82 DEER HUNTER, THE
Background
The Deer Hunter began as a story idea by actor/screenwriter Quinn K. Redeker,
circa 1971. After reading an article about a man who was filmed playing Rus sian
roulette, Redeker filed the incident away as an idea for a film script. In 1974 he
called fellow screenwriter Louis A. Garfinkle and proposed that they collaborate
on a screenplay, mentioning the Rus sian roulette motif among other story ideas.
Garfinkle found it compelling and, in February 1975, the two writers completed
“The Man Who Came to Play,” a spec script about a gambler who comes to Las
Vegas to play Rus sian roulette. They soon sold the property to producers Barry
Spikings and Michael Deeley of British Lion ( later absorbed by EMI) for $19,000.
In November 1976, writer/director Michael Cimino (Thunderbolt and Lightfoot) was
hired to rewrite the script and insert the Rus sian roulette ele ment into a Vietnam
War scenario. Cimino then subcontracted with screenwriter Deric Washburn to
produce a revised draft. Without doing any research or interviewing any Vietnam
vets, Washburn wrote a new screenplay in one month and was duly dismissed from
any further participation in the development pro cess. Soon thereafter, Cimino put
only his own name on Washburn’s script, failing to credit its real author (Wash-
burn took the matter to the Writers Guild for arbitration and was eventually
accorded sole credit for the screenplay and a co- credit for the film’s story). After
hiring Vilmos Zsigmond as his cinematographer, Cimino signed Robert De Niro
for the lead role of Michael, and through De Niro’s influence, the rest of the main
cast: Christopher Walken, John Savage, Meryl Streep, and Streep’s boyfriend, John
Cazale (diagnosed with lung cancer in March 1977, Cazale was dying during pro-
duction and would pass away at age 42 on 13 March 1978, almost nine months
before the film’s premiere). Shortly before the start of the shoot, Cimino took his
principal players to Weirton, West Virginia, a location that would partly substitute
for Clairton, Pennsylvania, the film’s stateside setting. The cast stayed in Weirton a
week, soaking up atmosphere. As Walken recalls, “We went to a real Rus sian wed-
ding, huge, with food and dancing. We traveled in the same car together, so by the
time we did start shooting we had some real camaraderie going, which I hadn’t
done in a movie before” (quoted in Biskind, 2008).Production
The Deer Hunter shoot lasted more than six months ( June 1977– January 1978).
Most of the Clairton scenes were actually shot in Ohio: the opening steel mill scenes
were filmed at US Steel’s Central Furnaces on the Monongahela River in Cleve-
land; the wedding scene, which took five days to film, was shot at St. Theodosius
Rus sian Orthodox Cathedral, in Cleveland (with Fr. Stephen Kopestonsky, the
cathedral’s actual pastor, presiding); the raucous wedding banquet scene was filmed
at nearby Lemko Hall (originally slated for 21 minutes of screen time, it ended up
running 51 minutes); the bar scene was filmed at a set constructed inside an empty
storefront in Mingo Junction, Ohio; Veterans Administration (VA) hospital scenes
were filmed at a real VA hospital in Cleveland; other street, mill, road, and ceme-
tery scenes were shot in Steubenville, Struthers, and McKeesport, Ohio (over the
Monongahela from Clairton), in Clairton and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and in