Bill Hughes is back in studio with George this evening, to bring us another essential song of the 20th century. And tonight, it’s all you’d ever want, as Bill takes us through Roy Orbison’s hit Pretty Woman.
Tune in live at 6.20pm: www.newstalk.com/player/
The song re-entered the charts a quarter of a century ago, when it was used in the Julia Roberts and Richard Gere film of the same name. A massive blockbuster that even saw Roberts bag an Oscar nomination for player a prostitute with a heart of gold saw Gere’s corporate stooge paying a lady of the night named Vivian $3,000 to spend an entire week with him, for reasons that are never that well explained. He’s also attempting to buy out a company from a dotty old man in order to strip it of its assets, but when the prostitute strips to reveal her assets are an infectiously warm spirit, his heart softens, and they settle on a future without transactional trysts.
But it wasn’t always going to be happy ever after.
In the original draft of the script, instead of snappy dialogue and snapping jewellery cases, Vivian was supposed to be a drug addict, and that’s only the start of the misery. In 2005, an original page of the Touchstone script surfaced online, and can be read below:
[Touchstone]
Instead of the soppy ending that see the millionaire business man driving Vivian home, presenting her with a rose and declaring his love, in the original he gives her an envelope of cash for her hard work on the job. No last-minute confessions, just pure business, dropping wide-eyed and drugged-up Julia Roberts on the street, literally leaving her crawling on her hands and knees to gather up the money while tears roll down her face.
Such was the finale of the film $3,000, as it was called before Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg took a glance at the pages and figured out that what light-hearted rom-coms don’t need is a bleak ending about sex trafficking and substance abuse.
Though a grittier Vivian would probably have gotten her hands on the Oscar.
