Washington: Who doesn’t remember the sweet ending Julia Robert’s character got in the 1990’s hit film ‘Pretty Woman’? Well, surprisingly, the original script of the movie had far from a pretty ending.
Speaking with fellow actor Patricia Arquette for Variety’s Actors on Actors series recently, Roberts revealed that the screenplay she auditioned for in the first place was a far cry from the romantic-comedy that fans love today.
“So many, many, many years ago, one of my early auditions was for a movie called 3,000. Most people don’t know that 3,000 was the original Pretty Woman script. That movie was really dark and the ending was really heavy,” Arquette said at the beginning of her interview with Roberts.
Roberts revealed that the original script ended with her character being thrown “out of the car,” before the driver “threw the money on top of her, as memory serves, and just drove away, leaving her in some dirty alley.”
“So it really read like a gritty art movie. When you first read it, it was that incarnation,” Arquette said.
Roberts explained that while she landed the role in ‘3,000’, she thinks she “had no business being in a movie like that.”
However, that version of the film was never executed because of the “small movie company” behind the script “folded over the weekend,” according to Roberts.
“And by Monday, I didn’t have a job,” she added.
The script and its sole remaining producer ended up landing at Disney, which Roberts originally thought was odd.
“I thought, ‘Went to Disney? Are they going to animate it?'” she told Arquette.
“Director Garry Marshall came on, and because he’s a great human being, he felt it would only be fair to meet me since I had this job for three days and lost it. And they changed the whole thing. And it became more something that is in my wheelhouse,” Roberts added.
“I couldn’t do it then. I couldn’t do it now,” Roberts said of the initial script, adding, “Thank God it fell apart.”
The two actors also discussed the pay gap in the Hollywood industry, as Arquette asked Roberts if her salaries early on in her career felt like “breaking that glass ceiling.”
“It never felt like pressure. All the salaries in those days where there was just a lot of money to be spent making films — in a comical way, I thought, OK, sure, this is ridiculous, but I’ll be part of this party,” Roberts said.
“I’m just walking in a path that Barbra Streisand has hacked out with a machete, so to be the gardener that’s picking some weeds that have come up since these incredible women before me have made a path for all of us to be artists in our own right — it was nice to feel that I had a little puzzle piece to that,” she added.
Roberts said that she felt like she could be more picky with her projects after filming ‘Sleeping with the Enemy.’
“I just had this instinct to stop doing anything if it didn’t feel that passionate,” she said.
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