A Biography of Michael Cimino, or What Should Film History Do

Whether or not it actually was, the publication of the first biography of Michael Cimino last week felt like an Event—for me, if nobody else. In one of those weird instances where a word becomes associated with something completely unrelated, whenever I heard the word “ample” (not a word you hear too often) over the last few years I thought of the prospect of a Cimino biography—an odd fact that can be traced back to my reading of Richard Brody’s memorial piece on Cimino in 2016, where he says that he’s “impatient to read a good and ample Cimino biography.” Is Charles Elton’s Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, and The Price of a Vision (2022) that biography? Yes and no. It clocks in at 346 pages (and that’s including notes, index, etc.), a fact which is unremarkable were it not that in my mind’s eye I had imagined my “ample” Cimino biography closer to the 600 page range, a dense tome that I could lose myself in poring over every little succulent detail of the Cimino universe. But enough of what I had imagined. The book itself has much to recommend, simply by virtue of being the first of its kind. The notoriously secretive Cimino had kept his life story close to the chest, but it’s pried open here to an unprecedented degree—which, all things considered, still isn’t that much. But much is sorted out about his personal life, and the facts are untangled as best as they can be from the little—often distorted, embellished, or just plain untrue—that Cimino chose to share during his life. Author Charles Elton has certainly done his fair share of legwork in tracking down and talking to as many people he could who knew Cimino, and besides simply setting down a full timeline of Cimino life happenings in one place with many interesting details, this is probably where most of the book’s value lies. Through this assorted oral history, an image of the actual man Cimino was gets a little less opaque, including more or less revelatory information gleaned from never-before-interviewed figures re: both Cimino’s changing appearance later in life and his relationship with his immediate family, both of which contradict Cimino’s public statements about the matters while adding additional hints of sadness to an already melancholic figure. The melancholy that already shrouded the legend of Cimino being due to the reception of Heaven’s Gate (1980) and the subsequent difficulties Cimino faced in the film industry. The book was marketed as a kind of historical correction to the myth of Cimino’s fall, told most notoriously in producer Steven Bach’s “tell-all” memoir of the Heaven’s Gate fiasco, Final Cut, published in 1985. In this it does its job well enough—as we learn, Heaven’s Gate did NOT actually bankrupt United Artists. But part of the Cimino myth, and I would argue a more important one that needs dispelling, is the assumption that his last few films—The Sicilian (1987), Desperate Hours (1990), and The Sunchaser (1996) in particular—aren’t any good. However, one is more or less left with this exact impression, and for the casual reader picking up this biography, little incentive is provided to give these films a first or second chance. This is really where my main disappointment lies with this biography: it is largely absent any cinephilic passion, and is content to do the bare minimum in the sections on films not mentioned in the title. Granted, this is straight biography through and through, and the author’s own views on the films probably take up less than half a page total. But I would argue that it’s impossible to do a biography of Cimino without making it a critical biography, because for a man for whom there is so little biographical information available, it feels like an imperative to look at the soul he left up there on screen if anything approaching a true picture of the man is to be painted. Even so, the book only spends four pages—literally four pages, out of over 300—on Year of the Dragon (to say nothing of the literally six pages accorded to Desperate Hours and The Sunchaser combined). This can’t even be chalked up to the relatively smooth productions of these three films relative to something like The Sicilian’s complex production, battles over final cut and script credits and all. Just the other day I started to listen to Cimino’s director’s commentary on the Year of the Dragon DVD, and in 45 minutes I was given a tale more engrossing, soulful, and full of interesting detail than anything in this biography. I wouldn’t call Elton a cinephile, and nothing I can find contradicts that verdict; his quick sketches of conceptual ideas like “auteurism” and “New Hollywood” leave much to be desired. He himself admits in the Acknowledgements that before embarking on this endeavor, he had strictly been a writer of novels. A quick internet search shows that he’s worked in television for the last thirty years. I don’t say this to discredit him, but I have to wonder if there was somebody better to write this book. (For example, F.X. Feeney, for a long time Cimino’s sole American champion amongst professional critics and later one of his closest friends, who unfortunately passed away in February 2020 before any project of the sort could be undertaken.) For a filmmaker who went so denigrated in American film culture for so long (and is still waiting on mainstream critical appreciation beyond Heaven’s Gate), I’d think that any book on Cimino put out in America would need to have “impassioned defense” as some part of its DNA. In fact, Elton isn’t even American—he’s British. Anyways....once again, we are all so far behind the French. There are a few references to the French adoration of Cimino throughout the book, and it even includes the first paragraph of Cimino’s 2001 novel Big Jane (written in English, but solely published in French) in translation. Clearly some level of access to French thought on Cimino was available, so it becomes ever more disappointing that reference to the contemporary French reception of the films couldn’t be included opposite the always and forever obligatory pull-quotes from Ebert, Canby, et al. that no published book on film can ever seem to do without. All this makes it sound like I hate this book more than I do; in truth, I enjoyed reading it immensely, if sometimes only for the things that I was learning, and would heartily recommend it to anyone interested in Cimino or his films. In fact, I don’t hate it at all; I’m merely disappointed in thinking about what it could have been. Far be it from me to arrogantly suggest that I could have done better, but in my mind’s eye I can envision a more dedicated version of myself creating a Michael Cimino (critical) biography for the ages. And maybe one day I will, and I’ll have Charles Elton to thank for providing additional information that I never would have had without his work. Regardless of whether that unlikely thing ever happens, I’ve still been given an opportunity to ponder the question of just what I think constitutes writing good film history. In fact, I’m in the midst of doing some version of that right now (my project, more or less a sort of critical biography about James Gray, I would optimistically estimate is ~15% finished; after a long break, it has been reconceptualized and when complete will appear on this blog, hopefully in weekly installments leading up to the release of Gray’s new film Armageddon Time.) Just in brief, I think any good critical film history has the job of not only providing as much context as possible, but spinning it into a web that demonstrates the complexity of history cinematic and otherwise, and always towards an end goal of increasing reader edification about the films at hand, in whatever way possible. I’d had in mind to twist this little post more in the direction of film history and the subject of biographies, including reference to a video on Francis Ford Coppola that I watched the other day, but I can’t quite remember what significance that video had, or what exactly I wanted to say about biographies. Maybe I just wanted to say that I like reading them, because they’re just about the only way I can get perspective about a person’s life, and by extension, if I use my imagination a little bit, about my own life. Where will I be in 50 years? I had this thought today: in terms of my contributions to film culture, I think I would be content if I attained a status such that just one random 24-year-old on the internet felt compelled to make a small, barely-viewed blog post about me. But this isn't about me; it's about Michael Cimino, a titanic American artist that, even if no word was ever written about him, would live on as a legend, an epic poet of the silver screen, whose images speak all that needs to be said.