He connects with relatives of Cimino’s whose existence the filmmaker denied, and he also encounters a faux relative with whom Cimino nonetheless associated. Elton delights in the practical details of these encounters-how he locates people, where they meet. As a result, Elton’s research is filled with false leads and surprising connections, and it led him to subjects whose meetings with the author are themselves the stuff of high drama. Elton, a longtime agent, producer, and novelist, blends both in “Cimino.” Unlike many of the New Hollywood directors of the nineteen-seventies, whose public and private lives intertwined amid self-promotion or unguardedness, Cimino was very secretive and even brazenly deceptive about many of his personal details, whether about such intimate matters as his romantic life and his family or even about such readily checkable ones as his birth year and his military service. Elton doesn’t find or force any significant connections between these two aspects of Cimino’s life, but their link is under the surface, by way of the third main subject of the book: a grand, mysterious love story between Cimino and his principal collaborator, Joann Carelli-a relationship that remained strong from his earliest days as a director to the end of his life.Įvery biography could be two books rather than one-the work itself and the nonfiction making-of detailing the journalistic adventures that yield the biographical record. The book, which was published in March by Abrams, has two main themes: first, how the director’s career was slaughtered by critics’ mockery of his masterwork, “ Heaven’s Gate,” when it premièred, in 1980 second, that Cimino presented as a woman, at least in private, for part of the last twenty-five years of his life. Here it is: Charles Elton’s “ Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, and the Price of a Vision” is as engaging, as fascinating, as revelatory, and as melancholy as one might expect. When Michael Cimino died in 2016, I expressed an ardent wish to read a well-researched and sympathetic biography of him.
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