Michael Cimino, a chaotic author
In the prologue of cimino, the new biography of Michael Cimino by Charles Elton, the author describes stopping at his subject’s mansion in the Hollywood Hills, knowing full well that the director would not be home. Elton showed up on the mansion’s doorstep in 2018, a year and a half after the director died at the age of 77 from undisclosed causes. He was there to sift through the artifacts of a career that changed the course of American film history even if it also, to some extent, got lost on it.
The idea of a biographer adrift in a Xanadu cluttered with garlands of rosebuds is as old as Citizen Kane, and the ghost of Orson Welles – the author making masterpieces in his protean image – haunts the memory of Cimino’s own life in indirect but suggestive ways. The legendary “final cut” privilege bestowed on Welles on his debut doubled as the title of Steven Bach’s best-selling account of Cimino’s disastrous 1980 western production. The Gate of Paradisea film as synonymous with the idea of top-down directional control as Kanealthough this is a cautionary tale rather than an indicator.
As a revisionist western examining the raw, remorseless violence of a country’s capitalist system, The Gate of Paradise remains powerful and provocative, its flaws subsumed in masterful painterly beauty. But it’s also a case study at the difficult intersection of auteur exceptionalism and blockbuster bloat. The film’s signature sequence, featuring hundreds of costumed extras partying on roller skaters around a wooden ice rink with the vigorous accompaniment of a bluegrass band, was indelible enough for James Cameron to diverted to Titanic; his excess also serves, subconsciously, as an emblem of Cimino’s debauchery on set. Caught up in their own circular reverie, players play endlessly, while barely out of frame an untold corporate fortune burns.
“There was no chaos”, writes Bach in final cut on the manufacture of The Gate of Paradise. “There was its opposite…a quiet, determined, relentless pursuit of the perfect.” What Bach’s book leaves unexplored is the dramatic idea that Cimino’s on-set perfectionism (and its ultimately chaotic consequences) existed as a counterpoint to the impulsive, messy, maddening ways in which it existed in the world – tendencies over which he both did and did not exercise any control.
Elton’s biographical method is mostly muckraking, and he’s good at it. cimino isn’t written from the perspective of a sidekick or a devil’s advocate (or even, really, a movie buff); it is sprawling and granular, structured around recorded testimonies of an artist who, as he grew older, did his best to live a secretive and private life. “I googled myself once,” Cimino told his friend, novelist FX Feeney. “I don’t know most of the people I’ve been.”
Bbefore Kane-like the isolation of his later years, Cimino had always been good for a quote, especially about himself. “It’s hard to lift pride with humility,” he observed in 1978 when accepting the Oscar for best director, for The deer hunter (1978), the hyperbolic and hugely problematic Vietnam War flick, which instantly put the former hired screenwriter on the same playing field as movie brats – Coppola, De Palma, etc. Any discussion of Hollywood in the 1970s necessarily includes massive director egos writing checks that their backers cashed, but Cimino’s iconoclasm set him apart even from the crowd.
A tough kid who told big tales of growing up wild on Long Island in the 1950s and briefly enlisting in the Army Reserve before practicing his skills as a graphic designer on Madison Avenue, Cimino insisted on the fact that he had only decamped to Los Angeles to cultivate a playboy persona. He poked fun at the self-conscious cinephilia of Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and their cronies, augmenting their invocations of Jean-Luc Godard by name-checking Kandinsky. “I didn’t come from the stage,” Cimino breathed. What Elton’s book illustrates is how the director was able to place himself at the center of his own private Hollywood cosmology and end up with power brokers and movie stars in his orbit.
In truth, Elton’s biography is a double-character study of two flamboyant figures: Cimino, for one, but also his producer, friend and longtime companion Joan Carelli, whose daughter Calantha grew up with the filmmaker as surrogate parent. If Cimino’s hotly contested biography sounds like a multiple-choice game — with even the correct year of his birth steeped in ambiguity — Carelli was the human equivalent of “all of the above.” She is described by Elton as the director’s “muse, lover, facilitator, adviser, hatchet woman, bad cop”. [and] gatekeeper”, an inventory that only scratches the surface of his intimate influence. When first meeting Cimino in the early 1970s – and recognizing his talent, restlessness and capacity for self-invention as equal to his own – Carelli advised the young filmmaker to “ask ten things and settle for of the four he really wanted”. In retrospect, this advice resembles the primal scene of gigantism and hubris titled from The Gate of Paradise.
Carelli was in her late 70s when Elton managed to contact her. She’s coy about the “secret world” she shared with Cimino for almost four decades by his side, telling Elton that everything he hears from other sources is probably a lie anyway. His participation constitutes one of the many real journalistic stunts for him; another is a long coda featuring Cimino’s brother, Peter, who talks about his brother – and his claims to a childhood straight out of a Eugene O’Neill play – with a disarming mix of empathy and skepticism.
Elsewhere, Elton also stalks more minor characters (former classmates, industry collaborators) and repeats unflattering anecdotes that the director’s fans (and detractors) will already be familiar with. These include Cimino’s debunked claims that certain aspects of The deer hunter were derived from his own combat experiences as a Green Beret, as well as his attempts to deny contributing screenwriter Deric Washburn credit as co-writer. Perhaps the subtext of this inventory of stolen artistry is that you can’t make an omelette – or a critically acclaimed and commercially successful meditation on American identity and the psychic traumas of combat – without breaking some eggs. Was Cimino’s statement what to do The deer hunter gave him a truly more outrageous form of PTSD than that of Francis Ford Coppola who Revelation now wasn’t “about Vietnam…[it] is Vietnam”?
Revelation now and The Gate of Paradise come together historically as feverish testimonies of a stubborn and intractable director’s will, as well as two of the last films produced under the imprimatur of United Artists, the venerable studio founded in 1919 by DW Griffith, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin as a hedge against the vertically integrated machinations of the original Hollywood moguls. In final cutBach juxtaposes the horribly troubled productions of the two films while pointing out that Coppola’s film – despite all its financial weight and bad vibes – ultimately recouped its costs, while The Gate of Paradise, relegated by bad press in advance to the status of a critical punching bag (“a film you want to disfigure”, wrote Pauline Kael), fell apart hard enough to sound the death knell for its backers. Elton reports that the 1980 sale of UA by its parent company Transamerica had been in the works for some time before the debacle of The Gate of Paradiseand that “the industry believed that [Cimino] was totally responsible for a bankruptcy that didn’t actually happen.
Aas its subtitle suggests, cimino weighs heavily on The deer hunter and The Gate of Paradiseand whether a byproduct of a relative lack of historical material or the author’s own disinterest, the feature films made by Cimino between 1981 and 1996 are largely glossed over: there’s more here on the scuttled participation from director to Free from all ties (1984) that there is about 1983 The Year of the Dragon—a film whose unrepentant anti-Asian xenophobia appears in retrospect as an act of defiance of accusations of racism against The deer hunter.
Elton doesn’t try many film reviews, and when he does, the results can be unfortunate: Discussing Cimino’s directorial debut with Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, he calls it the last time a Clint Eastwood vehicle had any kind of subtext (that sound you hear is that of a thousand author gritting their teeth). But it is not without some key critical observations: it skillfully documents the details and reasoning behind the post-millennium recovery of Cimino’s work. “The critics did not misunderstand [Heaven’s Gate], they just hated it,” he wrote; decades later, in a cinematic landscape dominated by impersonal blockbusters, The Gate of ParadiseThe combination of epic scale and individual idiosyncrasy sparked a kind of affectionate nostalgia – a window into a different kind of big-budget albatrosses.
Of all the enigmas that hang over Cimino and the malleability of his personality, the whispers about his subsequent gender transition are the most mysterious, complicating the filmmaker’s sometimes bluffing machismo. In 1997, Cimino denied The variety that he requested that his Director’s Guild of America membership be changed to “Michelle Cimino” and complained to friends that the changes in his physical appearance had become “fodder”. But as Elton sensitively points out, “the fact that [he] denied that there was any truth to the stories about him did not mean he was denying himself. The final passages quote Victoria Driscoll, a hair and makeup artist who remembers her client and friend as “Nikki”. Driscoll had no idea of Cimino’s life or career outside of the Torrance wig shop where they met and bonded in the 1990s; even at his most gregarious and open-hearted, Cimino clung to his own self-proclaimed intimacy.
In 2015, Cimino was asked by an interviewer about a room in his house he allegedly filled with unfinished or unproduced scripts, to which the director replied, sadly, “I keep [it] locked because I can’t stand to watch it. While Elton’s book doesn’t fully open the door to him, it does offer enough insight into what lies behind it to be indispensable.
45% of women are expected to be single and childless by 2030, according to a recent projection
10 easy meals for vegan beginners
The internet has only one question after watching SRK’s Jhoome Jo Pathaan and Deepika Padukone and that’s…
About The Author
