The “tacky” 1983 flop Richard Gere blamed on the studio: “They threw it out there as a sex-in-the-sun movie”
Credit: Far Out / Alamy
The alliance between Richard Gere and Hollywood has always been a tenuous one, with the actor happy with his current position on the fringes of the mainstream, one that he’s occupied for decades.
The way he tells it, Gere was effectively blackballed by some of the industry’s most powerful players after agreeing to star in 1997’s Red Corner, which was censored in China after its story was deemed to paint the country’s judiciary system in an unflattering light, right around the same time many major studios were bending over backwards to appease the nation, as Martin Scorsese’s Kundun discovered.
That came after he’d been slapped with a 20-year ban by the Academy Awards for using his platform to speak out on human rights violations in China in 1993, but the organisation let him back in after a decade, which was only fair, when his starring role in Chicago won ‘Best Picture’ in 2003.
Clearly, Gere has no problem speaking his mind on issues that are close to his heart, even when it’s to the detriment of his career. It hasn’t always been personal, though, with professional concerns doing an equally good job of stopping, starting, stalling, and reigniting his momentum at various points.
In the early 1980s, he exploded as one of the hottest new stars in the business when American Gigolo and An Officer and a Gentleman were released. That established him as the newest heartthrob on the block, something that marketing teams were desperate to take advantage of, much to his chagrin.
After those back-to-back breakout roles, Gere’s next outing was in 1983’s The Honorary Consul, a literary adaptation that finds the leading man’s doctor caught up in kidnapping, activism, and an extramarital affair in Argentina. He thought he was making a character drama, but after what he called “a failure of courage” on Paramount’s part, the film wasn’t packaged and sold as such.
“The Honorary Consul could have been made a harder movie if Paramount hadn’t gotten in the way,” he raged. “It was an attempt at a serious movie about politics in Latin America. But at the last minute, the studio changed the title, put some tacky poster on it, and threw it out there as a sex-in-the-sun movie.”
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
The movie did keep its title everywhere else except the United States, where it was rebranded as Beyond the Limit, which is a little bit sexier than The Honorary Consul, to be fair. As for the poster he abhorred so much, it depicted a shirtless Gere sprawled out in bed being approached by his onscreen love interest, Elpidia Carrillo’s Clara Fortnum, clad only in a nightgown.
Tarting it up for American audiences didn’t even work, with the film bombing at the box office at home and abroad, inadvertently starting a downward spiral for Gere that he wouldn’t be able to arrest until 1990, when the double whammy of Internal Affairs and Pretty Woman brought him back from the brink.
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