5. Pretty Woman
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wzii8IuL8lk Pretty Woman, the heartwarming tale of a wealthy businessman falling in love with a prostitute. Classic it may be, but it's hard to watch Pretty Woman without noticing a disparity between its tone (light hearted rom-com) and its subject matter (prostitution). Shouldn't this be darker? we ask ourselves, before laughing at the bit with the necklace. Our instincts are right, though the film
was supposed to be darker. As originally conceived, Pretty Woman was called Three Thousand. It was about a drug addicted prostitute who, at the film's conclusion, ended up back on the streets. Hollywood lore has it that the studio were the ones who dictated the rewrites, but
this article from Entertainment Weekly suggests that the writer of the original script, J.F. Lawton, grew tired of its grittiness and wrote in the happy ending himself. Whoever was behind the changes, they were responsible for creating not only a highly successful film, but one of the most unlikely double acts of the 90s: Gere-Roberts. Who knows, though, what place the film might occupy in the cultural pantheon had the darker version been made. A female version of Midnight Cowboy, perhaps?