I watched Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter yesterday. It was on cable, my homework was done, so I watched a movie I had seen a few times.
It brought back a couple of unpleasant memories that have attached themselves with me and the movie over the years. Back when we were dating, I think, I took my now-wife Mitzi to see The Deer Hunter at the Widescreen Film Festival at the Carpenter Center at Long Beach State. Slated to appear was the director himself, as he would introduce the film. The Carpenter was not full, which surprised me, because this was Michael Cimino.
For those who might not remember the name, Michael Cimino worked his way through the scene with screenplays to Silent Running (1972) and Magnum Force (1973) before Clint Eastwood gave him his directorial shot with Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), which Eastwood starred in. The dates are important because these weren’t huge films–though Magnum Force was part of the Dirty Harry series–but, at this time, Hollywood believed that young directors were going to make the next Easy Rider or The Exorcist, or that they could make some money off a small investment.
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot made the studios some money, Jeff Bridges was up for Supporting Actor, and that gave Cimino enough credibility to make The Deer Hunter in 1978. It was long, ran over budget, but won a lot of Oscars, including Best Picture, and had Robert DeNiro, a young Christopher Walken, Meryl Streep, John Cazale, and John Savage in it. It resonated with audiences on many levels, and, perhaps, was the movie that needed to be made after our country came out of the Vietnam War.
But after his success with The Deer Hunter, Cimino wrote and directed Heaven’s Gate, which featured an older Christopher Walken, and newly-box-office-bankable Kris Kristofferson, John Hurt after an alien popped out of his chest a year before, foreign actress Isabelle Huppert, along with veterans like Sam Waterston, Jeff Bridges, Brad Dourif, and Joseph Cotton. The name Heaven’s Gate and Michael Cimino are now associated with failure, indulgence, hubris, and two of the reasons United Artists doesn’t exist anymore.
Heaven’s Gate bombed. There have been books written about its failure, most notably The Final Cut, which detailed the excess of the shoot and the eventual box office thud. When filming, there were stories about how controlling Cimino was–that he was five days behind schedule on the sixth day–and that he had been cruel to animals. The budget went up monthly, but the studio was tied to the picture and kept coming up with money. When it was almost said and done, Cimino claimed he had a 500+ minute version of the film, but that he might be able to cut 15 minutes from that. There were battles over length and marketing of the film, but the first version that hit theaters was over 200 minutes. I’m not even sure if Cimino was the final editor.
Heaven’s Gate ruined Cimino. Yes, he directed other films after that, but Year of the Dragon, Desperate Hours, and Sunchaser were not going to get him back onto Hollywood’s elite list. He was done. There were stories that he had this or that project, but they didn’t happen. There were also stories that he was having plastic surgery to transition to a woman. When his picture came up on the In Memorium segment of the Oscars, I did not even know he had died.
Back to the Carpenter Center, not filled almost twenty years after The Deer Hunter first came out. Cimino was there and he did speak. He claimed he had not seen the movie since it first came out–which seemed like a ridiculous feat–but he was optimistic and talked about film and what it had done for him and what it might do in the future. He spoke to any young filmmakers in the audience and implored them to be true to their game, to tell their stories, and not give up in spite of any odds. He was funny, humble, and hardly seemed like the guy who was notorious for a movie that killed the independent spirit of 1970’s movies. Of my celebrity sightings, and the speeches they give, he seemed like a guy who had promise, which is, maybe, why studios took a chance on him. He even sat in the front and watched his movie as it played on the wide screen.
After an hour, or so, I started to remember some thing about The Deer Hunter that I wasn’t seeing on the screen. I chalked it up to my bad memory, which I don’t have; however, I hadn’t seen the movie in a while, so maybe I was wrong. There is, though, this major scene about an hour from the end of the scene. It’s where Robert DeNiro’s character named Michael (many people had issue that Cimino had DeNiro play “him” in the film) is off with his old buddies on a hunting trip. He’s a great hunter and, while his friends stay close to the action, he is bounding over rocks, running through forests, is even above the clouds in his search for the perfect elk. He stalks it, has it in his sights, but does not shoot it. It’s a big deal–he’s been to Vietnam and guns and violence have played a big role in the film so far. Needless to say, that scene was not in the movie my future wife and I were watching. Five minutes later,the lights came on and an announcer told us that this was not Cimino’s movie. It was an edited version that someone had grabbed from the Long Beach State library, a movie that anyone could have checked out and watched at home up until then. The announcer apologized to Cimino and us for the mistake, told us we could stay as the movie would be finished, but reminded us that this was not the real movie version. We left. I don’t know what Cimino did.
That was Long Beach State for me. As much as I enjoyed the school, and it did allow me to get an MFA in Fiction, it was always going to be the minor leagues and, in turn, so was I. While my friends went to amazing schools and got great degrees and pursued their Masters at those impressive schools, I went to Long Beach. They had Michael Cimino in their presence and they rolled out the wrong movie. My friends who went to other schools are very impressive on paper–they have scads of money, work high-level jobs, and are pretty important people. I took an MFA and parlayed that to my 19th year at a public high school and an unfinished book. The job is not a regret, nor is my life, but the non-book is.
The Deer Hunter will always bring me to these memories. It’s still a good movie, the actors sell it well, and it represents a time period in our country that was hard for people to recognize. It also points out the hard times at home for people–it takes place outside of Pittsburgh in a small town that doesn’t have it so good–but doesn’t Romanticize them too much. It’s supposedly Cimino’s story, his movie, and the fact that some of it doesn’t sit well with audiences shouldn’t matter. He was the one that took the chance on the story and, when it was all said and done, he was the one who reaped the rewards of it. Yes, it is sentimental at the end with the singing of “God Bless America,” but maybe that happened and was just part of the events in Cimino’s life.
Cimino is the other unpleasant reminder. Yes, it was his fault that Heaven’s Gate was a bomb for the studio, but it was filmmakers like him, and the films they made, that built studios, too. As soon as he became synonymous with failure, he was no longer the guy that took chances. Studios were satisfied with four singles and a strikeout here and there, rather than a home run and a strikeout here and there. It became safer. The independent spirit got movies into art houses rather than major distribution.
I watch too many movies and grew up with the many films of the 70’s. I went with my mother and father (though not together) to see major R-rated films of that decade because, for a while, I was too young to get in. I could list thousands of classic movies from the 70’s, but anyone who is still reading knows the titles. It was an era where Jack Nicholson represented the Everyman and was a huge star, even though many of his movies were personal, or anti-establishment, or just downright angry about the way it was to be an American man in this country at that time.
Now I have Pixar, who felt the need to find Dory and revisit their Cars franchise for a third time. I have Michael Bay blowing up things. Dwayne Johnson was the biggest actor (I think his movies made the most money) a year ago. I don’t know who my Everyman is these days. And so on.
But once, I was in a theater with Michael Cimino watching his Oscar winner, though not really. Think of him, the movie, or the occasion what you will, but it’s a moment that will only ever exist in memory which, perhaps, is like the Long Beach State movie version of The Deer Hunter.
https://youtu.be/ZHtQwxKaofk