Michael Cimino

Michael Antonio Cimino ( ; February 3, 1939 – July 2, 2016) was an American film director, screenwriter, producer and author. Notorious for his obsessive attention to detail and determination for perfection, Cimino achieved fame with ''The Deer Hunter'' (1978), which won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.

With a background in painting and architecture, Cimino began his career as a commercial director in New York before moving to Los Angeles in the early 1970s to take up screenwriting. After co-writing the scripts for both ''Silent Running'' (1972) and ''Magnum Force'' (1973), he wrote the preliminary script for ''Thunderbolt and Lightfoot'' (1974), which became his directorial debut, and one of the highest-grossing films of its year.

The critical accolades for co-writing, directing, and producing ''The Deer Hunter'' led to Cimino receiving creative control for ''Heaven's Gate'' (1980). The film became a critical failure and a legendary box-office bomb, which lost production studio United Artists an estimated $37 million. Its failure was widely blamed as the end of the New Hollywood era, with studios shifting focus from director-driven films towards high-concept, crowd-pleasing blockbusters. In recent decades however, ''Heaven's Gate'' has been dramatically reappraised, even being named by BBC Culture as one of the greatest American films of all time.

Having only subsequently made four more films, Cimino grew infamous for the amount of projects he worked on throughout his life that were never made due to his uncompromising artistry. In 2002, Cimino claimed he had written at least 50 scripts overall. Several of his ambitious "dream projects" included adaptations of the novels ''Conquering Horse'', ''The Fountainhead'' and ''Man's Fate'' as well as biopics on crime boss Frank Costello and Irish rebel Michael Collins. Provided by Wikipedia