Word: cimino
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...high points of the series. Also in the cast was John Cazale, who had played Fredo, the weak brother, in the Godfather films. They fell in love and lived together until Cazale died of bone cancer two years later, at 42. By the time they worked together in Michael Cimino's Deer Hunter, Cazale was fighting for the strength to say his lines. Streep had contracted to film Holocaust in Austria, where, as Cazale was dying in the U.S., she played a woman whose husband was imprisoned in a concentration camp. It was a grim experience, but, says Actor Fritz...
...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...
...good movie value at affordable prices. "I make films that generate emotions," he says, adding that the challenge is to "make them well enough so that they work at 51% effort. If the movie is made at 100% effort, it is indulgent." And likely to suffer unbearable cost overruns. "Cimino made Heaven's Gate at 150%." Moviegoers, says the frugal Lucas, will buy a weakish special effect or even stock footage as long as their emotions are engaged. "If it gets dreary, then they notice," he says. In Raiders, only sharp-eyed cineasts will know that a shot...
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...