direct it. According to Carver, Cimino presented him an existing screenplay commissioned by the veteran Italian film producer Carlo Ponti. The first draft had been written by Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and then translated to English by two Italian writers. Heavily researched, and taking Dostoevsky's near-execution as the film's focal point, Carver and Gallagher opted to rewrite the entire script, delivering a 220-page draft to Cimino in November. Cimino was impressed with the results, but Ponti returned to Europe shortly thereafter, halting further development. Fragments were later published in 1985, by Capra Press.