It began with lying about his age, which is no big deal in Hollywood, but then he lied about his degree. The studio chiefs must have had wet dreams thinking about this, a film by a real Viet Nam vet that could be in theatres long before Francis Ford Coppola’s Viet Nam epic Apocalypse Now (1979)?īut when the New York Times did some digging, as they do when profiling a director, they found some disturbing things. Everything on the screen would be the truth. He was going to show what he had experienced or seen, and as a vet had tremendous insight. He would do the same thing on his next film, Heaven’s Gate (1980) ultimately destroying a decades old studio.Ĭimino convinced EMI and Universal he was a Vietnam war veteran, that American audiences were for the first time going to see what really happened over there. It turns out Cimino was much smarter than they were and managed to sell himself as something it turned out, he was not. His career directing commercials was stellar, but how did he convince a studio to finance a film, a three-hour film at that, about the war in Vietnam? How did he manage to talk the suits into producing a film which the script makes clear has little or no dialogue for the first five pages? And why did the studio agree to produce a film that treated the Viet Cong as unfeeling, murdering monsters who forced American soldiers to play Russian Roulette while they bet on the outcome? Was no one thinking? They are unquestionably well directed, even brilliant, though what followed had an impact even on that thinking.Įarly screenings compared the film to The Godfather (1972), hailed the movie an American masterpiece and critic declared it the film to beat for the Academy Award.Ĭimino had directed the Clint Eastwood box office hit Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) and wrote some screenplays, did some doctoring work here and there, but was hardly an industry player or power. Perhaps forty-five minutes was spent in the inferno of war, horrific, intense sequences that had audiences squirming, and igniting American anger all over again. Cimino let the story unfold slowly, over his three-hour film, the opening act nearly ninety minutes long set in the hometown of the characters before they even leave for the war. A sharp-eyed reporter for the New York Times began digging into director-writer Michael Cimino’s past and found several irregularities in his life story, at least the one he posed to the press.Īt first, because Cimino told the press so, the thoughts on The Deer Hunter (1978) were that Cimino had made a masterpiece, a towering statement on the war in Vietnam from a man who had fought there, an honest film based on his experiences in Viet Nam. One of the first films to deal with war in Vietnam and how it impacted men and women who fought and those who remained behind, it followed the vastly superior Coming Home (1978) into theatres, opening nine months after Hal Ashby’s beautiful film. By the time it had won five Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director (Michael Cimino) the backlash against The Deer Hunter (1978) had been going on for several weeks.
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