Pretty Woman's original ending was two rewrites away from the movie you know
Before the fairy tale, the script was called 3000, Vivian was a crack addict, and the last scene left her money in a gutter. The writer himself drafted the movie out of its own ending.
The script J.F. Lawton wrote in the late '80s was titled 3000 — the price of Vivian's week with Edward — and it ended with no kiss, no fire escape, no opera. Edward never falls in love; at the end of the week Vivian throws herself out of his limo, he leaves her $3,000 in the gutter, and she goes back to the street.
The rest of the script matched the ending. Vivian was addicted to "white rocks" and negotiated her fee up from $2,000 on the condition she'd stay off crack for the week — Edward calls it "hardship pay" — while Edward himself had a girlfriend in New York he fully intended to return to. Julia Roberts has been blunt about what she signed up for:
"A really dark and depressing, horrible, terrible story about two horrible people."
— Julia Roberts, via TCM
She chased the role anyway — "like a dog," by her own account — and Patricia Arquette, who auditioned too, remembered the project as a "dark gritty art movie."
The two rewrites
The two rewrites were Lawton's own. After Vestron, the small studio that first bought 3000, went out of business, the script landed at Disney's Touchstone — and Lawton wrote two more drafts that turned the transaction into a love story, deleting Edward's girlfriend so the romance wouldn't be an affair.
Those two drafts built the movie's skeleton: the couple that ends up together, the ending rewritten from a gutter to a rescue. What happened next was polish by committee, per TCM's production history — Lawton was let go, Stephen Metcalfe wrote a fourth draft, Robert Garland a fifth, Barbara Benedek a sixth, and Garry Marshall kept a stable of writers punching up one-liners.
"He didn't fall in love with her in the original script, and she does end up back on the street."
— J.F. Lawton, on the version of Edward he first wrote
Marshall, for his part, hesitated over the happy ending — the dark script was respected around town, and he didn't want to be the man who turned it into fluff. The box office settled the argument for him.
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The movie the rewrites made
- The casting ladder: Disney doubted Roberts, so Marshall screen-tested her opposite Tom Conti, Sam Neill, and Charles Grodin; John Travolta auditioned for Edward; Richard Gere had already passed on the script, and Roberts and Marshall went to his New York apartment to talk him back in.
- The paycheck: Roberts made $300,000 for the role that made her the biggest star of the decade.
- The result: released March 23, 1990, Pretty Woman took $178.4 million domestic and still ranks among the highest-grossing romantic comedies ever.
Roberts has had decades to weigh the version she almost made against the one that exists. Her summary of 3000's collapse, delivered to Variety: thank God it fell apart.
Previously we wrote: Love of Your Life cast and ending: Patrick Schwarzenegger spends the whole Prime Video movie waiting for Margaret Qualley