Michael Cimino Biographies & Genealogy

42 Michael Cimino Biographies

Michael Cimino Feb 3, 1939 - Jul 2, 2016 Beverly Hills, California, United States

Michael Cimino Born February 3, 1939 New York City, New York, U.S. Died July 2, 2016 (aged 77) Beverly Hills, California, U.S. Education Michigan State University, (BA Graphic Arts, 1959) Yale University, (BFA Painting, 1961; MFA Painting, 1963) Occupation Film director · Producer and Screenwriter · Author Years active 1974–1996 Michael Cimino (/tʃɪˈmiːnoʊ/ chi-MEE-noh;[1] February 3, 1939 – July 2, 2016) was an American film director, screenwriter, producer, and author. He gained fame as the director of The Deer Hunter (1978), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture and earned him Best Director. Born in New York City, he graduated with a BA in graphic arts from Michigan State University in 1959 and a BFA and MFA from Yale University in 1961 and 1963. Cimino began his career filming commercials and moved to Los Angeles to take up screenwriting in 1971. After co-writing the scripts of Silent Running (1972) and Magnum Force (1973), he wrote the preliminary script Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. Clint Eastwood read the script and sent it to his personal production company Malpaso Productions, which allowed Cimino to direct the film in 1974. After its success, Cimino co-wrote, directed, and produced The Deer Hunter in 1978, which won five Oscars at the 51st Academy Awards. Early life Cimino was born in New York City on February 3, 1939. A third-generation Italian-American, Cimino and his brothers grew up with their parents in Westbury, Long Island. He was regarded as a prodigy at the private schools his parents sent him to, but rebelled as an adolescent by consorting with delinquents. His father was a music publisher. Cimino says his father was responsible for marching bands and organs playing pop music at football games. "When my father found out I went into the movie business, he didn't talk to me for a year," Cimino said. "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." His mother was a costume designer. 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. Commercials After graduating from Yale, Cimino moved to Manhattan to work in Madison Avenue advertising and became a star director of television commercials. He shot ads for L'eggs hosiery, Kool cigarettes, Eastman Kodak, United Airlines, and Pepsi, among others. "I met some people who were doing fashion stuff – commercials and stills. And there were all these incredibly beautiful girls," Cimino said. "And then, zoom – the next thing I know, overnight, I was directing commercials."[9] For example, Cimino directed the 1967 United Airlines commercial "Take Me Along", a musical extravaganza in which a group of ladies sing Take Me Along (adapted from a short-lived Broadway musical) to a group of men, presumably their husbands, to take them on a flight. The commercial is filled with the dynamic visuals, American symbolism and elaborate set design that would become Cimino's trademark. "The clients of the agencies liked Cimino," remarked Charles Okun, his production manager from 1964 to 1978. "His visuals were fabulous, but the amount of time it took was just astronomical. Because he was so meticulous and took so long. Nothing was easy with Michael." Through his commercial work, Cimino met Joann Carelli, then a commercial director representative. They began a 30-year on-again-off-again relationship. Screenwriting In 1971, Cimino moved to Los Angeles to start a career as a screenwriter. According to Cimino, it was Carelli that got him into screenwriting: "[Joann] actually talked me into it. I'd never really written anything ever before. I still don't regard myself as a writer. I've probably written thirteen to fourteen screenplays by [1978] and I still don't think of myself that way. Yet, that's how I make a living." Cimino added, "I started writing screenplays principally because I didn't have the money to buy books or to option properties. At that time you only had a chance to direct if you owned a screenplay which some star wanted to do, and that's precisely what happened with Thunderbolt and Lightfoot." Cimino gained representation from Stan Kamen of William Morris Agency.[18] The spec script Thunderbolt and Lightfoot was shown to Clint Eastwood, who bought it for his production company, Malpaso and allowed Cimino a chance to direct the film. Cimino co-wrote two scripts (the science fiction film Silent Running and Eastwood's second Dirty Harry film, Magnum Force) before moving to directing. Cimino's work on Thunderbolt and Lightfoot impressed Eastwood enough to ask him to work on the script for Magnum Force before Thunderbolt and Lightfoot began production. Cimino moved up to directing on the feature Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) The film stars Clint Eastwood as a Korean War veteran named "Thunderbolt" who takes a young drifter named "Lightfoot", played by Jeff Bridges, under his wing. When Thunderbolt's old partners try to find him, he and Lightfoot make a pact with them to pull one last big heist. Eastwood was originally slated to direct it himself, but Cimino impressed Eastwood enough to change his mind. The film became a solid box office success at the time, making $25,000,000 at the box office with a budget of $4,000,000 and earned Bridges an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. With the success of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Cimino said that he "got a lot of offers, but decided to take a gamble. I would only get involved with projects I really wanted to do." He rejected several offers before pitching an ambitious Vietnam War film to EMI executives in November 1976. To Cimino's surprise, EMI accepted the film. Cimino went on to direct, co-write, and co-produce The Deer Hunter (1978). The film stars Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, and John Savage as three buddies in a Pennsylvania steel mill town who fight in the Vietnam War and rebuild their lives in the aftermath. The film went over-schedule and over-budget, but it became a massive critical and commercial success, and won five Oscars, including Best Director and Best Picture for Cimino. Heaven's Gate was such a devastating critical and commercial bomb that public perception of Cimino's work was tainted in its wake; the majority of his subsequent films achieved neither popular nor critical success. Many critics who had originally praised The Deer Hunter became far more reserved about the picture and about Cimino after Heaven's Gate. The story of the making of the movie, and UA's subsequent downfall, was documented in Steven Bach's book Final Cut. Cimino's film was somewhat rehabilitated by an unlikely source: the Z Channel, a cable pay TV channel that at its peak in the mid-1980s served 100,000 of Los Angeles's most influential film professionals. After the unsuccessful release of the reedited and shortened Heaven's Gate, Jerry Harvey, the channel's programmer, decided to play Cimino's original 219-minute cut on Christmas Eve 1982. The reassembled movie received admiring reviews. The full length, director approved version, was released on LaserDisc by MGM/UA, and later reissued on DVD and Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection. In 1990, Cimino directed a remake of the film The Desperate Hours starring Anthony Hopkins and Mickey Rourke. The film was another box-office disappointment, grossing less than $3 million. His last feature-length film was 1996's Sunchaser with Woody Harrelson and Jon Seda. While nominated for the Palme d'Or at that year's Cannes Film Festival, the film was released straight to video. In later years, Heaven's Gate was re-assessed by film critics, and re-edited versions were met with critical acclaim. In 2012, Cimino attended the premiere of a new edit at the Venice Film Festival, which was met with a standing ovation.

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Michael J Cimino Aug 25, 1926 - Nov 7, 2009 Massapequa, New York

Michael J Cimino of Massapequa, Nassau County, NY was born on August 25, 1926, and died at age 83 years old on November 7, 2009.

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42 Michael Cimino Biographies

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