Cimino, Charles Elton
Cimino, Charles Elton
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.49

Cimino
The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, and the Price of a Vision

Author: Charles Elton

Narrator: Michael Butler Murray

Unabridged: 12 hr 4 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 03/29/2022


Synopsis

The director Michael Cimino (1939–2016) is famous for two films: the intense, powerful, and enduring Vietnam movie ,I>The Deer Hunter, which won Best Picture at the Academy Awards in 1979 and also won Cimino Best Director, and Heaven's Gate, the most notorious bomb of all time. When it was finally released, Heaven's Gate failed so completely with reviewers and at the box office that it put legendary studio United Artists out of business and marked the end of Hollywood's auteur era.

Or so the conventional wisdom goes. Charles Elton delves deeply into the making and aftermath of the movie and presents a surprisingly different view to that of Steven Bach, one of the executives responsible for Heaven's Gate, who wrote a scathing book about the film and solidified the widely held view that Cimino wounded the movie industry beyond repair. Elton's Cimino is a richly detailed biography that offers a revisionist history of a lightning rod filmmaker. Based on extensive interviews with Cimino's peers and collaborators and enemies and friends, it unravels the enigmas and falsehoods, many perpetrated by the director himself, which surround his life, and sheds new light on his extraordinary career. This is a story of the making of art, the business of Hollywood, and the costs of ambition, both financial and personal.

About Charles Elton

Charles Elton was a director of the Curtis Brown agency, representing film directors and screenwriters in London and Los Angeles. He was an independent TV producer before becoming an executive producer of drama at ITV in England, where he has been responsible for many award-winning shows. He is the author of two novels.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Bob on March 15, 2023

Superb biography of enigmatic New Hollywood director Michael Cimino, who died in 2016, four years after overseeing Criterion’s celebrated restoration of Heaven’s Gate (1980). Charles Elton’s research is fresh and thorough, and the book fact-checks and debunks a good deal of Final Cut: Art, Money, an......more

Goodreads review by Niklas on November 17, 2021

I love the quote at the start of this book: > If you don’t get it right, what’s the point? —MICHAEL CIMINO, EASTMAN KODAK PRINT AD, 1980 To be fair, this is also good: > For Cimino it was a very simple transaction and a fair exchange: United Artists would give him all the money he needed and in return......more

Goodreads review by Mike on February 19, 2024

I like all of Cimino's films and love most of them, so I found some innate enjoyment in this. However, despite over 300 pages of material, the book manages to illuminate almost nothing about the infamously elusive director. Elton is not necessarily to blame for this: the book portrays Cimino as some......more

Goodreads review by Carter on December 05, 2023

It’s difficult to write a revealing and insightful memoir when your subject was as mysterious and elusive as Michael Cimino was. Given the circumstances, this was a very entertaining and interesting read. The problem for me was that the author was a bit too caught up in trying to uncover all the det......more

Goodreads review by Richard on December 19, 2023

Michael Cimino has been something of a Hollywood enigma for decades. Unfairly labelled with almost single-handedly ending the ‘New Hollywood’ era with the commercial failure of Heaven’s Gate (1980), this book attempts to paint a portrait of the man before and after that cultural touchstone. Elton do......more