- In December 1981 he was signed to direct the musical Footloose (1984). Producer Daniel Melnick warned him that if the film went over its budget of $7.5 million, Cimino would have to cover the expenses himself. He agreed, but the following month, just as the movie was about to begin shooting, he asked Melnick to let him rewrite the screenplay for an additional $250.000 and to delay the start date. Melnick fired him and Herbert Ross directed Footloose (1984) instead.
- Had Heaven's Gate (1980) been a hit instead of a flop, he intended to follow it up with another epic that he had already scripted: "Conquering Horse." This screenplay was a generational saga, tracing the history of the Sioux Indians in America. He planned for the entire movie to be told in authentic Sioux dialogue, with English subtitles. To date, this picture has never been filmed.
- After quitting directing, he found success as a novelist in France.
- In 1981 he was hired by CBS to direct "Live on Tape," a film about camera crews. but after Heaven's Gate (1980) crashed and burned at the box office, CBS changed its mind; the movie remains unmade to this day.
- In 1979 he was considered to direct The King of Comedy (1982), which would have re-teamed him with Robert De Niro. Because of Cimino's preoccupation with Heaven's Gate (1980), Martin Scorsese directed the film.
- Told "Vanity Fair" magazine in 2000 that his drastically altered looks during his later years were the results of jaw-alignment surgery. During the surgery all of his teeth had to be re-aligned, which altered the shape of his face.
- Producer Dino De Laurentiis offered him the chance to direct "Hand Carved Coffins", based on Truman Capote's book, but Cimino turned it down. To date, the material has not been produced as a film.
- As of February 2004 was living in Paris, France, where he published two successful novels.
- In the late 1970s Cimino passed on an offer to direct Oliver Stone's screenplay for Midnight Express (1978). A few years later he met Stone again and optioned his screenplay for Born on the Fourth of July (1989). Cimino was eager to make the film, going so far as to offer to work for nothing, even attracting Al Pacino for the role of Ron Kovic. The producers declined. The film was eventually directed by Stone himself in 1989, and the two would later collaborate on Year of the Dragon (1985).
- During the production of The Deer Hunter (1978), he had given co-workers (such as cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond and associate producer Joann Carelli) the vague impression that much of the story line was biographical, somehow related to the director's own experience and based on the experiences of men he had known during his service in Vietnam. Just as the film was about to open, he 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. When the "Times" reporter, who had not been able to corroborate this, questioned the studio about it, executives panicked and fabricated "evidence" to support the story. Universal president Thom Mount commented at the time, "I know this guy. He was no more a medic in the Green Berets than I'm a rutabaga." Tom Buckley, a veteran Vietnam correspondent for the "Times", corroborated that Cimino had done a stint as an Army medic, but that the director had never been attached to the Green Berets. His active service--just six months in 1962--had been as a reservist who was never deployed to Vietnam. His publicist reportedly said that he intended to sue Buckley, but Cimino never did.
- During the production of Year of the Dragon (1985) in Thailand, he was made an Honorary Colonel of the Thai Air Force.
- His last name is pronounced "Chee-Mee-Noh". It is the name of the Italian city where his family is from.
- In 1987 he attempted to make an epic saga about the 1920s Irish revolutionary Michael Collins with funding by Nelson Entertainment, but the film had to be abandoned due to budget problems. Later Irish director Neil Jordan made Michael Collins (1996) based on his own screenplay.
- In 1981 he wrote "Proud Dreamer," a screenplay about the life of gangster Frank Costello (III). CBS turned the script down because he asked for too much money to shoot it; the film was never produced. Rumor has it that Cimino sold this screenplay elsewhere, and that it ultimately became Mobsters (1991), but that remains unsubstantiated.
- Adapted the Andre Malraux novel "Man's Fate", which was to be shot in Shanghai with Johnny Depp, Daniel Day-Lewis, John Malkovich, Uma Thurman, and Alain Delon. Years earlier, Fred Zinnemann had done pre-production work and had gone through considerable rehearsal with his cast when the plug was pulled by MGM just prior to the beginning of principal photography.
- Received a B.F.A. degree in Painting from Yale University in 1961 and an M.F.A. in Painting from Yale University in 1963.
- One of his goals since arriving in Hollywood was to make a musical. One dream project was a musical inspired by "Porgy and Bess". Not a straight adaptation, it would have been a romance about a black gospel singer and a white Juilliard pianist, as they struggle to mount a production of the opera." Later Cimino was in talks with the producers to direct Evita (1996), but they eventually decided to hire film musical specialist Alan Parker.
- In 1984, after being unable to finalize a deal with director Herbert Ross, Paramount Pictures offered the job of directing Footloose (1984) to Cimino. According to screenwriter Dean Pitchford, Cimino was at the helm for four months, making more and more extravagant demands in terms of set construction and overall production. In the process, he re-imagined the film as a musical-comedy inspired by "The Grapes of Wrath". Paramount realized that it potentially had another Heaven's Gate (1980) on its hands. Cimino was fired and Ross was brought on to direct the picture.
- He recorded two audio commentaries during his lifetime: One for The Deer Hunter (1978) and one for Year of the Dragon (1985).
- His nephew is novelist and screenwriter T. Rafael Cimino.
- He claimed he got his start in documentary films following his work in academia and nearly completed a doctorate at Yale. Some of these details are repeated in reviews of his films or his official bios. Steven Bach refuted those claims in his book "Final Cut": "[Cimino] had done no work toward a doctorate and he had become known in New York as a maker not of documentaries but of sophisticated television commercials".
- The story behind the notorious commercial failure of Heaven's Gate (1980) was told by former United Artists executive Steven Bach in his book "Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven's Gate", first published in 1985. Subsequently the documentary Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven's Gate (2004)) was produced, based on Bach's book and with new interviews. Cimino has dismissed the book as "pure fiction" and didn't participate in the documentary.
- He spent a year and a half working on a script entitled "Perfect Strangers", a political love story. "It bears some resemblance to Casablanca (1942)," said Cimino, "involving the romantic relationship of three people. Someone called it a romantic Z (1969). I was very close to doing it. In fact, we'd already shot two weeks of pre-production stuff, but because of various political machinations at the studio, the project fell through. This was just before David Picker left. He was the producer. There were internal difficulties, that's all. Nevertheless, I'd spent a year and a half of my life on something. It had been a difficult time. My father passed away while I was writing the screenplay. I kept working . . . ".
- Among his dream projects that have stalled in development: An adaptation of "The Fountainhead"; a biopic on Fyodor Dostoevsky; an adaptation of the novel "The Yellow Jersey" (a bicycle marathon-themed novel that at one time reportedly caught the interest of Dustin Hoffman); an adaptation of the André Malraux novel "Man's Fate"; a film about the Tour de France; an adaptation of "Crime and Punishment".
- Turned down an offer to direct The Bounty (1984).
- In 2001 he published her first novel, "Big Jane". Later that year the French Minister of Culture decorated him with the honor 'Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres' and he received the Prix Littéraire Deauville 2001, an award that previously went to Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal. Cimino said, "Oh, I'm the happiest, I think, I've ever been!" He also wrote a book called "Conversations en Miroir" with Francesca Pollock in 2003.
- He wrote a biopic about Janis Joplin called "Pearl" while working on a Frank Costello (III) biopic, both for 20th Century Fox. "It's almost a musical," said Cimino, "I was working with Bo Goldman on that one and we were doing a series of rewrites . . . All these projects were in the air at once," he recalled, "I postponed 'The Fountainhead' until we had a first draft on 'Pearl', then after meetings with Jimmy began "Frank Costello".
- An article in "The Hollywood Reporter" about Leonard Termo touched on how he and Mickey Rourke were friends, and how Termo had appeared in most of Rourke's films. The article says,"The pair also were set to appear in a Cimino biopic at Embassy Pictures about 'Legs' Diamond that never got made, with Rourke as the legendary 1930s gangster and Termo playing his bodyguard.".
- Directed four actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Jeff Bridges, Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, and Meryl Streep. Walken won for his performance in The Deer Hunter (1978).
- He was scheduled to work on The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984), which would have reunited him with Mickey Rourke from Heaven's Gate (1980). After Rourke and Eric Roberts signed on as the leads, Cimino wanted to finesse the screenplay with some rewriting and restructuring. However, the rewriting would have taken him beyond the mandated start date for shooting, so he and MGM parted ways. Stuart Rosenberg was hired as a result. The film, while receiving admiring reviews, didn't fare well at the box office.
- Cimino credited Clint Eastwood with his career. Cimino's debut as writer/director, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), only got made thanks to Eastwood's belief in him. The contract gave Eastwood the right to fire him after the first three days of shooting, and thankfully he never felt compelled to do so.
- He also wanted to write and direct an adaptation of Frederick Manfred's Western novel "Conquering Horse", an epic, set in pre-white America, to have been shot in the Sioux language. Ir was intended to follow the anticipated success of Heaven's Gate (1980) but was never realized after the failure of that film.
- He has directed one film that has been selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant: The Deer Hunter (1978).
- The Johnson County War became Heaven's Gate (1980) with an budget of $7.5 million budget when filming started in April 1979 but had risen to $40 million when filming ended.
- Worked on two films with short-story writer Raymond Carver. The first was "Purple Lake", a contemporary Western about juvenile delinquents who return to society after serving time in prison. The other was a biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Backed by Carlo Ponti, Carver took over from an uncredited Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Heavily researched, and taking Dostoyevsky's near execution as its focal point, the final screenplay was 220 pages long. Fragments were eventually published by Capra Press.
- After "Perfect Strangers" fell through, he spent 2-1/2 years working with James Toback on "The Life and Dreams of Frank Costello", a biopic on the life of Mafia boss Frank Costello (III), for 20th Century-Fox. "We got a good screenplay together," said Cimino, "but again, the studio, 20th Century-Fox in this case, was going through management changes and the script was put aside." Cimino added, "'Costello took a long time because Costello himself had a long, interesting life. The selection of things to film was quite hard.".
- He was in talks to direct "The Yellow Jersey", a bicycle racing drama with a script by Carl Foreman and starring Dustin Hoffman. The project was ultimately abandoned, as it proved logistically difficult to shoot during the actual Tour de France.
- Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume Two, 1945-1985". Pages 214-219. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1988.
- He was attached to direct "The Dreaming Place" in 1997. The film, which was in the early stages of development, was to be a male vigilante story, along the lines of Paramount's Eye for an Eye (1996). Rodney Patrick Vaccaro wrote the screenplay under the supervision of Cimino, and Jonathon Komack Martin Martin was to be executive producer. The planned budget was not revealed.
- His father was a music publisher, his mother a clothing designer.
- His dream project has been an adaptation of Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead". Taking its cue from more than the novel, it was largely modeled on architect Jørn Utzon's troubled building of the Sydney Opera House, as well as the construction of the Empire State Plaza in Albany, NY. He wrote the script in between Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) and The Deer Hunter (1978), and hoped to have Clint Eastwood play Howard Roark. His other dream project has been an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment".
- Shortly after the Michael Collins biopic was canceled, he quickly started pre-production work on "Santa Ana Wind", a contemporary romantic drama set in L.A. The start date for shooting was to have been early December 1987. The screenplay was written by Floyd Mutrux and the film was to be bankrolled by Nelson Entertainment, which also backed Collins. Cimino's representative added that the film was "about the San Fernando Valley and the friendship between two guys" and was "more intimate" than Cimino's previous big-budget work like Heaven's Gate (1980) and the yet-to-be-released The Sicilian (1987). However, Nelson Holdings International Ltd. canceled the project after disclosing that its banks, including Security Pacific National Bank, had reduced the company's borrowing power after Nelson failed to meet certain financial requirements in its loan agreements. A spokesman for Nelson said the cancellation occurred "in the normal course of business," but declined to elaborate. The film had been budgeted at about $15 million and was to have begun production shortly. The film, intended for distribution by Columbia, didn't feature any major stars.
- In 2001 he received the French honor 'L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres'.
- It took Cimino 14 hours a day for 3 months to view all the footage and produce a 3 and a 1/2 hour rough cut of Heaven's Gate (1980). The first screening was 219 minutes which was cut to 165 minutes then to 153 minutes in 70mm and 149 in 35 mm.
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content