Michael Cimino Biography

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Writer/producer/director Michael Cimino, the son of a Long Island-based music publisher, earned an MFA in Painting at Yale University, where he also became involved with student theatrical productions. Upon moving to New York City, he augmented his acting lessons with ballet classes, and began directing TV commercials and industrial films around 1963. In 1971, Cimino moved to Hollywood, where he wrote his first big-studio film, the Douglas Trumbull-directed Silent Running. This led to his own feature-length directorial debut, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), a successful Clint Eastwood vehicle which Cimino patterned after one of his favorite '50s films, Captain Lightfoot. Given virtual carte blanche for his next project, Cimino spent nearly three years on the preparation and production of The Deer Hunter, a long, elegiac Vietnam-era epic which won five 1978 Oscars, including Best Picture. Operating on the theory that Cimino could do no wrong, United Artists gave the filmmaker another free hand on his next project, Heaven's Gate (1980). The melancholy history of this mother of all cinematic fiascoes has been thoroughly covered elsewhere, so suffice to say that the production's combination of clashing egos, on-set drug participation, misfired "atmosphere" sequences, muddy (and muddled) battle scenes and incomprehensible dialogue added up to the Picture That Killed United Artists. As was their habit, French cineasts embraced Heaven's Gate as an unheralded masterpiece, but this fact did little to restore Cimino's tarnished reputation. He made several "comeback" films afterward, but nearly always as a studio hired hand, and with none of the autonomy he'd enjoyed in his Deer Hunter days. - Hal Erickson, Rovi

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