The film’s celebrated screenplay emerged from a remarkably contentious writing history. Producer Michael Deeley had purchased Louis A. Garfinkle and Quinn K. Redeker’s unfinished script, The Man Who Came to Play, a Las Vegas story built around Russian roulette. Michael Cimino then hired Deric Washburn to help relocate that premise to the Vietnam War and construct the steel-town lives of Mike, Nick and Steven. Their accounts later diverged sharply. Cimino claimed that Washburn’s draft was so bad it seemed written by someone “mentally deranged,” and said he fired him after confronting him at Los Angeles’s Sunset Marquis. Washburn called Cimino’s version “all nonsense” and said he had spent weeks working under crushing deadlines before being dismissed over dinner with associate producer Joann Carelli.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1970s
The Deer Hunter’s Screenplay Credit Became a Bitter Four-Way Authorship Fight
Michael Cimino, Deric Washburn, Louis A. Garfinkle and Quinn K. Redeker / 1970s
The film’s celebrated screenplay emerged from a remarkably contentious writing history. Producer Michael Deeley had purchased Louis A. Garfinkle and Quinn K. Redeker’s unfinished script, The Man Who Came to Play, a Las Vegas story built around Russian roulette. Michael Cimino then hired Deric Washburn to help relocate that premise to the Vietnam War and construct the steel-town lives of Mike, Nick and Steven. Their accounts later diverged sharply. Cimino claimed that Washburn’s draft was so bad it seemed written by someone “mentally deranged,” and said he fired him after confronting him at Los Angeles’s Sunset Marquis. Washburn called Cimino’s version “all nonsense” and said he had spent weeks working under crushing deadlines before being dismissed over dinner with associate producer Joann Carelli.
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