Michael Cimino, best known for directing the Oscar-winning film The Deer Hunter was found dead in his Los Angeles home Saturday.
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The news was confirmed by his friend and attorney, Eric Weissmann, with no cause of death yet determined.
His career in Hollywood would start in 1971 when he moved to Los Angeles, co-writing such films as Silent Running starring Bruce Dern and Magnum Force, the second film in the Dirty Harry franchise starring Clint Eastwood.
The cast featured Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, Christopher Walken, John Savage and John Cazale in a story of a group of friends from an industrial Pennsylvania town and how their lives are torn apart by the Vietnam War, both for those sent overseas and those who stayed behind. The film’s editor Joe D’Augustine recalled an eerie encounter with Cimino in a darkened edit suite, his face covered, voice hushed. In desperation, UA ordered Cimino to create a much shorter version of the film for wide release, but the results were still awful. “In his most iconic work…” He variously listed the year of his birth as 1939, 1943 and 1952. The emerging career of Cimino was dented by 1980 movie “The Heaven’s Gate” which was a critical and financial disaster.
Cimino made just eight films during his career but has been cited as a major influence by generations of filmmakers.
Whilst Jason Reitman wrote: “Heavens Gate was the bravest swing for the fences”. The theatrical version ran three hours and 39 minutes long, was severely over budget and critics hated it. The movie was budgeted for $11 million but took $44 million to make and only made $3.5 million.
During the filming, studio executives chafed as Cimino went over budget, but The Deer Hunter was a box-office hit and generated a large profit.
Michael Cimino, who received an Oscar for his critically acclaimed film The Deer Hunter has died aged 77.
United Artists slashed Cimino’s cut of Heaven’s Gate down into two disjointed shorter edits, finally allowing a limited release to nearly universally hostile reviews. The director-driven renaissance that had fueled numerous great films of the 1970s gave way to a business-and-blockbuster mentality that would dominate the decades that followed. In more recent years, he wrote occasional novels and would come out of seclusion to attend a film festival or event every now and then. “I never second-guess myself”. You cant look back. “I don’t 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'”. His father was a music publisher.
He went into advertising directly after college and became a top Madison Avenue commercial director; shooting commercials for many familiar household brands including Pepsi, Eastman Kodak, and United Airlines.
His other films include 1974’s Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, starring Jeff Bridges, and 1987’s The Sicilian, among others.
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The two worked together on the 1978 Academy Award-winning film The Deer Hunter, one of De Niro’s defining roles.
