MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: Molly Ringwald turned down Julia Roberts' lead role in Pretty Woman.
One of the most notable areas of movie and TV legends is looking into the stories of who turned down iconic roles. It's always fascinating to see who might have been cast in a major role, and why that person WASN'T cast. Did they turn the role down? Did the producers turn THEM down? Over the years, I've done a number of these types of legends, like how two 1980s teen stars had to first pass on Breaking Bad before Bryan Cranston was given a shot, or how Burt Reynolds turned down a role specifically written for him in Terms of Endearment to instead do the silly race car film, Stroker Ace (his replacement won the Oscar that Reynolds never won in his career, and desperately wanted). Sometimes, though, these legends aren't true, like the story of how Chuck Norris turned down the role of John Kreese in Karate Kid because he felt it disrespected karate (never happened). Then you get the really weird ones, like the story of Molly Ringwald and Pretty Woman.
WHAT WAS THE STRANGE ORIGIN OF PRETTY WOMAN?
Pretty Woman's origins started in a strange place, in the mind of an unemployed screenwriter named J.F. Lawton, who described to Vanity Fair how he came up with the idea for the film in the late 1980s, “I was a screenwriter who was trying to get a job, I was unemployed and I was working in post-production and I was trying to sell scripts, and I had been writing all of these ninja scripts and comedies, and I just couldn’t get any attention. I suddenly said, ‘Well, maybe I need to do something more serious and dramatic,’ and I had written a script called Red Sneakers which was about a one-legged lesbian standup comic who was an alcoholic, and all of a sudden, I got a lot of attention. People were really interested! People were talking to me.”
With this newfound attention to his "serious" side, Lawton decided to do another "serious" film, "Wall Street had either come out or was coming out, I had heard about it and the whole issue about the financiers who were destroying companies. I kind of thought about the idea that one of these people would met somebody who was affected by what they were doing,” Meanwhile, he had seen enough prostitutes around his home in Hollywood that he thought pairing a rich guy with a prostitute would be an interesting concept. He titled his script 3000, for how much money the rich guy pays a prostitute to spend a week with him. Besides Wall Street, Lawton was very much influenced by the Jack Nicholson film, The Last Detail, about two Navy sailors escorting a military prisoner to prison. Like 3000, The Last Detail was about that sort of "What kind of interesting things can happen before your time is up?" approach.
The picture was picked up by Vestron, the small studio that had had a surprise hit with Dirty Dancing, but it was having money problems, and so the film ended up at Disney, who was trying to come up with a serious film that it could woo Garry Marshall with to stay at Disney, after he had a hit with the sort of dark film, Beaches. Marshall was considering trying out other studios, because he wanted to do some darker fare, and Disney (who had only started Touchstone Pictures a few years earlier) was not that sort of place. He was intrigued by 3000, so he agreed to direct it for Disney.
SO, DID MOLLY RINGWALD TURN IT DOWN OR WHAT?
That, then, becomes the hook of the story. Marshall signed up to direct 3000. He ultimately directed Pretty Woman. The differences between the two films is STARK. In 3000, Vivian (the prostitute) is a drug addict (part of the deal is that she can't do cocaine for a week). At the end of the film, Edward (the rich guy) realizes that this was all a mistake, and throws her out of his car. She and one of her prostitute friends, Lil, get on a bus to go to Disneyland to spend some of the $3000, and the movie ends with Vivian sort of staring blankly into space, The Graduate-style.
Soooo....let's say that you turned down that script. Would you really say that you turned down Pretty Woman? That was the situation that Molly Ringwald was in when she received the script for 3000 sometime in the late 1980s. She discussed the situation in a Reddit "Ask Me Anything"), "I think I saw an early draft and it was called "$3,000". I don't specifically remember turning it down. The script was okay but I gotta say, Julia Roberts is what makes that movie. It was her part. Every actor hopes for a part that lets them shine like that."
The filmmakers had a lot of trouble finding ANYone to play the role of Vivian, as she existed in the script for 3000. Michelle Pfeiffer and Daryl Hannah both turned it down, as well, with the idea being that it was just too dark. Ringwald, as she notes, doesn't recall specifically turning it down, but almost assuredly, that was the same reaction she had, as well. Once the film was rewritten for Disney, though, it was obviously lightened up extremely.
Then, producer Laura Ziskin helped push the new, happier ending of the film, “Richard says, ‘So what happened when he climbed the tower to rescue her?’ Julia says, ‘She rescued him right back!’ I didn’t want a movie whose message would be that some nice guy will come along and give you nice clothes and lots of money and make you happy. Those words at the end said these people changed each other.”
Lawton acknowledged that Ziskin was the one who came up with the "and she rescued him right back" part, which he thought was great, but he noted that pretty much everyone involved in the project had discussed wanting a happy ending since before the project was even at Disney, so it is likely that no matter what, the film would have ultimately had a happy ending.
So anyhow, what does this mean for the legend? I think the way that the legend exists, it really means to say that Molly Ringwald turned down the role as it was in Pretty Woman, because THAT'S a good role. THAT'S a role where you would be surprised if someone turned it down. The role in 3000, though, was turned down by SO MANY actors that I think it is too misleading to say that Molly Ringwald turned down the Pretty Woman role, so I'm going with this legend as...
STATUS: False Enough for a False
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