Production
Red Rock West was made in 1992 in Arizona on a budget of $7 million. The domestic rights were sold to Columbia Tri-Star home video for $2.5 million and the foreign rights to Manifesto Films, a subsidiary of Polygram Filmed Entertainment. Test screenings for the film were not strong and Peter Graves, an independent consultant who headed the marketing department at Polygram said, "The film doesn't fall neatly into any marketable category. A western film noir isn't something people can immediately spark to." One of the film's producers suggested early on that the film be submitted to the Sundance Film Festival and was told by the studio that it wasn't a festival film. Columbia sold Red Rock West to cable and it was shown seven times on HBO in the fall of 1993.
The film opened successfully in theaters in Germany, Paris, and London in the summer of 1993. Piers Handling, director of the Toronto Film Festival saw the film in Paris and decided to show it at the festival in September. Bill Banning, who owned the Roxie Cinema and Roxie Releasing in San Francisco saw Red Rock West in Toronto and thought that there might be an American theatrical audience for the film. It took him until January 1994 to find out who owned the rights. The film had already played on HBO at this point and was due to come out on video in February. Banning started showing Red Rock West at the Roxie Cinema on January 28, 1994 where it broke box office records before expanding to eight theaters in the city. It then opened in Los Angeles and New York City.
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Famous quotes containing the word production:
“The problem of culture is seldom grasped correctly. The goal of a culture is not the greatest possible happiness of a people, nor is it the unhindered development of all their talents; instead, culture shows itself in the correct proportion of these developments. Its aim points beyond earthly happiness: the production of great works is the aim of culture.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“... if the production of any commodity necessitates the sacrifice of human life, society should do without that commodity, but it can not do without that life.”
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“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)