distribution rights, said, “ Deric wrote a brilliant script, so good that immediately Cimino turned on him and tried to discredit him.” In any event, Washburn took the matter to arbitration and won sole screenplay credit. He started crying and screaming and yelling, ‘I can’t take the pressure! I can’t take the pressure!’ He was like a big baby.” But Thom Mount, then president of Universal, which owned U.S. He was totally stoned on scotch, out of his frigging mind. It was written by somebody who was mentally deranged. Of Washburn’s script, he said: “I could not believe what I read.

The director always claimed he wrote it himself. When he next saw the script, Cimino’s name indeed was attached to it, and his was nowhere to be seen. “We finished, and Joann looks at me across the table, and she says, ‘Well, Deric, it’s f-off time.’ ” According to Washburn, “It was a classic case: You get a dummy, get him to write the goddamn thing, tell him to go f- himself, put your name on the thing and he’ll go away.” But Washburn didn’t go away. As Washburn told it, he and Cimino spent three days together at the Sunset Marquis pounding out the story, whereupon the director disappeared while Washburn spent a month on his own turning the story into a script.Īfter he handed it in, Washburn recalled Cimino and Joann Carelli, his longtime collaborator, taking him to dinner at a cheap joint off the Strip.

“When I first met Michael, he was making commercials and came to see me one day in a gigantic, perfectly manicured Rolls-Royce,” recalled Deric Washburn, a relatively inexperienced screenwriter whose day job was carpentry. Trouble started early, at the script stage. Albeit a powerful film that displayed Cimino’s talents to the full, with long, languorous takes that allowed the spectacularly gifted cast the freedom to make the most of a bone-crushing story, it tore open barely healed wounds with its vicious portrait of the North Vietnamese, who subjected poor American GIs confined in cramped tiger cages to games of Russian roulette while cackling like monkeys as they bet on the outcome.

The Deer Hunter was released a scant three years after the fall of Saigon, which marked the end of the most divisive war in American history, excluding, of course, the Civil War. During the course of his roller-coaster ride through Hollywood, this short, slight man with a nimbus of auburn hair became a magnet for controversy.

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