Photo: Everett Collection
The original script forPretty Womanhad far from a pretty ending.
Speaking with fellow actressPatricia ArquetteforVariety‘s Actors on Actors series last week,Julia Robertsrevealed that the screenplay she auditioned for was a far cry from the rom-com that fans know and love today.
“So many, many, many years ago, one of my early auditions was for a movie called3,000. Most people don’t know that3,000was the originalPretty Womanscript. And the ending was really heavy,” Arquette, 51, said to kick of her interview with Roberts, 51.
Roberts recalled that the3,000script 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 prodded.
The script and its sole remaining producer ended up landing at Disney, which Roberts originally thought was odd.
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“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.”
“I couldn’t do it then. I couldn’t do it now,” Roberts said of the3,000script, adding, “Thank God it fell apart.”
Roberts went on to laud Arquette for her nude scenes inEscape at Dannemora, saying, “Even inPretty Woman, if I had to be in a slip, I’d be covered in hives.”
The two actresses also discussed the pay gap in Hollywood, as Arquette asked Roberts if her salaries early on in her career felt like “breaking that glass ceiling.”
“It never felt like pressure,” Roberts said. “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.”
“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.
Eventually, Roberts said she felt like she could be more choosy with her projects after filmingSleeping with the Enemy.
“I just had this instinct to stop doing anything if it didn’t feel that passionate,” she said.
source: people.com
