Did Hollywood Blacklist Richard Gere Over China Criticism?

A new book by Erich Schwartzel, Red Carpet: Hollywood, China and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy, argues that actor Richard Gere has been blacklisted in Hollywood due to his longtime criticism of China.

Writing for ZeroHedge, Dinesh D’Souza explains the case made by the book:

Schwartzel documents that as Gere continued to champion the cause of Tibet, and castigate China for its human rights abuses, Hollywood became more and more uncomfortable with his public advocacy. The late 1990s and early 2000s corresponded with a period in which the American movie market was flattening out, and Hollywood studios increasingly looked to expand in China.

China, after all, has more than a billion people. It didn’t escape the attention of studio executives in California that tens of millions of Chinese were moving from the rural areas to the cities, and they were becoming avid consumers of Western products. Hollywood salivated at the prospect of tapping this market for American movies.

In this atmosphere of Hollywood courtship of the Chinese communist regime, Schwartzel reports that “Gere was too radioactive to hire.” His mere presence in the credits might mean the film would not be approved for release in China. At this point, Gere became persona non grata, at least as far as the big studios were concerned. He would have to be content appearing in independent, modest-budget feature films such as “Arbitrage” and “The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.” [emphasis original]

As D’Souza points out, Gere’s biggest public moment occurred during the 1993 Oscars. Before presenting that year’s Oscar for art direction, Gere ripped into China’s “horrendous human rights situation” and called for the communist country to free Tibet.

Watch below: 

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Four years later, Gere starred in Red Corner, the rare studio movie — even in those days — critical of China’s fascist regime.

US actor Richard Gere (L) and the spiritual leader of Tibet, Dalai Lama, share a laugh during a news conference at the Carlyle Hotel in New York on September 28, 1987. (BILL SWERSEY/AFP via Getty Images)

A quick look at Gere’s IMDB page definitely shows a career slow down. One of our biggest movie stars, who’s only 72 and in good health, should, at the very least, be winning the kinds of roles Robert Redford, Michael Douglas, William Hurt etc., have enjoyed in the Marvel Superhero franchise. But as we all know, Disney/Marvel are two of China’s most shameless Hollywood whores.

Since 2017, Gere’s only appeaed in a TV miniseries. One gig in five years? Also, it’s been more than a decade since he’s starred in something approaching a Big Movie.

Julia Roberts rides with Richard Gere in a scene from the film ‘Pretty Woman’, 1990. (Buena Vista/Getty Images)

History will not look kindly on the American institutions that have sold their souls to China’s Nazis, and did so only to become richer than they already were. We’ve had the NBA, Hollywood, and the news media — not to mention countless corporations — become shameless quisling and even propagandists for these genocidal gangsters and human rights abusers. Hollywood is the worst of them all, though, because Hollywood is supposed to be about the integrity of the art and the human spirit. And yet, it is well documented that Hollywood’s so-called artists willingly censor themselves and propagandize to appease China.

The only good news in all of this is that it now looks as though they have sold their artistic souls for short-term gain. Over the past couple of years, China has almost entirely closed its doors to American films, which has resulted in a long line of financial and artistic disasters that were produced, budgeted, and censored to appease China. But China said no, so these castrated blockbusters made nowhere near the money expected.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.


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