A friend once told Michael Cimino: “Your problem, Michael, is that nobody knows anything about you.” Bravo, then, to Charles Elton for trying to get to the bottom of the Cimino myth, a task as ambitious and foolhardy as the two films for which the American director is celebrated (or reviled). The Deer Hunter (1978), the pulverising Vietnam War epic starring Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep that won five Oscars, was followed two years later by Heaven’s Gate, a breathtaking but misunderstood western starring Kris Kristofferson and Isabelle Huppert that is regarded as one of the biggest flops in history. Cimino’s reputation as a grandiose genius has only recently begun to recover.
He was dictatorial, reclusive and prone to fictionalising his life — Napoleon, Miss Havisham and Walter Mitty rolled into one. Almost everything about him is up for grabs: his height, ethnicity, family, gender, dates of birth and death, and whether he wrote his own scripts or was allergic to the sun (despite driving a convertible). One thing that’s certain is that he had a sharp tongue, calling Francis Ford Coppola “dried up” and the co-writer of The Deer Hunter Deric Washburn “a big baby” and regarding producers as bean-counting philistines who were out to sabotage his genius. You lose count of the number of people whose recollections of the director end with “they never spoke again”.
The book opens in grand tragic style at the house where Cimino lived for 40 years and died alone in 2016, aged 77, hidden high in the Hollywood Hills where there are “more coyotes than cops”. When the English choreographer Eleanor Fazan was flown to Los Angeles to teach the cast to dance for the lavish Harvard ball scene in Heaven’s Gate and visited Cimino at home, she opened his fridge and found just two things: a half-bottle of champagne and a sandwich with a single bite taken out of it.
Born in 1939, not 1941 or 1952, as had been claimed, Cimino did grow up in Long Island, but did not serve in Vietnam despite saying: “I have this insane feeling that I was there.” One studio boss scoffed: “He was no more a medic in the Green Berets than I’m a rutabaga.” Such a sketchy relationship with the truth makes you wonder about his rumoured affair with Barbra Streisand or his days in advertising when he would seduce “one beautiful model after another — sometimes three at a time”.
A “social and familial porcupine”, Cimino cut off his brothers and didn’t attend his parents’ funerals, perhaps because his middle-class background didn’t live up to his sophisticated dreams. Elton does some impressive sleuthing, tracking down the mysterious Joann Carelli, the director’s long-time producer, best friend and possibly even wife. Carelli was even tougher than Cimino — it’s claimed that she once sacked someone with the no-frills line, “It’s f***-off time”, although she denies that. Carelli and David Mansfield, who wrote the music for Heaven’s Gate, secretly married, which Cimino refused to believe when he was told. The couple then had a daughter, Calantha, whom Cimino treated as his own. It was all very weird.
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That Heaven’s Gate spun out of control was partly due to Cimino’s excesses: he shot more than 200 hours of film and ordered a vast street set to be torn down because it “didn’t look right”. An eccentric attitude to budget didn’t help. As an accountant said: “We seem to be in the ironic and paradoxical position of not trusting the gentleman with our money and therefore insisting that he take more.” The budget spiralled to $40 million, a huge figure for the time. The Empire Strikes Back, the highest-grossing film of 1980, cost only $30.5 million.
There were problems with the casting too. Steven Bach of the studio United Artists said that Huppert, now the grande dame of French cinema but then a relative unknown in America, had “a face like a potato”. On meeting her, Bach revised that opinion: “She looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy.” Tinseltown players are not known for their chivalry.
Or their diplomacy. The publicist Allan Carr described The Deer Hunter as “a long movie about poor people who go to war and get killed”. Gore Vidal was equally blunt when hired by Cimino to rewrite the script for The Sicilian. Asked what it needed, Vidal said: “A trip to Lourdes.” For John Hurt, boredom was the problem. He spent seven months on the set of Heaven’s Gate in Montana, working only one day in the last ten weeks. Still, inactivity is well remunerated in Hollywood. When he returned home to England to star in The Elephant Man, Hurt bought a place in the country and named it Overtime House.
As Heaven’s Gate limped into cinemas, everyone strove to outdo each other in their put-downs. Vincent Canby of The New York Times compared it to “a forced, four-hour tour of one’s own living room”, while Kristofferson said: “It was like having a beloved child of yours murdered and then the murder blamed on you.” The writer Don Winslow, who was an usher at an advance screening, said he felt like an “undertaker at a very expensive funeral” and described finding a man in the lobby with his face in his hands, mumbling: “What am I going to do?” The man, Winslow revealed with a flourish, was Cimino.
“At least in the old days, when they lashed you to a post and whipped you, they stopped once you passed out,” the director said. The film became a byword for other expensive follies — Warren Beatty’s Ishtar became known as “Warren’s Gate”, Kevin Costner’s Waterworld as “Kevin’s Gate”. Elton insists that Heaven’s Gate did not bankrupt United Artists, as is often said. It is now acknowledged as a masterpiece, elegiac, dreamlike and full of wow moments, from the Harvard scene to the roller-skating rink that gives the film its title. Its critical reappraisal came too late for Cimino, who directed only a handful more films, most of them forgettable.
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As he retreated from the public eye, his appearance became more androgynous, described by one interviewer as a cross between “a cowboy hipster and your great aunt Bessie”. Elton even tracks down a woman who sold female wigs to the director, whom she called “Nikki”. Of all the personae Cimino tried on, perhaps that was the best fit.
Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, and the Price of a Vision by Charles Elton, Abrams, 320pp; £21.25
