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Angeles (this would allow the
film to qualify for Academy
Award consideration). They
would run the movie for one
week only and then close it to
enable the studio to gauge the
critical and public reaction.
Much to Universal’s surprise,
the film’s reviews during that
opening week were in the
main very positive. One New
York critic even described it as
a magnificent masterpiece and
Michael Cimino, an original and
major new filmmaker. However,
there were a number of ex-Vietnam war
correspondents who soundly condemned it
for taking liberties with historical accuracy, in
particular the contrived scenes where the Viet
Cong force Robert De Niro and Christopher
Walken’s characters to play Russian roulette
with a loaded gun.
The Deer Hunter
was finally given a
worldwide release in February 1979, and a
few weeks later it received nine Academy
Award nominations. Subsequently, all of the
Hollywood studios swarmed around Cimino,
offering him deals to direct his next picture for
them. Amongst the offers arriving on Cimino’s
agent's desk was one from the inexperienced
new leadership at United Artists.
United Artists was co-founded in 1919 by
the actors Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks,
Charlie Chaplin, and director D.W. Griffith. At
the time it was considered a revolutionary
new independent film company that would
free actors from the dominance of the big
studios and allow them to not only make
the films they wanted to make, but also
to retain all of the profits for themselves.
The movie industry predicted that the new
company would not last a year but it managed
to survive in one form or another all the way
through to 1956, when the last two surviving
founders, Pickford and Chaplin, sold off their
remaining stock.
In 1957 UA went public, and ten years
later was purchased by insurance giant
Transamerica Corporation. There now followed
an upsurge in UA fortunes with numerous
hit movies released each year and the
honours that went with them. In 1975 UA
won its eighth Best Picture Academy Award,
its ninth in 1976, and its tenth in 1977. But
the following year, the brilliant five-man
UA executive board had an acrimonious
falling out with the Transamerica owners
and decamped en masse to form a new film
company – Orion Pictures, a studio backed
by Warner Bros. The hastily replaced new
president of UA was Andy Albeck, who gave
the roles of head of film production to Steven
Bach and David Field, both having very little
moviemaking experience.
Hungry for product and the opportunity to
impress their new boss, they forwarded to
Cimino’s agent an offer to finance any film the
young director might wish to make. A meeting
was arranged between Bach, Cimino and his
producer, Joann Carelli, where she passed
Bach a script that she described as “a passion
of Michael’s”. The title of the script was
The
Johnson County War,
which told the story of
a little known incident in American history of
cattle ranchers legally hiring mercenaries to
slaughter immigrant homesteaders accused
of cattle rustling. Cimino added that he would
probably change the title but was otherwise
ready to begin pre-production immediately.
What was on the table, he said, was a “pay
or play deal”– which meant that Cimino
would get paid for the script and his director’s
fee whether the film was made or not. He
concluded by stating that his
personal protocol dictated that
he also submit the project to
Universal, Warner Bros. and
20th Century Fox, who had all
expressed an interest.
Bach took the script back
to UA where it was passed
on to the story department for
comment. Their reaction after
reading it was lukewarm:”Too
many characters with a too
downbeat ending in which all
the protagonists are killed. If not
for Cimino’s name we would
pass on it”.
But the UA executive thought
the project was worth going
ahead with. After all, if they
did not grab the property, one of the other
big Hollywood film studios certainly would.
Subsequently, a contract with a projected
budget of $7.5 million ($28.5 million in today’s
money) was signed with Cimino’s agent.
Two months later in April 1979, at the
51st Academy Awards ceremony,
The Deer
Hunter
won five Oscars including Best Picture
and Best Director. The new UA executive and
production team now heartily congratulated
each other that their first official act had been
making a deal with the now very hot Oscar
winning director, Michael Cimino, as well
as beating off all of the competition in the
process. Little did they know that they had in
fact made the deal that would destroy the 60-
year-old film company: United Artists.
To be continued...
Cimino would get paid
for the script and his
director's fee whether
the film was made or not
Michael Cimino with his Best Director
Oscar for
The Deer Hunter
Co-founders D.W. Griffiths, Mary Pickford,
Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks Snr. and
their legal representatives sign the contract
establishing United Artists motion picture
company in February 1919.