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I don't think I'm the only one who would have liked to see Cimino do Footloose as a "musical-comedy inspired by The Grapes of Wrath"...

Altair wrote:Hollywood Reporter interview with Cimino, apparently the first since 2002 - best line: "I think Clint should be president"

I can't help but feel that this interview was a missed opportunity to really delve into what Cimino has been up to professionally in the last 13 years. I'm far, far, far more interested in his unpublished novels and unproduced screenplays (that he says pile to the ceiling!) than I am in any kind of gossip about his surgeries (real and/or not real). I would love for him to make another movie but it seems like he's happy taking his time to do so - I half-expect a career resurgence similar to the one Terence Malick is having. I'm also curious If Cimino would ever consider to Kickstarter a project...

Definitely, another Cimino film would be interesting, especially due to his wide-ranging interests: his choices have been quite unpredictable and distinctive. I wonder though if Cimino could get past his ego to go to Kickstarter...

vanity fair 'michael cimino's final cut'

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/201 ... cut-200203

from 2000.
when i read it several years ago, cimino came across like a nutcase, especially when talking about his truck and his birth date.

Ugh, Jesus, regardless of whether Cimino is trans or not, that badgering gets really ugly. Funny to hear Rourke talking shit about his Iron Man 2 costar, though.


edit: "I tell him I have heard that many transsexuals regret it or simply go mad." seriously? Christ

Dead or Deader wrote:Michael Cimino memoir.

Neither a memoir nor an obit but instead some slapdash recycling of a self-serving hatchet piece less than a year old, "6 Reasons Why Michael Cimino Will Never Work in Hollywood Again." Not too classy of Anne Thompson to use the occasion of the man's death to trot out this name-calling listicle, retitled as if it was a reminiscence.
The original list format didn't make sense in the first place, as being a perfectionist and an egomaniac have not generally stopped other filmmakers/artists, and how is "He's an autodidact" even any kind of reason why it was clear he'd never work in Hollywood again? The real aim seems to be scoring points against him for his stance against critics and journalists and all the other grievances listed.

As a fellow journalist asked in the comments to the earlier , "I’m curious what led you to write this piece. ? It seems as unnecessary as the Locarno Film Festival’s idea of holding a Q&A with a clearly damaged man."
Interesting that she points out that she was working in publicity at UA at the time of Heaven's Gate so it wouldn't be too surprising if a grudge or intensely negative perception of Cimino was formed then.

A more loving tribute by Richard Brody. Trying to reckon with the full body of his work, as well as the failures of his later films.

One passage in particular stands out to me...

Richard Brody on [i]The Sicilian[/i] wrote:Cimino doesn’t stint on the Western analogies, with horses and mountains and conflicts over land rights, and his image repertory is as vital and energetic as ever, but it’s hard not to see a crisis of cinematic faith, a sense of narrowing possibilities, afflicting the film. The pageantry of a Communist march with red flags in the wilderness, the ancient clutter of a nobleman’s study, the haunting mystery of streetlights through a car’s rear window all ring with Cimino’s enthusiastic inspiration, but the movie seems like a substitute for the director’s visions at his most uninhibited. It plays mostly like a feature-length analogy, a sort of intellectual behind-the-scenes laboratory for another vast American movie that he couldn’t have made at the time.

I can't help but shake the feeling that, in final estimate, more so than The Deer Hunter and Heaven's Gate and the perceived successes and failure therein, Cimino's most lasting legacy may very well end up being the laundry list of projects he never got off the ground. Revisting the last four films recently - two of which feel largely of a piece with the films that came before it, the other two which vary sharply in various ways - I can't shake the feeling of the way his thwarted ambitions couldn't help sneak into those films.

Year of the Dragon, the most successful of the four, seems to me clearly haunted by an unfilmed project. Cimino claimed the impetus was both a notion to make a "spiritual sequel" to Deer Hunter, as well as the abandoned idea for a Western about the Transcontinental Railroad. Yet, rewatching the film, I can't but feel every crevice of the film is filled with Cimino's failed attempt at a Fountanhead adaptation. Mickey Rourke is truly a Howard Roark figure, a force of uncompromising ambition hampered on all sides by bureacracy and critics. It's easy to see a lot of biographical element there, given Cimino's position post-United Artists... but isn't that also all the more reason he clung to the Ayn Rand novel as a passion project right until the end? And ultimately, it is the stink of Rand's ideas which most damage the film: it rightly criticizes Stanley White throughout - as a fanatic, a racist, a destructive force to both him and those around him - but in final estimate it can't help but admire and be converted to his side by his force of will, and almost that alone.

The Sicilian is much harder to grapple with, all the more since it's so clearly Cimino's film, and the failures seems to be all of his making. The final cut was a debacle, and Cimino, whether paranoid or otherwise, felt constantly on the verge of being replaced. Yet, by most accounts, Cimino was largely given free reign on set and pre-production (the litigious post-production is a different story). Yet, it's damned almost from the outset by a fatal casting choice, but one which on paper makes sense. Some directors have been guilty of casting actors based on looks; Cimino's flaw often seemed to be casting based on iconography, the way these models fit his visual grand design, with there ability to emote or even do a proper line-reading often treated as an afterthought. Even Christopher Lambert's emptiness isn't without it's logic: Salvatore Giuliano is supposed to be a cipher that everyone hangs there hopes and fears on. Yet how easy it is for a cipher to become a void. For defenders, the film offers in fits and starts, gorgeous tableaux and stirring individual moments, the biggest proof that Cimino's later inactivity was a tragedy. For his detractors, the failure of the grand design, even in the director's cut, point that perhaps his ambitions did indeed exceed his talents and that there was no helping it.

This wasn't the first time he was guilty of this: Kris Kristofferson was seemingly cast for everything but his acting talent, his standing as a figure on the crossroads of the counter-culture and the "Western" world of Country, as well as his biographic similarities to his character (a child of self-forsaken privilege), seemingly informing the choice. Yet Kristofferson wasn't talentless, and his inherent limitations work with the sad nobility and paralyzed apathy of his character. Less successful was his casting Ariane in Year of the Dragon: I've always said that she was absolutely perfect for the role in everything but acting talent, and I believe there was plenty more to her casting than your typical practice of hiring a pretty it-model over an accomplished actress. Even her androgyny and her slightly ethnic ambiguity (she's partly German) informs the films in ways maybe Cimino himself didn't fully comprehend. For a film of violence and fury, it's telling that she is the center of perhaps it's most emblematic and meaningful image: her sillhoutted figure walking across and pondering the darkened Manhattan skyline, buried in which is the very Chinatown that she's both ascended from and is alienated from (The melancholic noveau rich-heights of her Brooklyn penthouse is itself contrasted by the basement "hell" of the Chinatown tofu factory that White later encounters). Likewise, in that image you have the encapsulation of all the things - affluence, ethnicity, immigrant-success - that repels/attracts/alludes Stanley White and drives his obsession.

Of the other two films, The Desperate Hours is easily the most dispiriting, yet perhaps the more successful, if only it provides a base-level Hollywood pulpiness that the other lacks. Still, it mostly seems like work-for-hire or missed opportunity, a few hanging threads of a potentially personal film - Hopkin's Vietnam vet could easily fall into the spectrum with his previous characters - which seem ignored and underdevelopment. But indeed, as highlighted by Brody, the film suddenly sparks with life the moment it expands into the great outdoors, as if Cimino suddenly convinced himself he was shooting a Western he'd been dying to make for years. Also as Brody points out, it's focus and approach to female characters point to an interesting development for a director who often had middling approaches to female characters prior (and not all the characterizations here are successful). As distasteful as most of the quips about Cimino's perceived transgender are, I still wonder if there wasn't a sliver of truth to them. Even Big Jane, as I understand it, has an undercurrent of transvestism and gender-blurring based on some of the reviews I've read (even more than the premise would suggest), and there's a strain of androgyny and especially homoeroticism running throughout his work. It's most pronounced, interestingly enough, in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot where notions of masculinity and fears of gay panic seem to be part of the generation gap the film straddles, right down to George Kennedy's violent, nigh-irrational hatred of Jeff Bridges character. Robin Wood detected a (fairly convincing) gay subtext in the DeNiro-Walken-Streep triangle in Deer Hunter and particularly in Walken's final suicidal gesture. You could also point to: Ariane, acting as something of an androgynous conduit between Rourke and John Lone's vaguely homoerotic tete-a-tete in Dragon; and the somewhat explicable surrogate father-son relationship that drives The Sicilian. And while she was certainly being catty, Kelly Lynch's account of working with Cimino certainly can't be brushed off, including the way he exaggerated certain elements in his female characters.

Yet, coming back full circle, both to my original idea (which I've admittedly detoured from) and Brody's article, there's The Sunchaser. Which in a way also comes full circle for Cimino, bringing him back near the buddy-film/road-film of his debut. It's certainly a more personal film than Hours, but that just makes it disappointing that it all comes off so half-baked. Yet there's still personality here, and plenty of touches of the personal, and I'm still not ready to write the film off. And as Brody notes, it's the film's final journey into Monument Valley, another venture in the Mythic Cinematic West, that sticks with you. Yet, in the way it pushes backwards past Ford's West to an even earlier myth, itself impressed with the failed realization of the pre-White, all-Sioux Conquering Horse, itself dealing squarely with Native American mysticism and vision-quests? Perhaps that's the meta-textual statement to sum up Cimino's career is there: his characters looking for salvation and transcendence in the landscape of the West, only for us to realize it was Cimino himself looking for it in the tatters of his unrealized works.

A new biography confirms the long-standing rumors that Cimino was trans, calling herself Nikki in her last decades alive.

The Narrator Returns wrote: Sun May 22, 2022 6:19 pm A new biography confirms the long-standing rumors that Cimino was trans, calling herself Nikki in her last decades alive.

Thank you so much for the heads-up. It got blurbs from John Lahr and Julie Salomon, so it must be pretty damn good. It’s a shame that Cimino’s novels have never been published outside of France

The Narrator Returns wrote: Sun May 22, 2022 6:19 pm A new biography confirms the long-standing rumors that Cimino was trans, calling herself Nikki in her last decades alive.

Nothing of the sort is confirmed in the NY-er article or the bio itself.

I read the book about a month ago, and have the ebook version on my screen presently. The chapter in question, “16 THE WOMAN FROM TORRANCE” is a mere four pages in the ebook, and if memory serves about 10-12 pages in the physical volume.

The first half of those pages is nothing but generally cruel, unfounded press clippings and innuendo about Cimino's changing appearance from the last couple decades, I guess provided to reiterate the troublesome context of a life under the lens of an enduring public scandal. The remaining pages are dedicated to quotes at length from a woman who ran a wig shop that Cimino supposedly frequented, a woman that not one other person in his life was aware of, who has no corroborators, no bona fides or presence online or in any way that is verifiable.

Bio author Elton never says Cimino was trans. The woman from the wig shop never says he was trans, rather just a “beautiful woman.” No evidence of any kind is given that Cimino was anything other than possibly a cross dresser, and likely had plastic facial surgery as we could all see in his public appearances. Unless the author and the supposed source are simply playing coy, or being politely guarded to an extreme, I don’t understand how any reviews or readers of the book would come to any conclusion.

This is where I need clarification from those of you more attuned to trans/gender issues. I understand someone can be transgender without actually carrying through with surgery. That‘s a given. If someone says they’re a man or woman, there it is. I can imagine all sorts of reasons why they do or don’t have surgery. It doesn’t affect their stated identity. But is it right to assume or assign their identity second or third hand, especially after their death?

Not one line is written or uttered in this chapter about surgery… except when Cimino is quoted, “Can you imagine cutting your prick off? I can’t stand mutilation. I mean, tattoos!” Kris Kristofferson and Cindy Lee Duck are quoted saying they never even saw Cimino in women’s clothing, before or after the rumors. Cimino denied to Variety, via his lawyer, that he was transitioning.

One thing the book does make very clear is that Cimino was, especially after “Heaven’s Gate,” increasingly evasive and even misleading in interviews, and his friends and family were radically compartmentalized. So making any assumptions does seem ridiculous.

An armchair shrink might suggest the failure of "Heaven's Gate" was so traumatic that Cimino literally had to become another person (or his true self) to continue living. And the book goes into this depression and despair to some degree. But frankly, every recorded interview I've seen or heard him give the last twenty years of his life was so lucid and thoughtful, he didn't seem broken in any way. I'd like to think, whatever his personal identity, he wasn't defeated.

I think the takeaway of the bio, most of all, is how lousy he was treated by the total shitheels in the media, and even in this thread and the "Heaven's Gate" thread here we have people calling him egomaniacal and irresponsible... because his film was a financial failure. To paraphrase Herzog, when did film fans become accountants? Pathetic.

As to the quality of the bio itself, there were rampant typos and grammatical errors. I counted at least one every ten pages. This included misspelling proper names, often within the space of a few paragraphs on the same page, and quoting contradictory production and budget numbers, again, often within sight of one another. Argue all you want about the merits of good editors, but this is a book from a major press, and this sort of thing doesn't suggest reliability in a non fiction effort.

I also read the bio recently and found it interesting if not very illuminating. And the errors! It actually says that Vilmos Zsigmond won the Best Cinematography Oscar for The Deer Hunter.

Quote Perf Unquote wrote: Thu Jul 28, 2022 6:15 amThis is where I need clarification from those of you more attuned to trans/gender issues. I understand someone can be transgender without actually carrying through with surgery. That‘s a given. If someone says they’re a man or woman, there it is. I can imagine all sorts of reasons why they do or don’t have surgery. It doesn’t affect their stated identity. But is it right to assume or assign their identity second or third hand, especially after their death?

Not one line is written or uttered in this chapter about surgery… except when Cimino is quoted, “Can you imagine cutting your prick off? I can’t stand mutilation. I mean, tattoos!” Kris Kristofferson and Cindy Lee Duck are quoted saying they never even saw Cimino in women’s clothing, before or after the rumors. Cimino denied to Variety, via his lawyer, that he was transitioning.

Caveat that I'm gay and not trans, but... it's not always right, and it's not always wrong. I remember when the bio came out, seeing some people mention rumors about Cimino that pre-dated it, and for those of us invested in finding our communities' buried histories, a little confirmation can go a long way. It's stating the obvious, but minority celebrities in the 20th century often had a vested interest in not being a minority: if you believe the published record, pretty much the only homos to grace the silver screen before Ellen were Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter; Merle Oberon threatened to sue her nephew when he was going to reveal her real name and birthplace in his memoir, never publicly acknowledged that she was mixed race and raised in India, and only admitted to not being Australian the year before she died in 1979. It may not be time to insist that using Michael is deadnaming, but also, minorities that can "pass" can't always rely on our "ancestors" having publicly proclaimed it.