Michael Cimino

Early life

Cimino publicly shared few details of his early life and family background and is believed to have given false birth year information. Many Cimino biographies thus include inaccuracies about his early years, as well as his background in filmmaking.

Cimino's presumed birth date was February 3, 1939. A third-generation Italian-American, Cimino and his two younger brothers, Peter and Edward, grew up with their parents in the town of Westbury, on Long Island. He was regarded as a prodigy in early private education, but rebelled as an adolescent by consorting with delinquents, getting into fights, and coming home drunk. Of this time, Cimino described himself as

always hanging around with kids my parents didn't approve of. Those guys were so alive. When I was fifteen I spent three weeks driving all over Brooklyn with a guy who was following his girlfriend. He was convinced she was cheating on him, and he had a gun, he was going to kill her. There was such passion and intensity about their lives. When the rich kids got together, the most we ever did was cross against a red light.

His father was a music publisher. Cimino says his father was responsible for marching bands and organs playing pop music at football games. "When my father found out I went into the movie business, he didn't talk to me for a year," Cimino said. He was very tall and thin... His weight never changed his whole life and he didn't have a gray hair on his head. He was a bit like a Vanderbilt or a Whitney, one of those guys. He was the life of the party, women loved him, a real womanizer. He smoked like a fiend. He loved his martinis. He died really young. He was away a lot, but he was fun. I was just a tiny kid.His mother was a costume designer. After Cimino made The Deer Hunter, she said that she knew he had become famous because his name was in The New York Times crossword puzzle.

Cimino graduated from Westbury High School in 1956. He entered Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. At Michigan State, Cimino majored in graphic arts, was a member of a weightlifting club, and participated in a group that welcomed incoming students. He graduated in 1959 with honors and won the Harry Suffrin Advertising Award. He was described in the 1959 Red Cedar Log yearbook as having tastes that included blondes, Thelonious Monk, Chico Hamilton, Mort Sahl, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, and "drinking, preferably vodka."

Career

1960s

Within eighteen months of directing TV ads, he was hired by Madison Pollack O'Hare to work on special assignments involving "graphic design concepts and unusual approaches to live film". While there, he handpicked the best cameramen MPO employed to shoot his commercials, including Gordon Willis and Owen Roizman, before either rose to fame. He directed ads for L'eggs hosiery, Kool cigarettes, Pepsi, Canada Dry and Maxwell House coffee, among others. "I met some people who were doing fashion stuff – commercials and stills. And there were all these incredibly beautiful girls," Cimino said. "And then, zoom – the next thing I know, overnight, I was directing commercials." Few of Cimino's early commercial work survived.

One of his more successful commercials was shot for United Airlines in 1967. Taking a song called "Take Me Along" from the short-lived Broadway musical, he created an ad in which a group of housewives plead, musically, to their husbands to take them along on their business trips. The commercial is filled with the dynamic visuals, American symbolism and lavish set design that would become Cimino's trademarks. Later that year, he made his most famous commercial; for Eastman Kodak, called "Yesterdays", which went on to win several awards that year. The elaborate commercial took six days to shoot — two on an intricately built set in New York and four on location in Connecticut. Cimino apparently shot close to eight thousand feet of film, which was whittled down to 2 minutes. Although the ads he made were considered among the most prestigious in the industry, they became increasingly costly. "The clients of the agencies liked Cimino," remarked Charles Okun, his production manager from 1964 to 1978. "His visuals were fabulous, but the amount of time it took was just astronomical. Because he was so meticulous and took so long. Nothing was easy with Michael."

At the height of his commercial career, Cimino met Joann Carelli, then a commercial director representative, and the two began to date. Encouraged by Carelli, Cimino began to write screenplays, despite no background in writing. To be more prolific, Cimino sought out collaborators to work with, including poet Thomas McGrath and playwright Deric Washburn, who had produced a one-act play off-Broadway. Washburn later recalled that there was always a big distance, socially, between him and Cimino:

"I remember trying to get to know him a little better. A friend had a house in Poughkeepsie, and I invited him up for the weekend. He shows up in his Rolls-Royce, and he's not comfortable there. But he wanted something from me, I think. Mike and I got closest when we started talking about a story. Then it was amazing. It was like one person. It was like a dance. We could boil together."

1970s

By 1970, Cimino's agent Michael Gruskoff was approached with an offer from studio executive Ned Tanen to produce a slate of low-budget films for Universal Pictures, with Conquering Horse among them. The estimated budget for the film had gone far over what initially was projected, and would have cost Universal substantially more than their cut-off figure of $1 million to produce it. Moreover, Cimino wanted to shoot the film in black-and-white and use authentic Sioux dialogue, with subtitles. Shortly after the project was cancelled, Gruskoff assigned Cimino to help draft the script for a story outline by Douglas Trumbull for his science fiction film Silent Running, and he brought aboard Deric Washburn to help. The two morphed the script to be more countercultural. However, Steven Bochco was later brought in and rewrote the story to be less bleak and more "accessible" to a mainstream audience.

The following year, Cimino and Joann Carelli moved to Los Angeles where they rented a house in Hidden Hills that belonged to British director J. Lee Thompson. Carelli told Cimino that the only way he would be able to direct a film is if he wrote an original screenplay and got the biggest star in Hollywood to agree to be in it. Cimino, who had never written on his own, began by writing stories about people he knew about. From this habit, the script for Thunderbolt and Lightfoot was born, which first began as a period story about the Irish outlaw folk heroes Capt. Thunderbolt and Capt. Lightfoot. Cimino gained representation from Stan Kamen of the William Morris Agency, who urged him to make it a contemporary story. Taking both their advice, Cimino took the spec script to Clint Eastwood, who loved it and wanted to direct it himself. Cimino told him that it wasn't for sale, and that he would have to direct the film or else there was no deal. Eastwood agreed, but under one condition: "I'll give you three days. If it doesn't work, I'll get another director." He also asked Cimino to finish John Milius' script treatment for the Dirty Harry sequel Magnum Force, which had a set shooting date. When Magnum Force was in production, Cimino was looking at various locations in Montana and preparing for Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. "We traveled a lot," said Cimino, "especially around the Great Falls; in the banks of the Dearborn and the Missouri; in the fields of wheat, east of Great Falls." In the film, Eastwood plays an aging Korean War veteran who, in the words of Cimino, "has lost his zest for life" and runs into an "exuberant, freedom-loving kid" (played by Jeff Bridges), who restores his youth. Bridges, for his part, felt hugely unprepared for the role, but was quickly reassured:

"Mike looked at me, and said, 'You know that game Tag?' 'Yeah,' I said. 'Well... you're it,' Mike told me. He went on to say that this guy, Lightfoot, was no one other than me, that I couldn't make a mistake, or a false move, even if I wanted to. I've never forgotten that bit of direction that that young director gave me on his first movie, that gift of confidence."

1980s

After editing the footage shot in Montana, filming for the Heaven's Gate prologue and epilogue began in March 1980. A rough edit of the film ended up screening for United Artists in June, running over five hours long. On November 18, Heaven's Gate had its world premiere in New York City. "I remember going to the New York premiere," said Jeff Bridges, one of the film's stars. "I'm not sure he [Cimino] had seen the movie complete; he was scrambling to put it together." In the 219-minute version that was shown, sound-editing problems in critical scenes made the plot hard for audiences to follow, and Cimino and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond tinted the film "with a kind of yellow glow" that was supposed to give an antique look, removed in the 2012 restoration. "Afterward, we heard that terrible stuttering applause," said Bridges, "and it was that sinking feeling. We tried to tell ourselves, 'Well, maybe they liked it so much that they are stunned into silence.' " The reviews were devastating. Before the film opened in Los Angeles, Cimino asked for it to be withdrawn and re-edited. In 1981, a shorter version was released, with added narration. A new poster campaign and a submission into the Cannes Film Festival slate did little to make a dent in financial losses. The failure of the film was also blamed for the collapse of United Artists, which was then sold by the Transamerica Corporation, having lost confidence in the company and its management. As a result, UA executive Steven Bach wrote an entire book devoted to the topic, Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists. Cimino referred to the book as "work of fiction" by a "degenerate who never even came on the set." Bach retorted when he told a reporter he didn't resent Cimino or wish the movie ill: "It would be like wishing ill of a corpse." With its scathing reviews and financial loss, Heaven's Gate quickly became a Hollywood legend.

Cimino intended to follow up Heaven's Gate with Conquering Horse through his two-picture deal with United Artists, but was never realized after its failure. The film, based on the Western novel written by Frederick Manfred, would have been a generational saga set in pre-white America that dealt with a young Sioux boy's rite of passage. "It's a story of the American Plains," said Cimino in 1982, "[taking] place in the Dakotas and Montana." Also at this time, Cimino had been attached as the director of The King of Comedy, which he withdrew from when Heaven's Gate was green lit, but vowed to return to once production ended. The film was first reported in 1979 as a Joann Carelli production, with Buck Henry making revisions to the script. However, by 1981, Martin Scorsese had already entered negotiations to direct. According to Cimino, in his version he would have cast Andy Kaufman in the lead role as Rupert Pupkin. "I shot videotape of Andy for weeks," he said. His version was to have also starred Meryl Streep and Orson Welles.

1990s

In 1991, Cimino participated in that year's Avoriaz Fantasy Film Festival, where he served as jury president and awarded director John Harrison with the Grand Prix for his film Tales from the Darkside: The Movie.

Following the poor reception of Desperate Hours, Cimino wrote an original screenplay called Heaven Is a Sometime Thing which he began submitting to studios circa 1992. It was conceived with Joann Carelli and told the story of a New Mexico mine-worker named C.J. who becomes a brilliant golfer and is estranged from his working-class waitress girlfriend when he meets an heiress and is taken up by high society. F. X. Feeney, who helped him with the script, compared it to the triangle of Montgomery Clift, Shelley Winters and Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun. The Washington Post reported that Cimino had developed the project at Paramount. He later resurrected the script and was able to publish it in France as a short novel.

Taking on "writer-for-hire work" in Hollywood, Cimino wrote an adapted script for Clint Eastwood's Malpaso Productions from the 1993 novel Paradise Junction, which Eastwood would have either directed/starred in. He was also writing a script for filmmaker John Woo based on his story titled Full Circle, which Woo claimed would "have a similar style to The Killer."

In the mid-90s, Oliver Stone encouraged producer Mario Kassar to help fund Cimino's ambitious Conquering Horse project. However, as Stone recalled, "He [Cimino] was too difficult to deal with. He was arrogant, and I don't know that he ever gave it up. He never could eat humble pie or didn't seem to."

In 1995, Cimino was approached by Regency producer Arnon Milchan to helm The Sunchaser, which would ultimately become Cimino's last feature-length film. A spiritual road odyssey, the film stars Woody Harrelson as a Los Angeles doctor who is held at gunpoint by a teenage convict dying of abdominal cancer (played by Jon Seda), and forced to drive into Navajo Country in search of a sacred mountain lake with healing powers. The script by Charles Leavitt (which had been offered previously to Diane Keaton and Mel Gibson), was virtually rewritten by Cimino. Incorporating elements of his unproduced screenplays for both Conquering Horse and Purple Lake into it, the film had a personal resonance to Cimino; "When I was very young, I was lucky enough to spend some time... with the tribe of the Dakota Indians," he said. "I immersed myself so heavily in their culture that, in a way, it became my religion—a religion based on a very simple idea: a stone, a cloud, a rock, everything has spirit, is life. Sunchaser allowed me to return to this." Jack Nitzsche was the original composer but Cimino fired him after the two didn't get on well. Instead, he hired Maurice Jarre, who orchestrated a bombastic, old-school score. The Sunchaser made its debut at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, where it screened in competition for the Palme d'Or. However, unsupported by its distributor, the film was released theatrically only in a few theaters in the southwest, where it played for a week, grossing roughly $30,000 on a budget of $31 million."

2000s

After Gonçalo was rejected by Warner Bros., Paramount and Disney, Cimino began to work on writing his first novel, titled Big Jane. Set in 1951, and 173 pages in length, the story follows a "dynamite-looking, six-foot blonde who wears blue jeans, a Miss Universe of muscle," who travels by motorcycle across America and ends up fighting in the Korean War alongside a brigade of women. Initially conceived as a screenplay, Big Jane was meticulously translated from English to French and published on September 5, 2001, by publishing house Éditions Gallimard. Cimino later tried seeking interest from U.S. publishers, to no avail. He first appeared with the screenplay treatment (written in prose at novel length), at that year's Venice Film Festival, where he conducted a staged reading from the piece and proclaimed that the next time he would return with a film made from the story. Cimino was then honored at Deauville, where he received the Prix littéraire Lucien-Barrière, an award that previously went to Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal. "Oh, I'm the happiest, I think, I've ever been!" he said in response.

In September 2001, it was reported that Cimino would return to the director's chair to make Man's Fate, a 3-hour epic set against the backdrop of the Chinese Communist Revolution. Based on French author André Malraux's 1933 novel, the film, as described by Cimino, was to have depicted "the deep, emotional bonds that develop between several Europeans living in Shanghai during the tragic turmoil that characterized the onset of China's Communist regime." The roughly $25 million project was to have been shot wholly on location in Shanghai in June of the following year and would have benefited from the support of China's government, which said it would provide $2 million worth of local labor costs. The film's producer, Mirko Ikonomoff was in early talks to pre-sell Man's Fate to several European groups, including Italy's RAI and France's TF1, but failed in his attempts. Actors Johnny Depp, Daniel Day-Lewis, John Malkovich and Alain Delon were all in negotiations as possible stars for the project, as well as Uma Thurman or Nicole Kidman as the female lead. After failing to raise money elsewhere, Cimino took his script to Martha De Laurentiis who passed on it. "If you edit it down, it could be a very tight, beautiful, sensational movie," De Laurentiis said, "but violent, and ultimately a subject matter that I don't think America is that interested in." Cimino however, felt differently, "There was never a better time to try to do Man's Fate," he said, "because Man's Fate is what it's all about right now. It's about the nature of love, of friendship, the nature of honor and dignity. How fragile and important all of those things are in a time of crisis." In a March 2002 interview for Vanity Fair, Cimino called the screenplay "the best one I've ever done," adding that he had "half the money; [we're] trying to raise the other half." Up until his death, Cimino tried to get the film off the ground several times, struggling to secure financing. In what would be his last interview in March 2015, Cimino had said he still hoped to make the film someday.

2010s

In the early 2010s, French film producer Vincent Maraval worked on various projects with Cimino, none of which came to fruition. One film, an original screenplay by Cimino himself titled Cream Rises, followed the daily lives of two young female models, (whom Maraval compared to Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie) who are "completely disconnected from reality" and live a hedonistic life in Los Angeles filled with empty sex and boozing. Cimino wanted Taylor Swift to play one of the leads, but since she was unknown at the time, Maraval passed on it. Halfway through the film, the more timid of the two girls is murdered and the other heads to the countryside to find her uncle, "An old cowboy farmer with very Western values", whom Christopher Walken was to embody. "It was something very contemporary," Maraval explained, "About the world of today and its confrontation with the world of yesterday. As if the cinema of Cimino looked at the cinema of today. It was very moving." The script for Cream Rises was also read by the TV channel Arte, who were apparently "enthusiastic" about possibly investing.

Other projects Cimino worked on with Maraval later in his life include a feature adaptation of the Tennessee Williams short story "One Arm" as well as a film about the history of America from the point of view of the Native Americans.

At the persistence of Joann Carelli, Cimino meticulously supervised a restoration of Heaven's Gate frame-by-frame, for The Criterion Collection, where he restored the original film's color. Cimino said, while at first hesitant to revisit the film, that his instincts quickly took over:

"The minute I sat down at the editing console, something else in me took over, and my hands began to work. My brain began to work. And before I knew it, I was working on this restoration, which I swore I would not do... The more I worked on it, the more I became absolutely blown away by the commitment of people like Kris [Kristofferson], and Chris Walken, Isabelle Huppert, all the actors. The intensity that they brought to every moment that they were on film, and off film. I owe a great debt to them because they dedicated the better part of a year to this enterprise. And when we first showed it, of course, in New York, it was like we all got guillotined at the same time. And I was always especially upset at the fact that the actors' work was never recognized. You know, for some reason I was singled out."

In 2012, at the 69th Venice Film Festival, the restored director's cut was screened and was met with a standing ovation. The film was also shown at the New York Film Festival, a return to "the scene of the crime" said Cimino, where it received subsequent acclaim, even being dubbed by critics as a misunderstood masterpiece. Cimino was deeply moved by the positive reception at the film's re-release, "All of those years, I felt like Heaven's Gate was a beautiful, fantastically colored balloon tied to a string fastened to my wrist, so the balloon could never fly," he said.

Death and legacy

Cimino was confirmed dead on July 2, 2016, at age 77, at his home in Beverly Hills, California. No cause has been disclosed officially to the public. Since his death, many directors, actors, and other public figures paid tribute to him, including Robert De Niro, Thierry Frémaux, Edgar Wright, William Friedkin, Paul Rust, Christopher McQuarrie, Kelly Lynch, Jason Reitman, Mark Romanek, Jay Baruchel, Mark Harris and Sophie Marceau. Film critic F. X. Feeney, a close friend of Cimino's, wrote:

A few weeks before his death, Michael consulted a physician about a mild respiratory complaint but otherwise suffered no signs of ill health. When I last had lunch with him on June 19th, he was full of energy and plans. Nevertheless, because he was an intuitive man, I feel certain looking back that he had an inkling his life was drawing to a close. He took deliberate care to mend fences with as many people as he could in the last year of his life, and with me that last day he was more reflective than I'd ever known him to be about his early life. He was full of amused memories centered on his dad's fierce perfectionism. Friends and loved ones found him impossible to reach after the 28th of June, and – when the police entered his house after several days – the officer who found him tucked in his bed described him as "peacefully deceased." His heart had apparently stopped without trauma, in sleep. There was no funeral or public memorial thereafter, and he needs none. His monuments are onscreen.

His work has been lauded by such filmmakers as Stanley Kubrick, Agnès Varda, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Miloš Forman, Spike Lee, Guillermo del Toro, Eric Roth, Steven Spielberg, Mark Romanek, Olivier Assayas, Greta Gerwig, Steven Soderbergh, Brett Ratner, David Gordon Green, James Gray and Quentin Tarantino.

The director was the subject of the 2021 documentary Michael Cimino, un mirage américain, featuring audio recordings conducted by French critic Jean-Baptiste Thoret. Reflecting on the time he spent with him, Thoret said:

I understood that he [Cimino] had a terrible time inhabiting the present, the reality of the life of every day. Physically but also in his way of thinking: he was always elsewhere. Not in an ethereal or disconnected way. He was in a very precise past and therefore also a bit in a fantasy... he fantasized about a relationship with America, with John Ford.

Other projects

At some point between the releases Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and The Deer Hunter, Cimino attempted to write an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.

In the month before he gave the pitch for The Deer Hunter, Cimino was briefly attached to helm James A. Michener's adventure novel Caravans, set in contemporary Afghanistan. The film had spent roughly a decade in development before it was released.

In 1976, Cimino met Oliver Stone who offered him the chance to direct his script adaptation of Midnight Express (before the book had even been published), which he loved. Cimino declined however, as he was already doing extensive pre-production work for The Deer Hunter, but the two remained in touch and would collaborate on several other projects. A few years later, he met Stone again, who was optioning his screenplay for Born on the Fourth of July. Al Pacino was attached to star as Ron Kovic. At that time, Cimino was eager to make another film about Vietnam and the stories of returning veterans, even going as far as to offer to work for free. However, the producer, Martin Bregman, declined. The film was later resurrected in 1989, and directed by Stone himself.

It was rumored that Cimino had been in early discussions with producer Robert Stigwood to direct the adaptation of the musical Evita at EMI, after he had finished The Deer Hunter. However, following the disastrous reception of Heaven's Gate in New York and Hollywood, a spokesman with Stigwood claimed that Cimino had never been involved with Evita at any capacity and that they "planned to seek a retraction from Time magazine," which had listed him as the film's director.

Producer Dino De Laurentiis purchased the film rights to the horror novel The Dead Zone after Stanley Donen left the project as director, at Lorimar. De Laurentiis approached Cimino to direct, and was very briefly attached but author Stephen King pushed for him to be replaced after disagreements over the rewriting of the script when King attempted to adapt it himself.

For a period of time in 1984, Cimino agreed to produce Platoon for Oliver Stone, with Emilio Estevez attached at that time to star as Staff Sgt. Barnes. Stone then signed on to co-write Cimino's Year of the Dragon for Dino De Laurentiis under the condition that he would next finance Platoon as a result. Cimino moved on after the project fell through with De Laurentiis at MGM, and from there the script was passed to John Daly and released in 1986. According to Stone, it was Cimino who had encouraged him to bring back his script for the film when Stone had given up on it: "He said 'It's going to come back', and I'm glad he said that."

Influences and style

Influences

Cimino has shown great admiration for Luchino Visconti, John Ford and Akira Kurosawa, dubbing them "The Holy Trinity of movies." He has also praised the work of film director Vincente Minnelli and "his attention to detail, especially in the musicals." He once named his literary influences as Vladimir Nabokov, Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, Gore Vidal, Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy, the classics of Islamic literature, Frank Norris and Steven Pinker. Cimino also said that he liked to begin research for a new film by reading that country's poets; Li Bo (China: Year of the Dragon) and W. B. Yeats (Ireland: Blest Souls).

In 1992, Cimino participated in the Sight & Sound film polls. Held every ten years to select the greatest films of all time, directors were asked to select ten films of their choice. Cimino's choices were:

Themes and style

Cimino's films have been noted for their controversial subject matter and striking visual style. Elements of Cimino's visual sensibility include shooting in Anamorphic widescreen, painterly compositions, jittery tracking shots and wide vista establishing shots that emphasize the Earth's landscape and nature. Cimino's films are also slowly paced, focusing less on story and more on characters, allowing the viewer to observe their nuances and the setting. The subject matter in Cimino's films frequently focuses on aspects of U. S. history and culture, notably disillusionment over the American Dream. Other trademarks include love triangles between main characters, sudden bursts of violence in seemingly tranquil or naturalistic settings and the casting of non-professional actors in supporting roles.

Frequent collaborators

Frequent collaborators of Cimino's included actors Mickey Rourke, Christopher Walken, Jeff Bridges, Clint Eastwood, Geoffrey Lewis, Richard Bauer and Caroline Kava, writers Deric Washburn, Oliver Stone, Thomas McGrath, Rodney Patrick Vaccaro and Raymond Carver, producers Joann Carelli, Dino De Laurentiis and Barry Spikings, cinematographers Vilmos Zsigmond, Alex Thomson and Doug Milsome, composer David Mansfield, and assistant director Brian W. Cook.

Public image

Cimino developed a reputation for giving exaggerated stories about himself, his background, and his filmmaking experiences. "When I'm kidding, I'm serious, and when I'm serious, I'm kidding," said Cimino in a 2002 interview. "I am not who I am, and I am who I am not."

Following The Sunchaser, Cimino became more reclusive; spending the majority of the last two decades of his life retreating to his home in Beverly Hills where he wrote incessantly: "Books and screenplays. Sometimes songs." He even claimed he kept track of how many pages he wrote day-to-day, "One page one day, five the next. Sometimes zero. Those are the hard days because you still have to get your butt in the chair and keep writing." Cimino's agent, Mike Wise, called him "the Howard Hughes of Hollywood."

Due to his reclusive habits and fluctuations in his physical appearance, many rumors circulated about Cimino over the course of his life, with several claiming he had dressed in drag, gotten plastic surgery, or even undergone a sex change. Beginning in 1997, a columnist with Variety magazine devoted an item to dispelling unspecified "reports" that he had changed his name to "Michelle" and his gender via surgery. Cimino explained that he had not had nor intended to have a sex change and that he was not a cross-dresser, suspecting a former girlfriend of his to have started the rumors. His change in appearance was attributed to weight fluctuations, saying in 2002 that he'd gained weight while editing The Sunchaser; "They're always ordering food. You're in there [the editing room] for twenty hours a day, seven days a week, getting no sleep." With the help of Sunchaser star Woody Harrelson, Cimino began fasting and lost roughly eighty pounds: "He had me on fat-free foods, yoga, etcetera... I am now back to my college wrestling weight," said Cimino.

In his 2022 biography, titled Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, and the Price of a Vision, Charles Elton claims that Cimino presented as a woman named Nikki during the mid-1990s with the aid of wig seller and cosmetologist Valerie Driscoll, while keeping the public persona of Michael through the end of his life. Elton speculates that "the many versions of himself that he showed to the world created a confusion that helped to hide one of his personae, the one that he had shared with Valerie Driscoll in Torrance, which possibly meant the most to him".

Filmography

Known commercials

1965: "Come Alive!" for Pepsi

1967: "Take Me Along" for United Airlines

1967: "Yesterdays" for Eastman Kodak

1968: "I Am the Soft Drink Expert" for Canada Dry

1969: "The Coffee Moment" for Maxwell House

Awards and nominations

Directed Academy Award performancesUnder Cimino's direction, these actors have received Academy Award nominations (and one win) for their performances in their respective roles.