This month sees the 30th anniversary of what many consider the greatest romcom of all-time β Pretty Woman. In the decades since its release, it has also precipitated doctoral theses about whether the storyline was problematic hooker with a heart of gold, anti-feminist. Whatever your take, it remains iconic, a movie with a host of myths about its inception, original script and ending. Lawton was a struggling screenwriter when he wrote a dramatic script in response to provincial s industrial downsizing and the women he met at his local Hollywood donut shop who had travelled to the west coast when their blue collar communities were devastated by corporate sharks.
He called it Three Thousand β note the words spelled out and not the number. This was its title, but through the years people mistakenly started calling it , as development executives would scrawl the figure on the spine of the pages.
When Vestron optioned the script, Gary pushed for her and she was briefly attached to it. When Touchstone picked up the rights, they were more hesitant to go with Julia and for a while other actresses were considered, but Gary Goldstein kept fighting for Julia and of course, he was right.
But after Gary Goldstein got them to test Julia Roberts, they pretty quickly signed her. I know they were turned down by many stars at the time, like Burt Reynolds and Tom Berenger, before they were able to convince Richard Gere to do it.
He decided to try to get it made at a major studio. Arnon closed the Touchstone deal and Garry Marshall was assigned to direct it. They greenlit the movie based on the original script and they were already building sets by the time I took my first meeting at the studio.
