When Michael Cimino died in 2016, I expressed an ardent wish to read a well-researched and sympathetic biography of him. Here it is: Charles Elton’s “Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, and the Price of a Vision” is as engaging, as fascinating, as revelatory, and as melancholy as one might expect. The book, which was published in March by Abrams, has two main themes: first, how the director’s career was slaughtered by critics’ mockery of his masterwork, “Heaven’s Gate,” when it premièred, in 1980; second, that Cimino presented as a woman, at least in private, for part of the last twenty-five years of his life. Elton doesn’t find or force any significant connections between these two aspects of Cimino’s life, but their link is under the surface, by way of the third main subject of the book: a grand, mysterious love story between Cimino and his principal collaborator, Joann Carelli—a relationship that remained strong from his earliest days as a director to the end of his life.
Every biography could be two books rather than one—the work itself and the nonfiction making-of detailing the journalistic adventures that yield the biographical record. Elton, a longtime agent, producer, and novelist, blends both in “Cimino.” Unlike many of the New Hollywood directors of the nineteen-seventies, whose public and private lives intertwined amid self-promotion or unguardedness, Cimino was very secretive and even brazenly deceptive about many of his personal details, whether about such intimate matters as his romantic life and his family or even about such readily checkable ones as his birth year and his military service. As a result, Elton’s research is filled with false leads and surprising connections, and it led him to subjects whose meetings with the author are themselves the stuff of high drama. Elton delights in the practical details of these encounters—how he locates people, where they meet. He connects with relatives of Cimino’s whose existence the filmmaker denied, and he also encounters a faux relative with whom Cimino nonetheless associated. Even with the conflicting stories and recollections, Cimino’s leading role as a character in his own self-created mythology develops stepwise along with his cinematic vocation and career—and is reflected in the aura of wonder and mystery with which the people in his orbit are enduringly tinged. And, when the legend eventually overtook the career, Cimino loomed as an awe-inspiring, cautionary, even tragic presence on the margins of Hollywood and at the center of film history.
Unlike such contemporaneous directorial heroes as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and Brian De Palma, Cimino didn’t grow up as a cinephile. He wasn’t a film critic, didn’t go to film school, and came to movies nearly by accident. Born in New York City and raised in a middle-class Italian American family in Westbury, Long Island, Cimino was a gifted artist. He graduated from Michigan State with a degree in graphic arts and, in 1963, got his M.F.A. in painting from Yale, where he “would hang around” the drama school and would find his calling in narrative and spectacle. (He also, Elton discovered, changed the pronunciation of his name from his family’s way, “Sim-i-no,” to the now familiar “Chi-mee-no.”) Moving to Manhattan, he found a job with an advertising-design firm, decided to direct commercials, and studied film technique by associating with prominent colleagues. A quick learner, Cimino, by 1965, commanded high pay as a commercial director (he soon bought himself a Rolls-Royce) and, by 1967, earned acclaim as an extraordinarily original commercial director—and an extraordinarily artistically controlling and demanding one. Then, in 1971, he went to Hollywood.
Carelli, an advertising artist who had represented Cimino in his commercial work (whether officially or not—one advertising producer called her Cimino’s “handler”), was his professional partner. She was present as his collaborator and behind-the-scenes counsellor and conscience for most of his career. (Elton writes, “Cimino had an entourage of one.”) When he moved to Hollywood, so did she. Many who knew them assumed that they were a couple, but neither Carelli nor Cimino ever said as much. Carelli gave very few interviews and stayed out of the public eye. Elton’s story of their initial discussions and their many encounters has a novelistic flair, as in his account of their first conversation, by phone: “ ‘This is Joann Carelli,’ she said in a guttural, unreconstructed New York accent. ‘I’m not going to tell you anything.’ ” But she turns out to be a key interview subject in “Cimino.”
Carelli advised Cimino that, if he wanted to direct in Hollywood, he’d have to write scripts—which is to say, first, he’d have to learn to do so. (Elton emphasizes that, at that time, no other TV-commercial director of note had had any success in Hollywood, although that career path became increasingly common by the nineteen-eighties.) As with commercial directing, Cimino learned screenwriting quickly, from others, yet not quite in the same way. Cimino collaborated with other writers, but removed their names before showing the scripts around. His methods were Machiavellian, and they worked. He was a co-writer of the post-apocalyptic “Silent Running,” with Bruce Dern; he revised the script for “Magnum Force,” starring Clint Eastwood; and he wrote a script on spec for Eastwood, “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot”—and, when Eastwood decided to produce and star in it, Cimino added the proviso that he be allowed to direct it as his first feature.
“Thunderbolt and Lightfoot” focusses on a former bank robber (Eastwood), whose past accomplices are chasing him; he escapes with a young rover (Jeff Bridges), and they team up with the accomplices to pull one final heist. Eastwood, a strict and economical producer, gave Cimino three days of shooting to prove himself. Cimino stuck religiously to the schedule and the budget, and Eastwood was pleased with his direction. The movie was a commercial success and received good reviews and an Oscar nomination (Bridges, for Best Supporting Actor). But it opened few doors for Cimino. He went back to writing—including a bio-pic of Janis Joplin that ended up being made without her name involved, as “The Rose,” starring Bette Midler—and he tried and failed to get financing for his dream project, a new adaptation of Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.” It wasn’t until late 1976 that he got the green light on another film, “The Deer Hunter,” a drama about three young men from a working-class town in western Pennsylvania whose service in the Vietnam War proves horrific.
“The Deer Hunter” was financed by an upstart studio, the U.S. division of EMI. Its producers were hungry for a prestigious hit, but, Elton says, “for tax reasons,” the production had to start quickly. In the mad rush to get the shoot up and running by March, 1977, the studio placed fewer checks on Cimino than were customary for a big-budget film. He brought in another writer, Deric Washburn, with whom he’d previously worked, and, again, removed his collaborator’s name from the script. (It was restored in Writers Guild arbitration.) He selected a wide range of locations—spread across the country (from Pennsylvania to Washington) and, indeed, around the world (Thailand)—that would provide the film with the authenticity and the detail that he sought. It was reported that, because the hunting in the movie took place in the fall but was filmed in the summer, leaves were painted yellow and pasted on trees. Cimino shipped two large deer to the hills, where thirty crew members carried them over in crates. The movie’s great set piece, a Russian Orthodox wedding scene, required two hundred and fifty extras; it was ten pages in the script, and Cimino told his producer that it would be aptly brief onscreen. But, in Cimino’s first cut, that one scene ran seventy-five minutes. In Thailand, they filmed amid a military coup. By the end of the production, Cimino had shot about a hundred hours of footage, and the budget had doubled, from $7.5 million to fifteen million dollars. He was contractually obligated to bring the film in under two hours, or else lose his right to final cut. The producers granted him an extra half hour; Cimino wouldn’t cut it below three hours. He snuck his cut out of the editing room, showed it privately to influential industry people, and orchestrated a pressure campaign that worked—because the film, at that length, proved overwhelmingly moving to those who saw it.
Cimino was a master tactician. He figured out how to manipulate the system and its power wielders in the interest of making his films as he saw fit. As good as “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot” is, it hardly suggests the enormous scope of Cimino’s vision. He was already in his late thirties, and “The Deer Hunter” had been his great chance to catch up to his peers—and he made good on it. His sense of drama is inseparable from his sense of spectacle; his art is a granular and sensory one that shares a fanatical eye for graphic detail with his work in commercials. In directing “The Deer Hunter,” Cimino was cunning, duplicitous, peremptory, and it worked. The film garnered rave reviews, was a box-office hit, and received nine Oscar nominations and won five, including Best Director and Best Picture.
Even before the Oscars, on the basis of private showings of “The Deer Hunter,” Cimino got a deal with a different studio, United Artists, to make another large-scale movie that he’d had in mind since his first days in Hollywood: a Western based on the true story of a massacre, by wealthy ranchers and their hired guns, of European immigrant farmers in Wyoming in the eighteen-nineties. Kris Kristofferson would star in it, as an idealistic federal marshal who attempts, in vain, to protect the poor farmers from the ruthless grandees. The studio figured that, by making a deal with Cimino before the Oscars, he would be willing to direct a major cinematic epic at an affordable budget. That assumption was colossally wrong, on a historic scale.
By that point, the studio was run by two new heads of production, Steven Bach and David Field, whose teamwork often ran at cross purposes, and whom Cimino outmaneuvered, strong-armed, insulted, and defied in order to get his way. For this film, “Heaven’s Gate,” there was, again, a rush to production and to completion (by the end of 1979, for Oscar consideration), and Cimino leveraged the studio’s impatience into more than final cut: he won contractual exoneration from budget overages. The scope of this film was larger, Cimino’s vision grander, and the tales that Elton tells of the filmmaker’s efforts (and expenditures) on behalf of that vast vision are astonishing. Cimino transformed active, living, breathing towns into full-sized historical sets. Production was centered in Kalispell, Montana, and the cast and crew took over the town. Cimino, however, needed a location where the train station was essentially on Main Street. Such a place turned out to be three hours away, in Wallace, Idaho. Cimino had that town’s shopkeepers paid to stay closed for weeks, had false period storefronts built to conceal the town’s modern ones, and had an actual antique train sent in—one unable to ride on rails, shipped atop another train, that travelled circuitously through five states to get there. He used twenty-five hundred extras, hired locally, in Kalispell; another thousand in Wallace; and a hundred-plus horses and wagons. Another faux town was built near Kalispell—on platforms, to protect the soil.
The art of direction is foremost the art of production—of coming up with an original way to make a movie. Cimino had one. The titanic scope of his vision allowed for no compromise. Elton speaks of the amount of time that Cimino spent on crowd scenes: “He would spend hours moving the extras around into different groups, plucking them from one and seeing what they looked like in another. This was an expensive way of getting the right canvas, but it gave those sequences an amazingly rich texture.” Cimino did dozens of takes of brief scenes, and also of long, complex ones. That sense of texture makes him something of an avant-gardist in Hollywood: his drama has both a primal emotional fury and a pointillistic obsession with infinitesimal details. His art of salience, of detail that pops—an art that he developed in TV commercials—is, from moment to moment, extremely condensed, but in “Heaven’s Gate” it also accretes gradually, filling extended takes and a nearly four-hour span. Cimino’s frank and furious view of American xenophobia and violence meshes with a cosmic view of the overwhelming and crushing cruelty of nature itself—and of the awe-inspiring beauty of that cosmic power.
When the producers and other executives raised questions about the “Heaven’s Gate” budget, Cimino literally refused to talk with them. United Artists considered pulling the plug on the film, mid-production. It even considered firing Cimino and replacing him with someone more workmanlike. (The studio consulted with Norman Jewison, the director of “Fiddler on the Roof,” who in any case refused to do it.) The budget, originally $11.5 million, grew to more than forty million dollars. The movie wouldn’t be done by the end of 1979; the studio instead locked itself into the release date of November 19, 1980. Cimino, again with tremendous quantities of footage to edit—this time, more than two hundred hours’ worth—needed “Heaven’s Gate” to come in at under three hours to keep final cut, but, again, he played high-stakes poker. He showed a five-and-a-half-hour version and agreed to cut it down, but he wouldn’t show executives the new edit and refused to do a preview. The first time that the studio saw the final cut, at three hours and forty minutes, was at the première, on November 18th.
Word had been getting around about the colossal shoot, its enormous footprint in the Northwest, its cost, and its delays. As Elton details, Cimino exacerbated speculations by keeping the set closed and allowing no journalists in to report on the production. Instead, the rumor mill churned overtime, accelerated by reporting from a journalist who embedded himself in the cast as an extra. “Heaven’s Gate” was an industry scandal long before its release, and it paid the price. Elton writes that after the première, held two days before the release, “the reviews were probably the most devastating ever published for a movie. The media, antagonistic to Cimino since his hostile attitude to them in Kalispell and after, turned on him in a vicious attack.” In response, Cimino prevailed upon the studio to postpone the imminent release for a month and let him recut it—and published an open letter in Variety to that effect. Yet when the hundred-and-forty-five-minute version finally came out, in April, 1981, the reviews were hardly better, and the movie was a commercial disaster, taking in a mere $3.5 million.
Critics may love the art of movies, but they depend on the movie business, and ultimately they reviewed Cimino’s willful ways with studio money and studio control rather than the onscreen results of his methods. They assailed his expenditures, though, Elton rightly adds, few had anything negative to say about the thirty-four-million-dollar budget of the previous year’s 007 film, “Moonraker.” Despite the legend of “Heaven’s Gate” bankrupting the studio (a legend perpetuated by Bach, the studio head, who wrote the 1985 book “Final Cut” about the making of the film), the movie itself had, as Elton details, only a slight impact on United Artists’ profits and stock price. The real cost to the studio was emotional—the company and its executives were humiliated—and this, more than any financial practicality, destroyed Cimino’s career. Had the film been recognized for its artistry at the time of its première, the executives could have held their heads high as Hollywood’s Medicis, the sponsors of a film that’s a credit to the studio and to the industry at large—and of its admired director. Instead, Cimino’s own reputation as a director was besmirched, and doubly, both for having made a putatively awful movie and for having made the studio look bad in the process. The studio was sold; the director never recovered.
As Elton writes, Cimino “was no longer a star director, and never would be again. Just as ‘Heaven’s Gate’ had become a symbol of all failed films, so Cimino became a symbol of all failed directors.” Elton sketches the definitive shift in the industry that followed the film’s failure—the end of the auteur era in Hollywood, the clamping-down on the personal projects of that era’s celebrated directors. Cimino kept working nonetheless. When Russian producers dangled a bio-pic of Dostoyevsky before him, he called upon Raymond Carver to write the script with him and, when that fell through, to work with him on a script about a program for the rehabilitation of juvenile delinquents. (Carver and his wife, the poet Tess Gallagher, were admirers of “Heaven’s Gate.”) Cimino was also offered “Footloose” and was eager to prove himself once more. He was even willing to accept the stringent terms set by the producers at Paramount to keep him in line. “The budget was a low $7.5 million,” Elton notes, “and cost overages were to be deducted from Cimino’s salary.” But Cimino wanted to rewrite the script. As the screenwriter, Dean Pitchford, recalls, “Cimino insisted that the movie should be harder, grittier, and dirtier. . . . He kept saying, ‘That’s too light, that’s too much fun.’ ” Cimino was fired before shooting started. He pitched “The Fountainhead” again, with Barbra Streisand in the lead female role; he was offered a movie about the Irish freedom fighter Michael Collins that was cancelled in preproduction; and he was offered a romantic drama written by Floyd Mutrux (another great director of the seventies whose career had stalled), but this, too, never got off the ground. In the end, he would make only four more features.
For all their sense of spectacle, Cimino’s films are also like documentaries, creating a world that is enormously large and detailed, and that sense of scope and detail is what’s missing from the later films. They capture his world of ideas and themes but largely lack his aesthetic. “Year of the Dragon,” from 1985, about a police detective (Mickey Rourke) who fights organized crime in New York’s Chinatown, has the distinction of re-creating the neighborhood in such teeming detail that many of its contemporaneous viewers, including Stanley Kubrick, believed it to have been filmed on location. (It was made in a studio in North Carolina.) All of these last four films follow in the path of Cimino’s first three as outpourings of loss and grief in the face of implacable power. His final movie, “The Sunchaser,” released in 1996, cost thirty-one million dollars and took in less than thirty thousand dollars at the box office.
Though Cimino lived two more decades and continued to write scripts and harbor hopes of making another feature, he never did. But he lived long enough to see the rehabilitation of “Heaven’s Gate,” in his original three-hour-and-forty-minute cut, by a new generation of movie lovers. The film received a meticulous and costly restoration and was hailed at the 2012 New York Film Festival, widely praised by critics, and released (including an interview with Cimino and Carelli) on DVD by the Criterion Collection.
During the shoot of “Heaven’s Gate,” Carelli married David Mansfield, a young musician who played a remarkable role in the film—a fiddler who performs on roller skates while leading a group of immigrant farmers, who are jubilantly skating behind him, at the roller rink that gives the film its title. They kept the marriage a secret from Cimino; later, the editor Penny Shaw felt it her duty to tell him. Elton quotes her: “He got very angry with me. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. No, they didn’t.’ I said, ‘Yes, they did.’ He never mentioned it again.” He and Carelli remained, Elton reports, as close as they’d been. Carelli and Mansfield had a daughter together, named Calantha. They divorced in 1992, and by the late nineties Cimino had become a virtual father to Calantha, who often travelled with Carelli and Cimino when he received tributes from European film festivals.
In his later years, Cimino had hardly any public life in the United States, and, to the extent that he was discussed, it was all too often in terms of his appearance. Elton writes, “Whereas once he had been standard-issue Italian American macho—like Stallone or Pacino—he now gradually began to take on an androgynous appearance.” What’s more, journalists didn’t hesitate to assail Cimino with questions about his new look. “Interviewers clearly felt that there were no boundaries around the questions they could ask Cimino, that no aspect of his private life was off-limits,” Elton notes. “With him, the questions were cruel and invasive, as if, after his downfall, he deserved no respect.” Cimino denied that he was transitioning; he scoffed at some questions and refuted others. But, as Elton adds, “the fact that Cimino denied that there was any truth to the stories about him did not mean he was in denial to himself. He knew what he was doing, and the gradual reevaluation of his identity turned out to be a brave journey, through which he was helped by a woman with whom he had an extraordinary relationship.”
In Elton’s telling, in the early nineties, Cimino began to present as a woman with the aid of a wig seller and cosmetologist named Valerie Driscoll. Working with Driscoll, Cimino went by the name of Nikki; their sessions, Driscoll told Elton, took place in the course of a few years, through 1996, when she closed her wig shop. During their visits, Cimino told her that he was “a caregiver to an elderly couple in Beverly Hills and lived in their guesthouse.” Driscoll refers to Cimino as Nikki, by the pronouns “she” and “her.” In public, Cimino continued to appear as Michael through the end of his life; in private, Cimino’s gender identity seemed fluid. “I think she was questioning herself, what she was doing,” Driscoll said. “ ‘So now what? Should I just go back to being Michael?’ ”
Amid the humiliations that went with public life in the United States and the accolades that went with public life in Europe, Cimino was Michael. And when Driscoll, amid their ongoing friendship, disclosed that she knew Cimino was no caregiver but a famous director, Cimino ended the relationship. One passage from Bach’s book “Final Cut,” which Elton doesn’t cite, proves strangely apt. Bach refers to Cimino’s “penchant for secrecy” in the context of the exclusion of the press from the location shoot of “Heaven’s Gate”:
To the best of my knowledge, there were no openly transgender or even gender-fluid directors in Hollywood in the early nineteen-nineties, let alone earlier. Elton doesn’t present any evidence of Cimino having questioned his gender identity prior to his meetings with Driscoll. What is clear, however, is that Cimino separated himself from his family (he saw his mother for the last time in the nineteen-eighties; she died in 2010), from his childhood friends, from his home town, from his past. Only once does Elton yield to psychological speculation: “The many versions of himself that he showed to the world created a confusion that helped to hide one of his personae, the one that he had shared with Valerie Driscoll in Torrance, which possibly meant the most to him.” If the fear of discovery was the overarching agony of Cimino’s life, it’s one that perhaps finds its artistic embodiment in the opening sequence of his first film, “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.” A minister, played by Eastwood, is preaching a sermon to his congregation in a country church when he is interrupted and pursued by a gunman, a former partner in crime, whom the preacher calls an “old friend.”
An earlier version of this article misstated when Carelli and Mansfield became divorced.
