Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Flick Pick: Jeremiah Johnson

Jeremiah Johnson
(Warner Bros., 1974)

Directed by Sydney Pollack, talked into it by third choice star Robert Redford, from a John Milius screenplay, and with the mountains of Utah as a backdrop, those four aces combined for a huge winning hand, first at the Cannes Film Festival, and then at the box office. Warner had originally insisted that it be filmed on their Burbank backlot, and budgeted $3M to make the movie. Redford and Pollack convinced them they could do the movie for the same price on location, insisting it had to be shot that way. They not only pulled it off, it raked in over $52M domestic gross alone, and the rest was moviemaking history.

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