



Cimino
The Deer Hunter, Heaven's Gate, and the Price of a Vision
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- £4.49
Publisher Description
The “revelatory” (The New Yorker) first biography of critically acclaimed then critically derided filmmaker Michael Cimino—and a reevaluation of the infamous film that destroyed his career.
The director Michael Cimino (1939–2016) is famous for two films: the intense, powerful, and enduring Vietnam movie The Deer Hunter, which won Best Picture at the Academy Awards in 1979 and also won Cimino Best Director, and Heaven’s Gate, the most notorious bomb of all time. Originally budgeted at $11 million, Cimino’s sprawling western went off the rails in Montana. The picture grew longer and longer, and the budget ballooned to over $40 million. When it was finally released, Heaven’s Gate failed so completely with reviewers and at the box office that it put legendary studio United Artists out of business and marked the end of Hollywood’s auteur era.
Or so the conventional wisdom goes. Noted television producer and author Charles Elton delves deeply into the making and aftermath of the movie and presents a surprisingly different view to that of Steven Bach, one of the executives responsible for Heaven’s Gate, who wrote a scathing book about the film and solidified the widely held view that Cimino wounded the movie industry beyond repair. Elton’s Cimino is a richly detailed biography that offers a revisionist history of a lightning rod filmmaker. Based on extensive interviews with Cimino’s peers and collaborators and enemies and friends, most of whom have never spoken before, it unravels the enigmas and falsehoods, many perpetrated by the director himself, which surround his life, and sheds new light on his extraordinary career. This is a story of the making of art, the business of Hollywood, and the costs of ambition, both financial and personal.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Filmmaker Michael Cimino (1939–2016) remains a mysterious figure in this intriguing biography from novelist Elton (Mr. Toppit). Based on copious interviews, including with Cimino's estranged brothers and his collaborator Joann Carelli, Elton's account offers a variety of perspectives on an artist who sought to obfuscate his own identity. Born in Westbury, N.Y., Cimino was a "talented artist," had a "superficial" bad-boy persona, and remained elusive even to his childhood friends. After college he became a well-known TV commercial director, but his reputation as the toast of Hollywood came for his 1978 Oscar-winning The Deer Hunter, then plummeted to industry pariah after his 1980 film Heaven's Gate exceeded budgets and schedules and was a critical and commercial flop. In the ensuing years, he only directed four more films. Then, in 2012, he released his original cut of Heaven's Gate to much acclaim. Elton has a sure hand with behind-the-scenes details and is even-handed in his appraisals, describing Cimino's "meticulous, detail-heavy direction" that could skew toward "nit-picking attention to detail" as both a strength and a weakness. A somewhat murky picture of Cimino emerges, though Elton wrestles commendably with an elusive subject who reportedly said of himself, "I don't know most of the people I've been." Film buffs will find much to enjoy. Photos.