The movie that sent Richard Gere into Hollywood exile: “If you release this film, we’re not buying it”
Maintaining stardom is one of the most difficult things to achieve in Hollywood, with the industry in a perpetual state of evolution that often reduces the next big thing to yesterday’s news in an instant. Richard Gere enjoyed his time in the sun, but it’s been a long time since he was sniffing around the A-list.
From the early 1980s through to the turn of the 1990s, he was one of the most popular leading men and desirable heartthrobs in the business. Movies like American Gigolo, An Officer and a Gentleman, Internal Affairs, and Pretty Woman turned tidy profits at the box office and won plenty of acclaim from critics and audiences alike.
Despite being named the ‘Sexiest Man Alive’ in 1999, the turn of the millennium coincided with a downturn in fortunes. There was the occasional hit along the way, such as his Golden Globe-winning performance in Rob Marshall’s ‘Best Picture’-winning Chicago and another award-nominated turn in the underseen Arbitrage, but Gere gradually slid down the pecking order.
To underline just how drastically he was pushed out of the limelight, Gere hasn’t made a film that was financed entirely by a major studio since 2008’s romantic drama Nights in Rodanthe, which promptly bombed in cinemas. He never went away, but it’s true that his profile is nowhere near what it used to be.
In between those two points, though, there was a defining moment that can accept a fair share of the blame for halting his mainstream exploits in their tracks. The actor’s political beliefs are well known, and in the ’90s, he’d signed on for an independent drama that was scrapped two weeks before shooting was due to start after the intended director, a Chinese national, said “his family would never have been allowed to leave the country ever again” if the production went ahead.
Several years later, Gere headlined Jon Avnet’s mystery thriller Red Corner, in which he starred as an American businessman accused of murder on a trip to China. The film was supposed to be shot in a location in the country, but the studio ultimately decided against it, which was the first alarm bell to start ringing.
“Everyone was happy with the film,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “I get calls from the heads of the studio. Went on Oprah. Then, out of nowhere, I get calls saying, ‘We don’t want you doing press’. MGM wanted to make an overall deal with the Chinese. China told them, ‘If you release this film, we’re not buying it’. And so, they dumped it.”
Given Gere’s pro-Tibet stance, the movie’s depiction of the Chinese legal system, and Hollywood’s desire to make inroads into the burgeoning market, defending Red Corner made him a few enemies. The government even issued a memo banning any of its production companies from working with any American entity involved in Avent’s potboiler, with Gere naming the picture in front of the United States Senate when testifying that “economic interests compel studios to avoid social and political issues Hollywood once addressed.”
It didn’t exactly sign the death warrant on his career, but it can’t be a coincidence that in the years that followed Red Corner‘s release, his high-profile leading roles became fewer and further between than they had for decades.
