Charles Elton - Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heavens Gate, and the Price of a Vision

The house in the Hills (Authors collection)

Cimino had bought this home in 1972, when he came to live in Los Angeles. He had felt ambivalent about the move, leaving behind a successful career in advertising and the city in which he had spent most of his life. Instrumental in persuading him to go was the most compelling and enigmatic figure in the Cimino diasporaa woman named Joann Carelli. Her precise role in the fifty years of their life together has always been a source of conjecture, but many people regarded her as a kind of Sunset Boulevard Mrs. Danvers, loyal and aggressively protective, disliked by many people in Hollywood.

Maybe, by some improbable form of osmosis, just being near the house would illuminate some of the ambiguities in Ciminos life for me, a bewildering mixture of truths and untruths, some circulated by others, but many by him. However, one thing was undeniably true: he became one of the most reviled figures ever in the industry. Scandals tend to fade over time, but thirty-eight years after the disaster of his movie Heavens Gate, it is still a Hollywood myth. I have found nobody thereeven people who were born after the movie opened in 1980without a view on it.

After the modest success of the first movie he directed, the Clint Eastwood vehicle Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, and the monumental success of The Deer Hunter in 1978, Cimino was given the Hollywood version of droit du seigneur: he could make more or less what he wanted, and what he wanted was Heavens Gate, an ambitious Western that he wrote and directed.

At that time, the average budget for a film was around $9 million, although many were cheaperRocky cost just over $1 million in 1976. Ciminos movie was originally budgeted at $11.5 million and ended up at an unprecedented $40 million. That would not have been so hard to bear for the studio that financed it, United Artists, if it had been a success or even, at worst, a prestigious succs destime with great reviews. It was neither. Not only were the reviews unanimously vicious, but nobody went to see it. After a week, UA did something no studio had ever done before: they withdrew it, putting a $40 million movie on the shelf. Two years later, United Artists went out of business, and everyone believed that it was Ciminos movie that had bankrupted them.

There have been many crimes in Hollywood over the years, from David Begelman, a multimillionaire studio chief, stealing $10,000 from an actor to Cleopatras producer Walter Wanger shooting his wifes lover in the groin. What was different about Ciminos crime was that it was not actually illegal, but that made no difference: in the court of Hollywood opinion, he had been found guilty, and there would be no parole for good behavior.

For him, the punishment was much worse: banishment from the career that had promised so much and from his work as a director who had total control over his movies. Cimino retreated to his refuge in the hillsa Hollywood version of house arrest. If he had worn an ankle bracelet, the words Heavens Gate would have been engraved on it.

While it was true that almost every critic hated the film at the time, within twenty-five years of its release, many critics, particularly in Europe, came to regard Heavens Gate as a masterpiece, one of the greatest Westerns ever made. For Cimino, of course, the truth was that the film had been a masterpiece from the beginning, but he had always had an ambivalent relationship with the truth. This was, after all, a man who had said, I am not who I am, and I am who I am not, a statement designed to be either obfuscating or illuminating, depending on your view of Cimino.