4min chapter

The Big Picture cover image

3. What a Strange Country | Do We Get to Win This Time?

The Big Picture

CHAPTER

The Deer Hunter

Chameena's original cut of the deer hunter was nearly four hours. Universal secretly hired superstar editor Verna Fields, who'd recently won an Oscar for Jaws. Chameena died in 2016 and didn't talk much about the deer hunter in later years.

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Yet the bigger issue was Chameena's maximalist approach to, well, everything. The first act of the deer hunter includes an elaborate Russian Orthodox wedding that serves as a send-off for its heroes. Chameena filled a church with actors and extras and filmed them endlessly, often improvising along the way. Until some in the cast simply gave up and collapsed on the floor. Michael would get obsessed and want to shoot something over and over and over. This thing could easily have gone to $25 million and could easily have been the Cleopatra of its moment. Things only got harder after shooting wrapped. Chameena's original cut of the deer hunter was nearly four hours, making it pretty much unreleasable. Universal secretly hired superstar editor Verna Fields, who'd recently won an Oscar for Jaws, to cut the movie down, a fact the studio kept hidden from Chameena. When the director objected, Universal agreed to test Chameena's version at a theater in Detroit. By then the deer hunter, which had gone nearly $5 million over budget, had attracted the attention of Universal honcho Lou Wasserman, who flew to the screening to see how his investment had turned out. It was a very unhappy night when the lights came back up. More than half the audience had walked out already. And worse than that, just to make life insane, on the way back to his hotel, Mr. Wasserman got trapped in a stuck elevator. I mean, you just, Brian, you'd shoot yourself. You know, what are you going to do? They got their answer. When Universal screened a shorter version of the film, now just under three hours long, in Chicago, where it got a huge response. Chameena may have driven everyone crazy, but even the director's opponents had to admit the deer hunter was something special, a visually sweeping, emotionally blunt film that never flinches from the American soldiers' pain. The movie has two climaxes, both of them ballsy. In the first, the near attempts to bring walking home from Vietnam, only to watch him die as they play one last round of Russian roulette. Afterward,
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back in Pennsylvania,
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walk and friends gather for one last send-off. They don't say much, but before the credits roll, they take a seat at a crowded dinner table and quietly sing. Meryl Streep carries the tune. That ending confounded some viewers when the deer hunter finally made it to theaters. Was it a sincere moment of jingoistic pride, or was it sneering at the Americans who still loved the country
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that had damaged them?
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Chameena died in 2016 and didn't talk much about the deer hunter in later years, but the director explained the scene during a DVD audio commentary.

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