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262 pages

English

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The first biography of critically acclaimed then critically derided filmmaker Michael Cimino-and a reevaluation of the infamous film that destroyed his careerThe 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. 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.

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Publié par	ABRAMS BOOKS
Date de parution	29 mars 2022
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781683359920
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	3 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1166€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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If you don t get it right, what s the point?
- MICHAEL CIMINO, EASTMAN KODAK PRINT AD , 1980
Copyright 2022 Charles Elton
Cover 2022 Abrams
Published in 2022 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021946805
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4711-3
eISBN: 978-1-68335-992-0
Abrams books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact specialsales@abramsbooks.com or the address below.
Abrams Press is a registered trademark of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
ABRAMS The Art of Books 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007 abramsbooks.com
CONTENTS
Prologue
PART I: 1939-1976
CHAPTER 1: The Tarnished Coast
CHAPTER 2: Coffee Moment in Malibu
CHAPTER 3: The Secret World
CHAPTER 4: Thunderbolt in Hollywood
PART II: 1976-1981
CHAPTER 5: Stalking the Deer Hunter
CHAPTER 6: The Body Count
CHAPTER 7: Opening the Gate
CHAPTER 8: The Circus Comes to Town
CHAPTER 9: Kurtz in Kalispell
CHAPTER 10: The Retreat from Moscow
CHAPTER 11: The Violinist on Roller Skates
CHAPTER 12: The Gates of Hell
PART III: 1981-1996
CHAPTER 13: Footloose in Hollywood
CHAPTER 14: Chasing the Sun
PART IV: 1996-2016
CHAPTER 15: Shadow Conversations
CHAPTER 16: The Woman from Torrance
CHAPTER 17: Phoenix
CHAPTER 18: June 30, 2016
CHAPTER 19: Wizard
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes and Sources
Bibliography
Index of Searchable Terms
PROLOGUE
I drove up to Michael Cimino s house a mile off one of the roads that cross Alto Cedro Drive high above Los Angeles, on a hot August day in 2018. Off the beaten track in the Hollywood Hills, the streets seemed ghostly and unnaturally empty of people. While two, three, four cars sat in the driveways I passed, flashy convertibles and hulking SUVs, I got the strange feeling that there was no one inside the houses. One thing was certain: Cimino was not going to be at home; he had died in June 2016.
I parked a little way from the house. It was certainly alto -my ears had popped on the way up there-but the cedro were few and far between. I got out of the car and walked down to the gates. Although many of the other homes were obscured by hedges of trees, I could at least see the rough shape of them. Cimino s was different: it was set on a bluff invisible from the road because of the sharply curved drive. I knew the house was a single story and L-shaped because I had viewed it from above on Google Earth the night before. Some of the neighboring ones were similarly shaped, and I imagined that if they were pushed toward one another, they would fit together like the blocks in a game of Tetris.
Of all Hollywood directors, Cimino is one of the most fascinating, mysterious, and enigmatic figures, both reviled and praised, his controversial behavior well-documented but often misunderstood. I had thought a lot about him and his house, and it had acquired a particular resonance for me. Maybe because Cimino seemed to have invented himself, to have been almost a fictional character-indeed was a character in a crazy French novel published in 2017, in which the hero pursues Cimino through New York-I thought of truly fictional characters whose houses revealed the secrets of their owners, maybe Citizen Kane s Xanadu, Norma Desmond s crumbling mausoleum on Sunset Boulevard, or Rebecca s gothic mansion: Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me .
Standing there did seem dreamlike. There was an iron gate, and the way was, indeed, barred to me-there was a thick chain and padlock. I was there for many reasons, but the main one was that I had heard something extraordinary: the house had been locked up after Cimino died two years before, and nothing had been touched since, like Miss Havisham s wedding feast.

The house in the Hills (Author s collection)
Cimino had bought this home in 1972, when he came to live in Los Angeles. He had felt ambivalent about the move, leaving behind a successful career in advertising and the city in which he had spent most of his life. Instrumental in persuading him to go was the most compelling and enigmatic figure in the Cimino diaspora-a woman named Joann Carelli. Her precise role in the fifty years of their life together has always been a source of conjecture, but many people regarded her as a kind of Sunset Boulevard Mrs. Danvers, loyal and aggressively protective, disliked by many people in Hollywood.
Maybe, by some improbable form of osmosis, just being near the house would illuminate some of the ambiguities in Cimino s life for me, a bewildering mixture of truths and untruths, some circulated by others, but many by him. However, one thing was undeniably true: he became one of the most reviled figures ever in the industry. Scandals tend to fade over time, but thirty-eight years after the disaster of his movie Heaven s Gate , it is still a Hollywood myth. I have found nobody there-even people who were born after the movie opened in 1980-without a view on it.
After the modest success of the first movie he directed, the Clint Eastwood vehicle Thunderbolt and Lightfoot , and the monumental success of The Deer Hunter in 1978, Cimino was given the Hollywood version of droit du seigneur: he could make more or less what he wanted, and what he wanted was Heaven s Gate , an ambitious Western that he wrote and directed.
At that time, the average budget for a film was around $9 million, although many were cheaper- Rocky cost just over $1 million in 1976. Cimino s movie was originally budgeted at $11.5 million and ended up at an unprecedented $40 million. That would not have been so hard to bear for the studio that financed it, United Artists, if it had been a success or even, at worst, a prestigious succ s d estime with great reviews. It was neither. Not only were the reviews unanimously vicious, but nobody went to see it. After a week, UA did something no studio had ever done before: they withdrew it, putting a $40 million movie on the shelf. Two years later, United Artists went out of business, and everyone believed that it was Cimino s movie that had bankrupted them.
There have been many crimes in Hollywood over the years, from David Begelman, a multimillionaire studio chief, stealing $10,000 from an actor to Cleopatra s producer Walter Wanger shooting his wife s lover in the groin. What was different about Cimino s crime was that it was not actually illegal, but that made no difference: in the court of Hollywood opinion, he had been found guilty, and there would be no parole for good behavior.
For him, the punishment was much worse: banishment from the career that had promised so much and from his work as a director who had total control over his movies. Cimino retreated to his refuge in the hills-a Hollywood version of house arrest. If he had worn an ankle bracelet, the words Heaven s Gate would have been engraved on it.
While it was true that almost every critic hated the film at the time, within twenty-five years of its release, many critics, particularly in Europe, came to regard Heaven s Gate as a masterpiece, one of the greatest Westerns ever made. For Cimino, of course, the truth was that the film had been a masterpiece from the beginning, but he had always had an ambivalent relationship with the truth. This was, after all, a man who had said, I am not who I am, and I am who I am not, a statement designed to be either obfuscating or illuminating, depending on your view of Cimino.
Of all the things Cimino was, there were many things he was not. He was not born in either 1952 or 1941, as he told people. He was not inspired to make The Deer Hunter because of his stint as a Green Beret, because he never actually was one. He said he was the screenwriter of the movie, but another writer was credited. He talked of a much-loved daughter, but he was not actually her father. In the last twenty years of his life, he vehemently denied that he had had any plastic surgery done, but he became so unrecognizable that nobody believed him.
What is extraordinary is how implausible some of his stories about himself were. Sometimes they would contradict one another, but he obviously relished the contradictions. His tales seemed like a series of shameless bluffs that he was daring people to disprove. What was not a bluff was Cimino s belief, later to be shared by others, that he was a great director. However, in the last twenty years of his life, he did not direct a single movie. Instead, inside the house, he worked constantly. He said he had written at least fifty scripts, although few people know exactly what they were.
At the Locarno Film Festival in 2015, the year before he died, he made a haunting statement about his writing. During a Q A session, someone asked him a question: I believe you have a room in your house that is stacked to the ceiling with stuff that you ve written, and I wondered what still keeps you writing.
God knows! Cimino said. Only the Lord knows, not I. That room, at one time, was very neat. Everything was in piles, very organized, but as you know, in the wonderful state of California, we have things called earthquakes, and after years of many earthquakes, this very neat room of files, piles of screenplays, is now a mountain, a confused mess, so it s very difficult for me to find anything. He paused, and then said quietly, I keep the room locked because I can t bear to look at it.
The house, both a refuge and a prison after his last film in 1996, was central to his working life. Most of his