Deer Hunter director Michael Cimino dies aged 77

“We loved him, too”.

Eric Weissmann, a friend and former lawyer for the 77-year-old Cimino, said Cimino’s body was found by police Saturday at his Los Angeles home after friends said they were unable to reach him by phone. The cause of his death has not yet been confirmed, according to Entertainment Weekly.

Cimino’s masterpiece, The Deer Hunter, detailed the story of Vietnam War’s effect on a small steel-working town in Pennsylvania. The film garnered two Academy Awards for director and best picture, reports IndyWire.com. It won Cimino two Oscars, for Best Film and Best Director. And it helped bring down United Artists. The plot of the movie, now considered to be a cinematic classic, pitted immigrant homesteaders against powerful cattle barons.

Cimino directed a total of eight films with The Deer Hunter hailed as one of Hollywood’s best films while his next project, Heaven’s Gate, was labelled a flop. As a commercials director, he quickly received a reputation for creative élan and (significantly) obsessive fastidiousness.

Michael Cimino, one of the defining directors of the 1970s has died, Variety and other sources are reporting. Several sources give his birth date as February 3, 1939, and he was raised on Long Island.

Even before Heaven’s Gate, Cimino closely guarded his privacy and rarely spoke to the press, telling the Los Angeles Times in 1978, “I don’t like the notion of celebrity”.

Cimino in his earlier career was an advertising executive who moved into film with the Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges crime caper, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, in 1974.

Cimino was riding high from the triumph of The Deer Hunter.

But Mr. Cimino was criticized for playing fast and loose with factual details, both in the film and in his personal biography. After Michigan State, he studied painting at Yale, and while still enrolled, enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve in 1962.

The production of Heaven’s Gate, a study of the 1890 Johnson County war, was so disordered, controversial and ruinous that it inspired one of the great books on Hollywood: Stephen Bach’s Final Cut. And that was after just first six days of shooting “Heaven’s Gate” in Montana. “R.I.P.” wrote Wright. The production, itself a victim of the newly structured United Artists, saw its budget swell and swell and stayed in production for almost a year. His last picture was in 2007, “To Each His Own Cinema”. A sometime novelist and thwarted architect who often expressed regret about his detour into the “insane” world of movie-making, Cimino built his Oscar-winning career on grand-scale myth-making, often about himself. “I took an ad out in the trades and tried to explain why I neglected to thank certain people and to make up for the shortfall of my dumb-ass acceptance speech”, Cimino told the Hollywood Reporter in 2015 about the Oscars ceremony.