Word: cimino
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Director Michael Cimino shoots a $30 million western...
...minor footnote to history. No longer. In fact, if the Guinness Book of World Records ever devises an entry for History's Most Expensive Minor Footnote, the frontier fracas may find itself at the top of the list. Credit for the elevation goes to Michael Cimino, 38, the Oscar-winning director of The Deer Hunter. Cimino's new film, Heaven's Gate, will dramatize the Johnson County War as lavishly as his last film did the war in Viet Nam, but the price will be steeper. The Deer Hunter was a $12 million movie. By the time...
...Cimino submitted a script for the movie last fall to United Artists. The studio agreed to finance the picture for $7.5 million. "A really well-done western hadn't been made in a long time," explains U.A. Senior Vice President David Field. The studio's faith in Cimino was undiminished when the director's script rewrites necessitated a bigger budget of $11.6 million. The film had become more sweeping than a conventional western. It opens in the 1870s with the Harvard graduation of the hero, James Averill, who, like many of his generation, went West to help...
...between the two films is that The Deer Hunter presents a version of the American experience in Viet Nam that is utterly at variance with the view, widely held among intellectuals, of barbarously overarmed Americans, a nation of William Galleys, doing battle against the frail, gentle, long-suffering Vietnamese. Cimino's victims are the rambunctious guys from Clairton, blue-collar heroes who took their wholesome patriotism to Viet Nam and there found themselves alone, morally adrift among savage Southeast Asian exotics who are forever forcing them to play Russian roulette. There is no record or recollection, incidentally, that...
...Cimino's tale may or may not be a bad description of what happened in Viet Nam; it depends on one's politics. It is the implication of American innocence that enrages some critics of the film. Partly the difficulty lies in trying to extrapolate a general statement of American performance in Viet Nam from the in dividual American stories that Cimino presents. The director, now working in Montana on a new film about the immigrant voyages west, speaks bitterly of Fon da's charges about his film. His characters, says Cimino, "are trying to support each...