‘Jeremiah Johnson: The Robert Redford movie nobody wanted to make: “We don’t think we can sell that”
The way Hollywood tends to work is that the biggest stars have a much easier time getting their passion projects made because the studios can rely on their name value to draw in a crowd. However, although he was comfortably perched atop the A-list in the early 1970s, Robert Redford still faced an uphill battle to bring a story close to his heart to the screen.
After Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had torn the box office to shreds, scooped a quartet of Academy Awards, nabbed a Golden Globe, and won more Baftas than any movie before or since, Redford was being inundated with offers. The issue was that he never really wanted to be a superstar, with the lure of a complex character always taking precedence over the zeroes on the paycheque.
As a result, when he found a role he was desperate to play, he seized the opportunity with both hands. Things were made slightly easier by the fact the project had already been in active development since 1968, even if there were already hints it would be a tricky tale to adapt after the original team of director Sam Peckinpah and leading man Clint Eastwood both dropped out.
Redford swooped in, recruited friend and regular collaborator Sydney Pollack to direct, secured a $200,000 advance from Warner Bros to guarantee his participation, and it was all systems go. For a while, at least, after he confessed to Vanity Fair that the biggest problem facing 1972’s Jeremiah Johnson was that his paymasters suddenly got cold feet over handing over more cash to actually make the thing.
“We made it for $3 million. The studio said, ‘We don’t think we can make it for under five,'” he recalled. “We said, ‘We think we can’. They didn’t want to do it. They said, ‘We don’t think we can sell it with you in the beard and the traps and all, we don’t think we can sell that.'”
Redford and Pollack disagreed, but Warner Bros showed its thrifty side once again when it came to the final product. “They said, ‘We don’t know how to sell it,'” he revealed. “We don’t know how to market it’. I said, ‘Well, can’t you market it as something different?’. ‘No, you don’t understand the business’. Three and a half years, it sat on the shelf without being released.”
He was slightly exaggerating, with principal photography on Jeremiah Johnson commencing in January 1971, but it wouldn’t premiere in the United States until December 1972. Redford still got the last laugh, though, after the film received a rapturous response from critics and became one of the highest-grossing releases of the year by recouping its budget almost 15 times over.
