CIMINO

The revelatory The New Yorker first biography of critically acclaimed then critically derided filmmaker Michael Cimino and a reevaluation of the infamous film that destroyed his career The 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 Noted television producer and author 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 biograph