The exact moment Richard Gere realised his career was in danger: “You’re fucked”
A movie star’s relationship with the box office can often be contentious. Every A-list name is at least aware on some level that their career is at the mercy of what the public does and doesn’t want to see. Therefore, if they want to be a marquee name who gets the pick of the projects, they must be careful with their choices. However, this sometimes goes against their artistic impulse to work on worthy, challenging material. Richard Gere is an excellent example of a star who has always tried to maintain this balance – and he admitted at one point that he had messed it up so badly that his career was in deep trouble.
Gere’s career began in the mid-1970s, but it would take until 1978’s Days of Heaven for Hollywood power plays to truly start noticing him. In 1980, he starred in Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo, and in 1982, he made An Officer and a Gentleman. By this point, he had become a bona fide star. As Jeffrey Katzenberg of Walt Disney Studios told Vanity Fair in 1990, “It’s interesting to watch film actors evolve through their careers. That evolution starts when you make a new discovery like you did with Richard in [Terrence] Malick’s film Days of Heaven. Then, with An Officer and a Gentleman, he became what Tom Cruise is today, an actor who is also a sex symbol.”
Unfortunately for Gere, the momentum of that sexy one-two punch didn’t sustain into the rest of the ’80s, and he sank into an abyss of one flop after another. Between ’84 and ’88, Gere starred in The Cotton Club, King David, No Mercy, Power, and Miles From Home – and every one of them lost money at the box office. While critics rapturously received the Cotton Club, the rest were more middling efforts, and by the end of that stretch, Gere’s star had dimmed considerably.
It all led to a come-to-Jesus moment for Gere in ’89 when he looked around at the Hollywood landscape and wondered why he wasn’t being offered the kinds of movies he wanted. Then, he realised, “The hard answer was, ‘You’re not box-office, pal. You’re fucked.'”
In an industry where you’re only as good and only as bankable as your last movie, Gere had to swallow the bitter pill that he’d made five movies in a row that didn’t work. Incredibly, he actually considered leaving the business for a moment or two because he thought that would be the “courageous” thing to do. But then he realised he was looking at it all wrong. “The courageous choice is to stay in it,” he explained. “There are still things I want to do. I have big plans for terrific projects.”
Gere knew he needed a firmer foundation than he currently had in order to bring those projects to life, though. So, he began thinking strategically for the first time in his career and sought out movies that seemed like they had the potential to be hits. “I said, ‘OK, this year I’m gonna do three films back-to-back—the best I can find. That’s the criteria. I’m up-front. I did my last movies for very crass reasons.”
To his – and the rest of Hollywood’s amazement – the first movie he picked was Internal Affairs, which made a healthy $47.7million, and the second was Pretty Woman, a genuine cultural phenomenon that banked a staggering $463.4m. Gere wasn’t even overly enthused about making the latter, describing it as a film he “had no use in doing,” but to his delight, he found that he liked it. Even better, the stratospheric success of the Julia Roberts rom-com classic meant he didn’t need to search for that third banker. He smiled, “I stopped at two films”, and told himself, “That’s enough.”
Overall, in the space of one year, Gere had completely reversed six years of failure and emerged on the other side as an even bigger star than he had been before. It’s no wonder Katzenberg said, “I predict within 30 days of this film’s release that Richard Gere will be as important a leading man as exists in our business. That’s it: Richard himself has evolved into a man.”
