Edward, a wealthy entrepreneur, hires Vivian, a prostitute, to accompany him to a few social events. Trouble follows when he falls in love with her and when they try to bridge the gap between their worlds.
In 1990, at just 23 years old, Julia Roberts shot to stardom with her breakout character as Sunset Boulevard hooker Vivian Ward in Pretty Woman. She spontaneously became America’s Sweetheart, making goofy compatible with sexy and infecting us with her peering, full-throttle laugh. Opposite to her candid, brazen Vivian was emotionally repressed corporate raider Edward Lewis, presented by Richard Gere, who was almost twice her age at the time.
Also Read: Pretty Woman, Why it turned into a romantic comedy?
Over the past 3 decades, the tale after the original Pretty Woman script how it was dark, how it did not have a happy ending, how it was not the kind of property anyone could ever suppose Disney to go for has been smoothed out into the narrative that is mean, a footnote in the history of a wildly prosperous and deeply cherished film.
The most familiar version of the tale holds that managing producer Laura Ziskin was the one that commanded that the Garry Marshall directed movie has a feel-good ending, turning the film from a dark play to an added Disney fairy tale—albeit one with a modern twist.
Though Ziskin contributed to the film’s summing-up. And while it would also be a good, dark Hollywood story if screenwriter J.F. Lawton were overwhelmed by the way his rough drama, formerly called 3,000, was turned into the uber rom-com Pretty Woman, that is not the case either.
Lawton was a struggling screenwriter when he initially wrote 3,000 in the late 1980s, a dark play that pulled inspiration from movies like Wall Street and The Last Detail. As Lawton says it, he was trying to do something new to get a gig.
“I was a screenwriter who was attempting to get a job, I was unemployed and I was working in post-production and I was striving to sell those scripts, and I’d been writing all of these ninja characters and comedies, and I just couldn’t get any attention.”
Thus, it is time for a change. “I suddenly told, ‘Well, perhaps I need to do something more serious and dramatic,’ and I had written a script titled Red Sneakers which was about a one-legged lesbian standup comedy who was an alcoholic, and all of a sudden, I got a lot of attention. People were much interested! People were talking to me.”
