But Hollywood – and the prospect of telling stories longer than thirty seconds – beckoned Cimino to take a crack at screenwriting.

A promising student with an interest in visual arts and architecture, he attended Yale (where he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree) before moving into the lucrative world of commercials and advertising (making him a forerunner of the current generation of directors, like Michael Bay and David Fincher, who cut their directorial teeth in commercials). But the man whose name is synonymous with profligate, egocentric, and overbudget filmmaking has also delivered some of the most striking images ever seen on a motion picture screen through a body of work that's – even at its worst – never less than interesting.Īccording to his official bio, Cimino was born on Novem(although rumor has it that he was actually born five years earlier in 1938) in New York. Even such Icarus-like 1970s directors as Peter Bogdanovich and William Friedkin took more than one movie to fall from wunderkind to wash-out but then none of those guys managed to bankrupt a studio with one film like Cimino did with United Artists on Heaven¿s Gate. In the space of exactly three directorial works, he went from promising newcomer ( Thunderbolt and Lightfoot) to can-do-no-wrong genius ( The Deer Hunter) to Hollywood pariah ( Heaven¿s Gate).

BIOGRAPHY: Michael Cimino is one of those directors I¿ve been obsessed with for a long time, not only out of genuine admiration for many of his films but also because he had the most profound and sudden career shift of any filmmaker in recent memory.

Shadow of a doubt (1943) casting