Post-production
By this point, The Deer Hunter had cost $13 million. The film still had to go through an arduous post-production. Film editor Peter Zinner was given 600,000 feet of printed film to edit, a monumental task at the time. Producers Spikings and Deeley were pleased with the first cut, which ran for three-and-a-half hours. "We were thrilled by what we saw," wrote Deeley, "and knew that within the three and a half hours we watched there was a riveting film."
Executives from Universal, including Lew Wasserman and Sid Sheinberg, were not very enthusiastic. "I think they were shocked," recalled Spikings. "What really upset them was 'God Bless America.' Sheinberg thought it was anti-American. He was vehement. He said something like 'You're poking a stick in the eye of America.' They really didn't like the movie. And they certainly didn't like it at three hours and two minutes." Thom Mount, president of Universal at the time, said, "This was just a fucking continuing nightmare from the day Michael finished the picture to the day we released it. That was simply because he was wedded to everything he shot. The movie was endless. It was The Deer Hunter and the Hunter and the Hunter. The wedding sequence was a cinematic event all unto its own."
Deeley wasn't surprised by the Universal response: "The Deer Hunter was a United Artists sort of picture, whereas Convoy was more in the style of Universal. I'd muddled and sold the wrong picture to each studio." Deeley did agree with Universal that the film needed to be shorter, not just because of pacing but also to ensure commercial success. "A picture under two and a half hours can scrape three shows a day," wrote Deeley, "but at three hours you've lost one third of your screenings and one third of your income for the cinemas, distibutors and profit participants."
Mount says he turned to Verna Fields, then Universal's head of post-production. "I sicked Verna on Cimino," Mount says. "Verna was no slouch. She started to turn the heat up on Michael, and he started screeching and yelling." Zinner eventually cut the film down to 18,000 feet. Zinner was later fired by Cimino when he discovered that Zinner was editing down the wedding scenes. Zinner eventually won Best Editing Oscar for The Deer Hunter. Regarding the clashes between him and Cimino, Zinner replied "Michael Cimino and I had our differences at the end, but he kissed me when we both got Academy Awards." Cimino would later comment in The New York Observer, " was a moron ... I cut Deer Hunter myself."
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