STACK #144 Oct 2016

EXTRAS

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

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,

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.

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 Cimino would get paid for the script and his director's fee whether the film was made or not 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

Michael Cimino with his Best Director Oscar for The Deer Hunter

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...

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