Nobody really knows anything about Michael Cimino. All we have are contradictions and fleeting glimpses. As a director, Cimino is an integral part of the story of “New Hollywood” in the 1970s. But as the former director of TV commercials for Maxwell House, Cimino has always stood apart from film school “movie brats” like Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola. Cimino’s second movie, The Deer Hunter, won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1979. Cimino’s follow-up, Heaven’s Gate, is the most infamous critical and commercial flop in cinema history. There are accounts from half a dozen people who believed they were Cimino’s only real friend, each unknowingly siloed into a separate part of Cimino’s life. Cimino’s own account is inherently suspect, as Cimino was a known and inveterate liar. The Long Islander grew up middle-class but claimed to be basically a Vanderbilt and deliberately mispronounced their own name, going from Cimino with a soft c (Sim-ee-no) to Chi-meen-o right after leaving home. Cimino was “always knocking five or six years off, even when he was barely thirty,” George Parker, an adman who knew an early-career Cimino, said. “He also claimed he was just shy of six foot, when it was obvious he wore massively built-up shoes and was probably about five foot four.” 

Charles Elton’s biography Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, and the Price of a Vision is both the definitive version of Cimino’s life and a version that recognizes—is thematically about—its own incompleteness and contradictions. It has a ghostly quality. Even when Elton can parse out the truth, something always remains unknowable. The motivations for Cimino’s lies, for one. Parts of the intensely private two-time Oscar winner’s life remain a black box. Late in the process of writing the book, Elton encounters Valerie Driscoll, a woman who runs a wig shop. Cimino was a client who became a close friend. Driscoll claims that Cimino was a trans woman named Nikki—although she doesn’t put it exactly that way. “I don’t know at what point he decided he was done with being a guy,” she tells Elton. “I just don’t know. Michael became Nikki.” She remembers “Nikki driving away one night in the Mercedes sports car and waving through the window” and thinking “she was the most beautiful woman I ever saw.” This apparently confirms a rumor Cimino denied when alive. Struggling to come to terms with their gender identity seems like a potential organizing principle for the lies, clarifying that Cimino had a need to build a Michael Cimino-with-a-hard-c from the ground up, a macho persona to wear as armor. But really, it’s just another fleeting glimpse, creating more uncertainties than it resolves. We don’t know Cimino’s gender, just like we don’t know their date of birth.