Word: cimino
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...stiffening competition from new entertainment technologies, Raiders is, in fact, an exemplary film, an object lesson in how to blend the art of storytelling with the highest levels of technical know-how, planning, cost control and commercial acumen. Most of its relatively low, $20 million budget (half what Michael Cimino was permitted to squander on his out-of-control flop, Heaven's Gate) is, as they say in Hollywood, "on the screen." It will therefore surely make money. The only question is whether it will rival the huge worldwide grosses of Star Wars ($500 million) and The Empire Strikes...
HEAVEN'S GATE Directed and Written by Michael Cimino...
Perhaps critics owed Michael Cimino that much when, last November, they sat in a Manhattan theater for the first screening of Heaven's Gate. The critics had praised Cimino's pictorial and political extravagances in The Deer Hunter; here he was describing another romantic triangle tested in time of war. It had taken him two years and $36 million to make his 3-hr. 40-min. western, so they'd better eat all of it. They didn't: the critics were outraged by the expenditure of all that time, talent, money and solemnity on a story...
...mood, moguls turned frantic, searching their silk purses for overpriced sows' ears. Penny pinching was back in style, and the omnipotent auteur was on the ropes. U.A. Executive Steven Bach, who once called Cimino "the Michelangelo of film," now pointed out that his director had been "behind five days in shooting- in six days." Universal's Ned Tanen noted that The Deer Hunter, which his studio coproduced, had gone 50% over budget. Sherry Lansing of 20th Century-Fox assured the company's owner-to-be, Marvin Davis, that "there are no Heaven 's Gates here." When...
...Michael Cimino will be lucky if he ever gets another job, perhaps not because his movie is terrible, but because it is so huge and terrible. The golden boy stands in shame. The kid had potential. He coulda been a contenda. And instead, he's a bum--with nothing to console him but his delusions of grandeur...