Evening Standard (London): Bizarre life of the Deer Hunter genius

HOLLYWOOD'S modern day Howard Hughes makes a rare appearance, albeit a strictly aural one, in Britain this week. Michael Cimino, hailed as the most exciting new directorial talent at the end of the Seventies when his second film, The Deer Hunter, won five Oscars, has seldom been seen outside the ornate gates of his LA mansion in recent years. When he has ventured out, his bizarre, androgynous appearance - shockingly different from the hefty, bearded man who triumphantly held those Oscars aloft - has fuelled rumours that he is a preoperative transsexual. Many have even taken to calling him "Michelle" Cimino.

This week the strange, reclusive, 64-year-old Cimino pops up providing a director's commentary to the British DVD release of the movie that featured Robert De Niro and made stars of Meryl Streep and Christopher Walken.

Ostensibly, Cimino is simply defending his Vietnam epic (in its day it was derided as a "racist, Pentagon version of the war" by Jane Fonda).

But insiders believe that Cimino may be seizing the opportunity to redeem himself in the eyes of Hollywood.

For, just two years after The Deer Hunter, Cimino's career was to crash as dramatically as it had soared. He spent $44 million - $34 million of that over budget - on Heaven's Gate, a rambling three- hour Western that took just $1.5 million at the box-office.

It bankrupted United Artists and effectively ended an era of creative freedom that had spawned such brilliant young auteurs as Francis Ford Coppola, Paul Schrader, Peter Bogdanovich and Martin Scorsese.

Cimino's name became synonymous with megalomanical excess. His obsessiveness - he filmed 53 takes of Kris Kristofferson cracking a whip, for example - became the stuff of legend and ushered in today's era of play-safe blockbusters and sequels. The fallen hero became a joke.

"I look at it now as an assassination," says Kristofferson. "Poor Michael, it was like watching your baby ripped up in front of you, then having it blamed on you."

Since his spectacular downfall Cimino has made a few small films, but nothing he actually wanted to make. And strange rumours about Cimino have circulated in Hollywood, fuelled by the dramatic change in his appearance.

Once dark and heavyset, "the new Michael Cimino has his hair teased into a Rod Stewart shag with sprigs of bangs hanging over his forehead," wrote Vanity Fair. "It's very blonde. His eyebrows are groomed into arches. His nose looks almost petite. His lips are puffed up as are his cheekbones. There are no visible wrinkles on his forehead.

His jaw line looks somehow different."

Cimino, once described as looking like "a cross between a cowboy hipster and your great-aunt Bessie", admits that he has had plastic surgery "for medical reasons". He says he had to have his jaw realigned because "my mouth is too small". But he has vehemently denied that he has had, or is planning, a sex change.

Indeed, one of his friends says that the story has to be untrue, if only because "if he can't come out looking like Catherine Deneuve, forget it." For his part, Cimino is clearly hoping that the revived interest in The Deer Hunter will help silence the gossips and reaffirm his Hollywood status.

His re-evaluation of his film is timely, with America emerging from yet another foreign war. Yet as widely acclaimed as The Deer Hunter was, many critics loathed its depiction of the Vietnamese as savages, especially the scenes in which American prisoners are forced by their Vietnamese captors to play Russian roulette.

As you might expect from a man of such vaulting ego, Cimino cannot, in this commentary, be accused of false modesty. He has recorded his thoughts for the British DVD only because the film would not have been made without British money, from Thorn-EMI.

For two-and-a-half hours he marvels at the brilliance of his technique, the subtlety of his camera angles, the daring nature of his subject matter, finally signing off with an almost tearful: "God bless all my fans, God bless America."

Years of rejection and failure seem to have done little to dent Cimino's own idea of himself as a genius of historical proportions. When asked once about the catastrophe of Heaven's Gate, he replied: "Would you ask Picasso to explain Guernica? Would you ask Nabokov to explain Lolita? Would you ask Tolstoy to explain War and Peace?"

Behind closed gates in his Benedict Canyon home, Cimino refuses to believe that his film career is finished. He plans ever more grandiose projects. He wants to direct Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.

Studio bosses sneered at his bid to direct a three-hour $35 million adaptation of Andr Malraux's La Condition Humaine.

Of Cimino's downfall, old friend Clint Eastwood says: "The accolades for The Deer Hunter probably made him think, 'I am a genius, king of the world'. But if you say you're king of the world, people will root for you to fail."

That's called hubris, as a self-styled genius like Michael Cimino would surely know.

. The Deer Hunter: Special Edition DVD with Cimino's commentary, is out now.