Legendary film director Michael Cimino, who made critically acclaimed moves including The Deer Hunter, has been found dead at his home in Los Angeles at the age of 77.
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His career can be seen as a case study and cautionary fable, one of the ultimate tales from the now venerated era of 1970s Hollywood, in which bracing films of deep emotional currents were made with all the resources of major studios.
Screenwriter and director Christopher McQuarrie, who won an Oscar for The Usual Suspects, also posted on Twitter on Saturday, “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot”. It launched Streep and co-star Christopher Walken to stardom, with the latter winning Best Supporting Actor at the Oscars.
Cimino’s death, first reported by Cannes film festival director Thierry Fremaux and the New York Times, was confirmed by Lt. B. Kim of the Los Angeles County coroner’s office.
Cimino’s fame went into overdrive when he co-wrote, co-produced, and directed The Deer Hunter, a Vietnam War film about three friends from a steel town in Pennsylvania who fight in the war and return home attempt to rebuild their lives after surviving the horrors of war.
Robert De Niro summed up the feelings of many with his succinct tribute: “Our work together is something I will always remember”.
He followed up that film with the film Heaven’s Gate, one of Hollywood’s most infamous critical and commercial flops.
A couple of years ago, I saw Heaven’s Gate.
His final Hollywood film, 1996’s “The Sunchaser”, a drama about a doctor, played by Woody Harrelson, who is kidnapped by a dying patient, didn’t fare any better and marked the end of Cimino’s career.
Having worked on the screenplay for Clint Eastwood’s 1973 “Dirty Harry” film Magnum Force, Cimino was offered the chance to write and direct the star’s next film, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. “He will be missed”, De Niro said of Cimino. Dad said that some movies are so brilliant you can only see them once and put The Deer Hunter into that category.
Steven Bach, a former executive vice president at United Artists, documented the production in the 1999 book Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heavens Gate..
“I never second-guess myself”, Cimino told Vanity Fair in a wide-ranging 2010 interview.
He also directed Desperate Hours (1990), starring Mickey Rourke and Anthony Hopkins, and the gangster film The Sicilian (1986), adapted from a novel by Godfather author Mario Puzo. You cant look back. I dont believe in defeat. “Everybody has bumps, but as Count Basie said, ‘It’s not how you handle the hills, it’s how you handle the valleys'”.
But Cimino’s rocketing career cratered following the controversial release of “Heaven’s Gate” in 1980.
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Cimino was born in New York City and raised in Long Island; his father was a music publisher, his mother a costume designer.
