- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
"Maybe we want to see him as Richard Gere's Pretty Woman character, with some emotional wound that she is somehow salving with her body."
I remember reading once that the original ending to "Pretty Woman" went like this:
Julia Roberts' and Richard Gere's characters don't have a beautiful relationship. Instead, they have an argument. He throws the money at her, and she, sobbing, collects it as the wind blows it all around the street. He takes off in his car, never to see her again. She then takes some of her cash and buys cocaine from the loser dealer mentioned in the earlier scenes, and we are left to assume she will become another "specific case of crack heads" that her friend discussed with such scorn.
Which is probably a helluva lot closer to how most of these relationships end than the final version of the film showed. But test audiences *hated* the downer ending.
