Michael Cimino
American film director (1939–2016) / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Michael Antonio Cimino (/tʃɪˈmiːnoʊ/ chim-EE-noh[3] Italian pronunciation: [anˈtɔːnjo tʃiˈmiːno]; February 3, 1939 – July 2, 2016) was an American film director, screenwriter, producer and author. Notorious for his obsessive attention to detail and determination for perfection, Cimino achieved fame with The Deer Hunter (1978), which won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.
Michael Cimino | |
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Born | Michael Antonio Cimino (1939-02-03)February 3, 1939 New York City, New York, U.S. |
Died | July 2, 2016(2016-07-02) (aged 77) |
Education | Michigan State University (BA Graphic Arts, 1959) Yale University (BFA Painting, 1961; MFA Painting, 1963) |
Occupations |
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Years active | 1972–2007 |
Partner(s) | Joann Carelli (1968-1975)[1] Nongnuj Timruang (1977)[2] Yvonne Sciò (2002) Kim Swennen (2008-2009) |
With a background in painting and architecture, Cimino began his career as a commercial director in New York before moving to Los Angeles in the early '70s to take up screenwriting. After co-writing the scripts for both Silent Running (1972) and Magnum Force (1973), he wrote the preliminary script for Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), which became his directorial debut, and one of the highest-grossing films of its year.[4]
The critical accolades for co-writing, directing, and producing The Deer Hunter led to Cimino receiving creative control for Heaven's Gate (1980). The film became a critical failure and a legendary box-office bomb, which lost production studio United Artists an estimated $37 million. Its failure was widely blamed as the end of the New Hollywood era, with studios shifting focus from director-driven films towards high-concept, crowd-pleasing blockbusters. In recent decades however, Heaven's Gate has been dramatically reappraised, even being named by BBC Culture as one of the greatest American films of all time.[5]
Having only subsequently made four more films, Cimino grew infamous for the amount of projects he worked on throughout his life that were never made due to his uncompromising artistry.[6] In 2002, Cimino claimed he had written at least 50 scripts overall.[7] Several of his ambitious "dream projects" included adaptations of the novels Conquering Horse, The Fountainhead and Man's Fate as well as biopics on crime boss Frank Costello and Irish rebel Michael Collins.[8]
Throughout his life, Cimino allowed few details of his early life or family background to be known to the public, even giving false dates regarding his birth year.[9][7] As a result, many biographies about Cimino list several inaccuracies about his early years, as well as his background in filmmaking.[10][11][12]
Cimino's presumed birth date was February 3, 1939.[13][14] A third-generation Italian-American,[15][16] Cimino and his two younger brothers, Peter and Edward, grew up with their parents in the town of Westbury, on Long Island.[17] He was regarded as a prodigy at the private schools to which his parents sent him, but rebelled as an adolescent by consorting with delinquents, getting into fights, and coming home drunk.[18] Of this time, Cimino described himself as
"always hanging around with kids my parents didn't approve of. Those guys were so alive. When I was fifteen I spent three weeks driving all over Brooklyn with a guy who was following his girlfriend. He was convinced she was cheating on him, and he had a gun, he was going to kill her. There was such passion and intensity about their lives. When the rich kids got together, the most we ever did was cross against a red light."[19]
His father was a music publisher.[18] Cimino says his father was responsible for marching bands and organs playing pop music at football games.[7]
"When my father found out I went into the movie business, he didn't talk to me for a year," Cimino said.[18] "He was very tall and thin... His weight never changed his whole life and he didn't have a gray hair on his head. He was a bit like a Vanderbilt or a Whitney, one of those guys. He was the life of the party, women loved him, a real womanizer. He smoked like a fiend. He loved his martinis. He died really young. He was away a lot, but he was fun. I was just a tiny kid."[7]
His mother was a costume designer.[7] After he made The Deer Hunter, she said that she knew he had become famous because his name was in The New York Times crossword puzzle.[18]
Cimino graduated from Westbury High School in 1956. He entered Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. At Michigan State, Cimino majored in graphic arts, was a member of a weightlifting club, and participated in a group to welcome incoming students. He graduated in 1959 with honors and won the Harry Suffrin Advertising Award. He was described in the 1959 Red Cedar Log yearbook as having tastes that included blondes, Thelonious Monk, Chico Hamilton, Mort Sahl, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, and "drinking, preferably vodka."[20]
In Cimino's final year at Michigan State, he became art director, and later managing editor, of the school's humor magazine Spartan. Steven Bach wrote of Cimino's early magazine work:
"It is here that one can see what are perhaps the first public manifestations of the Cimino visual sensibility, and they are impressive. He thoroughly restyled the Spartan's derivative Punch look, designing a number of its strikingly handsome covers himself. The Cimino-designed covers are bold and strong, with a sure sense of space and design. They compare favorably to professional work honored in, say, any of the Modern Publicity annuals of the late fifties and are far better than the routine work turned out on Madison Avenue. The impact and quality of his work no doubt contributed to his winning the Harry Suffrin Advertising Award at MSU and perhaps to his acceptance at Yale University."[20]
At Yale, Cimino continued to study painting as well as architecture and art history and became involved in school dramatics. In 1962, while still at Yale, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve.[9][17] He trained for five months at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and had a month of medical training in Fort Sam Houston, Texas.[9][18] Cimino graduated from Yale University, receiving his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1961 and his Master of Fine Arts in 1963, both in painting.[9][18]
After graduating, Cimino moved to Manhattan and was given a job by Pablo Ferro with a small company that produced documentary and industrial films: "They taught me how to use a Moviola. I operated the Moviola and swept the floors and I was hooked — I decided to become a filmmaker."[21][22] During this time, he also took ballet classes and studied under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio once every week in order to better understand how his actors performed, if he wanted to direct.[23][24]