Vintage Beef: "American Gigolo" (1980)

You can't really lean into the stud sex symbol stuff when all of the world has seen your tiny meat

Several same threads over the years. Check them out.

Richard Gere looked great in 80's designer suits. It was lucky that the first choice, John Travolta, didn't get the role.

I feel like he leaned into it more than other people. Travolta was never naked in a movie. Richard not having qualms about flaunting himself probably led to the gerbil rumors to try to undermine him.

Did you not see Breathless? His character is an awful person, but he looks great in it.

Gere is one of those types of men, who are handsome, but do not have any one great feature... Not stunning beautiful eyes, Not perfectly shaped lips or a blinding white smile and so on.. He has the classic square jaw look and chiseled features and a nice thick head of hair, but not one feature that stands out...

He spent his entire career riding the sensation he caused in American Gigolo. He's extraodinarily handsome (though I agree with r5 he does not have one "perfect" feature--it's all the parts working together), but he was never much of an actor. He's perfectly adequate, but he just doesn't bring all that much to a role. Except for AG, where a lot of the buzz he caused was because so few people had noticed him before, it's hard to think of a film where someone else wouldn't have been much better.

Freddie Fields, Nina van Pallandt, Carole Cook, Giorgio Moroder, John Bailey, “Call Me”….. what’s not to like. Could never be made in this day of woke.

The full-page ad we had to take out during our marriage didn't help matters.

He was very hot.

I wonder if Richard procreated with Cindy, would they have produced more beautiful children than Rande and Cindy. What I find surprising is how intelligent Gere is, he's devoted to his causes and beliefs which is respectable. Cindy seems vapid and boring and her kids even more so.

I think he leaned into it quite a lot - that’s why he wasn’t taken seriously for a long time. He’s also improved a ton as an actor since then - he’s given a lot of very good and enjoyable performances from the 90s on.

Looking at IMDb, his '80s movies immediately after Gigolo were An Officer and a Gentleman, Breathless, Beyond the Limit, The Cotton Club, King David, Power, No Mercy, Miles from Home, Internal Affairs.

Those varied widely in how good, successful, and well remembered they are, but they're all dramas, thrillers, or both. And Officer/Gentleman, Breathless, and Cotton Club all cast him in the romantic/sexy leading man slot. Then he disastrously tried to demonstrate range by going biblical, and took some other chances that were less embarrassing.

He didn't do a rom-com until Pretty Woman in 1990, and even then, it hardly changed the trajectory of his career. He would go on to do others, but he worked them in between, yep, dramas and thrillers in which he was psychoanalyzing dangerous crazy women (Final Analysis), defending dangerous crazy boys (Primal Fear), trying to escape unjust imprisonment (Red Corner), trying to forgive his unfaithful wife (Unfaithful)...

Not really beef. More like high quality veal.

Richard and Andy Garcia in Internal affairs was such prime jack off material back in the day.

His early films were Bloodbrothers, Days of Heaven and American Gigolo which gave him a good start. I think he was always careful with the roles he took. Overall, it's really hard for any actor to have a 100% solid filmography because when they sign up for movies, they don't know how the final product will end up.

[quote] Richard Gere looked great in 80's designer suits. It was lucky that the first choice, John Travolta, didn't get the role.

I think Travolta would've been good in American Gigolo.

How does Gere evolve into Berthnal in the series?

I don't find Travolta attractive but I can see him being good in American Gigolo too, he always seemed more of the type women would be into. Gere as a gigolo would clearly have more male clientele.

Travolta would have been attractive to men, for sure.

He let gay men like Robert Mapplethorpe capture his beauty

Herb Ritts who was still unknown took this pics of also unknown Richard Gere at a gas station and the pictures ended up becoming popular and featured in Vogue, Esquire and Mademoiselle and put Ritts on the map as a photographer.

You just reminded me that I made it half way through the television series, and still have the other half to watch. I haven't missed it.

Bitchin' tune.

When his inn and restaurant in Bedford, NY first opened (The Bedford Post Inn), we took my mother-in-law there for brunch. She was a huge Richard Gere fan. He walked through the dining room and stopped to ask her if she was enjoying her meal. She was the only one he spoke to; maybe because she was the oldest one in the place. Anyway, she was over the moon and I thought that was really kind of him to do.

Gere got the role after Travolta dropped out. I remember reading that the expensive wardrobe had been designed for JT and they altered everything for Gere.

The gerbil myth is so fascinating and an example of a pre-internet meme like Rod Stewart getting his stomach pumped from semen ingestions.

^ And the Jamie Lee Curtis rumors.

Richard's presence at a business someone very close to me worked at caused her to win a fairly substantial sexual harassment award. Please don't ask me to elaborate.

Is there any evidence he's gay or even bisexual? I think he's just an overeducated and soft-spoken middle class white guy born with pretty features with reads to many as gay. I'm not denying he's probably had same sex experiences especially since partied like everyone else in the 70s and probably had to put out to old queens to get a jump start. But that just makes him a whore not gay or bi. And the fact he seems so unbothered by the rumors unlike Miss Cruise who sued publications. Plus there aren't any men who'd come out and accused him of sexual harassment unlike Miss Travolta. He just seems like a pussyhound.

R28 not asking you to elaborate I’m just not following your sentence structure. He sexually harassed your friend at work? Why was he there?

He did a good job playing a sweet natured and sensitive working class Italian teen in the family melodrama Bloodbrothers. He takes his shirt off a lot and wears some tight ass jeans. Definitely channeled some James Dean and Marlon Brando there with some Joe D'Allesandro and Al Pacino in the mix. Tony Lo Bianco who played his father was also sexy. Paul Sorvino and Leila Goldoni were excellent too.

In the big 90's I was riding my bike downhill Pershing Dr in PDR in front of Outlaws. Going downhill fast at the curve a convertible screeched to a stop inches from me. I slammed on the brakes and skidding almost flew over the hood of the bloody car. I looked over to launch a volley of vitriol at the driver. It was Gere and Cindy Crawford. When they saw I recognized them, their look was "don't you dare hurl yourself on top of the hood of our car you money grubbing peasant". Cussed em out royally. Yes it was a big brown convertible Mercedes 300SL.

[quote]Gere got the role after Travolta dropped out

Interestingly, that's also how Gere got Days of Heaven (the best movie he has had anything to do with, IMO). It's hard to imagine it now with Travolta and Carrie Fisher rather than Gere and Brooke Adams.

He was extremely beautiful in Days of Heaven and looked way too modern/stylish for the period setting just like James Dean in East of Eden.

[quote] Not really beef. More like high quality veal.

Ahem.

[quote] I wonder if Richard procreated with Cindy,

Cindy Williams?

Best scene in the movie.

I know a whore when I see one.

Didn't Travolta also turn down Officer..... AND Chicago.

Another OP with another PATENTLY RIDICULOUS opening troll. Gigolo played studs for years afterwards.

DLers seem to think they can SHART OUT any bullshit and its AOK if it gets people talking.

I'm surprised Gere hasn't been #MeTooed given his promiscuity and rumors of sleeping with married women but I guess that's the beauty of being irrelevant for two decades.