Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven's Gate, and the Price of a Vision

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 powerful and enduring Vietnam movie The Deer Hunter, which won Best Picture and Best Director at the Academy Awards in 1979, and Heaven's Gate, the most notorious box office 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.

In Cimino, Charles Elton delves deep behind the myths of both films, and offers a richly detailed biography of a lightning-rod filmmaker who helped define the auteur era and was wrongly blamed for its demise. Based on extensive interviews with Cimino's peers, collaborators, enemies, and friends, most of whom have never spoken about him before, Cimino unravels the enigmas and falsehoods, many perpetrated by the director himself, that surround Cimino's 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.

ISBN-13: 9781419747120

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Abrams Press

Publication Date: 03-21-2023

Pages: 352

Product Dimensions: 8.66h x 5.51w x 1.02d

Charles Elton was a director of the Curtis Brown agency, representing film directors and screenwriters in London and Los Angeles. He was an independent TV producer before becoming an executive producer of drama at ITV in England, where he has been responsible for many award-winning shows. He is the author of two novels.