Michael Antonio Cimino was an American filmmaker.
61 Facts About Michael Cimino
2.
One of the "New Hollywood" directors, Cimino achieved fame with The Deer Hunter, which won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.
3.
The critical accolades for co-writing, directing, and producing The Deer Hunter in 1978 led to Michael Cimino receiving creative control for Heaven's Gate.
4.
Michael Cimino was born in New York City on February 3,1939.
5.
Michael Cimino gave various dates for his birth, but his real birthdate was most likely February 3,1939.
6.
Michael Cimino was regarded as a prodigy at the private schools to which his parents sent him, but rebelled as an adolescent by consorting with delinquents, getting into fights, and coming home drunk.
7.
Michael Cimino was convinced she was cheating on him, and he had a gun, he was going to kill her.
8.
Michael Cimino was a bit like a Vanderbilt or a Whitney, one of those guys.
9.
Michael Cimino was the life of the party, women loved him, a real womanizer.
10.
Michael Cimino entered Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan.
11.
At Michigan State, Michael Cimino majored in graphic arts, was a member of a weightlifting club, and participated in a group to welcome incoming students.
12.
Michael Cimino graduated in 1959 with honors and won the Harry Suffrin Advertising Award.
13.
Michael Cimino thoroughly restyled the Spartan's derivative Punch look, designing a number of its strikingly handsome covers himself.
14.
The Michael Cimino-designed covers are bold and strong, with a sure sense of space and design.
15.
At Yale, Michael Cimino continued to study painting as well as architecture and art history and became involved in school dramatics.
16.
Michael Cimino trained for five months at Fort Dix, New Jersey and had a month of medical training at Fort Sam Houston, Texas.
17.
Michael Cimino graduated from Yale, receiving his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1961 and his Master of Fine Arts in 1963, both in painting.
18.
Michael Cimino shot ads for L'eggs hosiery, Kool cigarettes, Eastman Kodak, United Airlines, and Pepsi, among others.
19.
In 1971, Michael Cimino moved to Los Angeles to start a career as a screenwriter.
20.
Michael Cimino gained representation from Stan Kamen of William Morris Agency.
21.
Michael Cimino co-wrote two scripts before moving to directing.
22.
Michael Cimino moved up to directing on the feature Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.
23.
Eastwood was originally slated to direct it himself, but Michael Cimino impressed Eastwood enough to change his mind.
24.
Michael Cimino went on to co-write, co-produce, and direct The Deer Hunter.
25.
Heaven's Gate was such a devastating critical and commercial bomb that public perception of Michael Cimino's work was tainted in its wake; the majority of his subsequent films achieved neither popular nor critical success.
26.
Michael Cimino's film was somewhat rehabilitated by an unlikely source: the Z Channel, a cable pay TV channel that at its peak in the mid-1980s served 100,000 of Los Angeles's most influential film professionals.
27.
Michael Cimino directed a 1985 crime drama, Year of the Dragon, which he and Oliver Stone adapted from Robert Daley's novel.
28.
Michael Cimino directed The Sicilian from a Mario Puzo novel in 1987.
29.
In 1990, Michael Cimino directed a remake of the film The Desperate Hours starring Anthony Hopkins and Mickey Rourke.
30.
Michael Cimino wrote a book called Conversations en miroir with Francesca Pollock in 2003.
31.
In 2007, Michael Cimino returned to directing briefly to contribute a 3-minute short segment for the anthology film To Each His Own Cinema.
32.
In 2012, Michael Cimino attended the premiere of a new edit of Heaven's Gate at the Venice Film Festival, which was met with a standing ovation.
33.
In 2015, Michael Cimino received the Locarno Film Festival's Leopard of Honour on the Piazza Grande.
34.
Michael Cimino died July 2,2016, at age 77, at his home in Beverly Hills, California.
35.
Michael Cimino took deliberate care to mend fences with as many people as he could in the last year of his life, and with me that last day he was more reflective than I'd ever known him to be about his early life.
36.
Michael Cimino was full of amused memories centered on his dad's fierce perfectionism.
37.
Michael Cimino's work has been lauded by such filmmakers as Stanley Kubrick, Agnes Varda, David Gordon Green, James Gray and Quentin Tarantino.
38.
Michael Cimino was announced as the director for The King of Comedy on March 7,1979, but was later replaced by Martin Scorsese on November 10, due to production being stalled by his focus on the editing process of Heaven's Gate.
39.
Michael Cimino was announced as the director of Live on Tape, to be distributed by CBS Theatrical Films, on December 11,1981, but the failure of Heaven's Gate resulted in the film's cancellation.
40.
Michael Cimino proposed a story about Frank Costello to CBS, but it was rejected.
41.
Michael Cimino was hired to direct Footloose on December 12,1981, with the stipulation that expenses above the allotted budget would come from Michael Cimino personally.
42.
On January 18,1982, before filming began, Michael Cimino requested $250,000 to rewrite the screenplay and an indefinite delay on when shooting from producer Daniel Melnick, but was fired and replaced by Herbert Ross.
43.
Michael Cimino's dream project was an adaptation of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.
44.
Michael Cimino wrote the script in between Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and The Deer Hunter, and hoped to have Clint Eastwood play Howard Roark.
45.
Michael Cimino continued to hope to film the script until his death in 2016.
46.
Michael Cimino named his literary influences as Vladimir Nabokov, Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, Gore Vidal, Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy, the classics of Islamic literature, Frank Norris and Steven Pinker.
47.
Michael Cimino's films are often marked by their controversial subject matter and striking visual style.
48.
Michael Cimino's films are slowly paced, focusing less on story and more on characters, allowing the viewer to observe their nuances and the setting.
49.
Michael Cimino worked with Mickey Rourke on several films, Heaven's Gate, Year of the Dragon and Desperate Hours, as well as a planned adaptation of William Kennedy's novel Legs with Rourke playing gangster Legs Diamond.
50.
Michael Cimino did the pre-production work for The Pope of Greenwich Village.
51.
Michael Cimino did uncredited contributions for the film adaptation of The Dogs of War which Walken starred in.
52.
Michael Cimino rewrote John Milius's screenplay for Magnum Force as a favor to Clint Eastwood.
53.
Eastwood turned it down but enlisted Michael Cimino to assist Philip Kaufman in rewriting the screenplay for The Outlaw Josey Wales, although he remains uncredited for his work.
54.
Michael Cimino was set to direct Eastwood in his adaptation of Frederick Forsyth's The Dogs of War but dropped out to work on Heaven's Gate.
55.
Michael Cimino had this huge production going on all around him yet he could devote his absolute concentration on the smallest of details.
56.
Michael Cimino transposes an art-school student's approach from paintings to movies, and makes visual choices: this is a New York movie, so he wants a lot of blue and harsh light and a realistic surface.
57.
Michael Cimino was known for giving exaggerated, misleading, and conflicting stories about himself, his background, and his filmmaking experiences.
58.
Michael Cimino gave various dates for his birth, usually shaving a couple of years off to seem younger, including February 3,1943; November 16,1943; and February 3,1952.
59.
Michael Cimino claimed he got his start in documentary films following his work in academia and nearly completed a doctorate at Yale.
60.
Just as the film was about to open, Michael Cimino gave an interview to The New York Times in which he claimed that he had been "attached to a Green Beret medical unit" at the time of the Tet Offensive of 1968.
61.
Michael Cimino was no more a medic in the Green Berets than I'm a rutabaga.