Pretty Woman (1990)

Pretty Woman (1990). Directed by Garry Marshall, written by J. F. Lawton. Julia Roberts as Vivian, Richard Gere as Edward, with Laura San Giacomo as Kit, Hector Elizondo and Jason Alexander.

In the first script, she leaves with her friend, on a bus.

In the film, she is waiting for that bus when a man climbs up to rescue her. Somebody chose the knight.

This page belongs to The Pattern on Screen. It follows Mannequin, and it is that film’s direct heir: a woman dressed, remade and finally rescued by the man who chose her. Like every entry there, it reads a story for the pattern it teaches, and makes no claim about anyone’s diagnosis. Edward is no villain. He is lonely, guarded and, by the end, genuinely changed. Vivian is nobody’s fool.

Pretty Woman is different from every other film in this series in one way: we know what the story was before Hollywood got to it. Most films only show us the lesson. This one left a record of the lesson being chosen.

This page is about what the film taught about love. It says nothing about sex work or the people who do it, and it asks nothing of them.

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The Story

Edward Lewis is a New York corporate raider in Los Angeles to take over a shipbuilding company and sell it off in pieces. Lost on Hollywood Boulevard in his lawyer’s sports car, unable to manage the stick shift, he meets Vivian Ward, a sex worker, who drives him to his hotel. He hires her for the night, then for the week: $3,000 to be his companion at business dinners and events. He gives her money for clothes.

On Rodeo Drive the saleswomen look her over and turn her away. Back at the hotel, the manager, Barney, finds a saleswoman to fit her with a cocktail dress and teaches her table manners. Edward is astounded by the change. Later he takes her shopping himself, and she walks back into the store that snubbed her with her arms full of bags: “Big mistake. Big. Huge.”

At a polo match, Edward tells his lawyer, Philip, what Vivian does for a living, and Philip propositions her. Edward apologizes, admitting he was jealous. He flies her to San Francisco for La Traviata, an opera about a courtesan who falls in love with a wealthy man, in a borrowed necklace that goes back to the jeweler afterward. She breaks her one rule with clients, no kissing on the mouth, and when she thinks he is asleep, she tells him she loves him.

As the week ends, Edward offers her an apartment, an allowance and regular visits. Vivian refuses: he is still treating her as someone he pays. She tells him the fantasy she had as a little girl, of a knight on a white horse coming to rescue her. Edward decides to save the company rather than break it up. Philip, furious at the money he has lost, finds Vivian alone, hits her and tries to rape her. Edward pulls him off and fires him, then asks her to stay one more night, not for money. She gently says no, and leaves.

Back at her apartment, she gives her roommate and best friend, Kit, some of the money and tells her she has a lot of potential. Kit leaves the street and enrolls in beauty classes. Vivian packs for San Francisco, a new job and a high school diploma, and waits for the bus.

Edward arrives in a white limousine, opera playing, climbs out through the sunroof and up the fire escape despite his fear of heights: the knight from her fantasy. He asks what happens after the knight rescues the princess. “She rescues him right back,” she says, and kisses him.

Released by Touchstone Pictures, the film was one of the biggest box office successes of all time and earned Julia Roberts her first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

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The Ending Hollywood Rewrote

The screenplay began as 3000, by J. F. Lawton: a dark cautionary tale about class and sex work in Los Angeles. In that version the week ends badly. Edward throws Vivian out of his car and drives away. The last scene is Vivian and her friend on a bus to Disneyland.

According to the film’s director, Garry Marshall, Jeffrey Katzenberg, then running Walt Disney Studios, insisted it be rewritten as a modern-day fairy tale and love story. It went to Disney’s Touchstone label and came back as a romantic comedy. The studio that owned the fairy tale took out the ending where she leaves with her friend, and put in the knight.

Look at what changed and what didn’t. Both versions have the bus. Both versions have Vivian and Kit, and in both, the two women are headed somewhere together. In the rewrite, Vivian still gets Kit off the street, still packs, still waits for the bus. The film keeps all of it, and then makes it the thing she is rescued from.

	3000, the first script	Pretty Woman, the film
How the week ends	He throws her out and drives away	He climbs up to take her away
Who she leaves with	Her friend	Him
How she leaves	On a bus	In a limousine
What the ending says	She survives it, with another woman	She is saved, by a man

That is the whole On Screen series in one production history. There was a version of this story where a woman gets out with her friend. Hollywood decided we would rather have the knight, and we did.

Nobody in that decision meant any harm. They were choosing what an audience would want to see. That is exactly how these lessons get made: someone decides which ending we are shown, and a generation of girls learns it as the way love goes. The bus is the ending almost nobody saw.

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What It Gets Right

Pretty Woman deserves more credit than a page like this usually gives it.

Vivian has a voice from her first scene. She names her own price, sets her own rules and says what she thinks in rooms that expect her to be quiet. When Edward offers the apartment, she sees exactly what it is and says no, a refusal many women in far better circumstances never manage. When he asks her to stay one more night, she leaves. She lifts her friend on her way out, and Kit’s quiet change, a woman helped by another woman, is the film’s most honest transformation. And the last line insists that the rescue runs both ways: she changed him too.

That is a lot. It still sits inside a story whose structure teaches something else.

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What It Teaches

1. You become worth it when he pays for it

The film’s hinge is a transaction. Vivian is the same woman on Hollywood Boulevard and at the opera. What changes is what has been spent on her. The hotel staff, the saleswomen, Edward’s business partners and the film’s own camera all see her differently once his money has been through her.

The “Big mistake. Huge.” scene is the one everyone remembers, and it is worth looking at what it celebrates. Vivian’s revenge on the women who humiliated her is to come back with a rich man’s shopping bags. The film offers no other way she could have been treated as a person in that room. A girl watching learns where respect comes from: from being chosen by someone who can afford you.

2. Love arrives with the clothes

The shopping montage is the emotional high point of the film, and it plays to a pop song, like a first kiss. Edward walks her into a store, tells the staff to make a fuss of her, and she shops the rest of the street on his money. Each new look is a step closer to love.

This is Mannequin‘s third lesson, with a credit card instead of a window display. To be loved is to be styled for someone else’s world. The version of Vivian the film falls in love with is the one who has learned his manners, worn his clothes and been introduced to his colleagues. Even the necklace is only on loan: the worth he puts around her neck goes back when the evening is over.

3. Jealousy means he cares

Edward exposes Vivian to his lawyer, she is humiliated, and his apology is that he was jealous. The film plays the confession as tender: it is the moment we learn he has feelings. A girl watching learns to read possessiveness as proof of love, and to forgive the harm it does because of what it seems to mean.

4. The world that needs changing is hers

Barney teaches her to eat. Edward teaches her about polo and opera. Everyone who helps her helps her fit into a world that was already there, on terms already set. Almost nothing Vivian knows is ever treated as knowledge Edward’s world might need, beyond the fact that she makes him feel something.

Many women know this from their own lives: the relationship where she learned his friends, his family’s rules and his tastes, and he never had to learn hers. That is what it looks like when one person’s identity is slowly absorbed into another’s. The film calls it growing up.

5. Hollywood replaced her friend with a knight

Here is the heart of it. On the last morning, Vivian has done everything the film admires. She has refused the apartment, turned down his money, left him, helped her friend and packed for a new city, a new job and a diploma. She is waiting for a bus to a life she chose, and the first script tells us who she was supposed to be on it with.

Then a white limousine arrives, and the man she just left climbs up to her window. The film asks us to see this as the happy ending, and we do. The bus, the city, the diploma and her friend become the thing she is rescued from.

The Glossary has a name for the position Edward takes in that final scene: the Rescuer, one of the three corners of the Drama Triangle, which “requires someone below it.” Vivian was not below anyone that morning. She had a plan and a friend. The rewrite needed her to be waiting, so it could send someone.

This is Mannequin’s fifth lesson again: getting out of one arrangement with a man only means waiting for a better one. “She rescues him right back” is a lovely line, and it tells a girl what her half of the rescue is: loving him until he becomes a better man. The first script had a different answer. She rescues herself, and she takes her friend.

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Mannequin and Pretty Woman, Side by Side

The two films came out three years apart and tell one story in two registers, fantasy and fairy tale.

	Mannequin (1987)	Pretty Woman (1990)
How he gets her	He makes her, with his hands	He hires her, with his money
Who dresses her	He does, for the window	His money does, on Rodeo Drive
When she is seen	Only when he is alone with her	Only once she is in his clothes
What she wants	We are told: true love	We are told: school, and the fairy tale
How it ends	She becomes real as his reward	He climbs up to take her away, and her bus leaves without her

A girl who watched both learned that it made no difference whether the woman was made or bought. Either way, her value arrived with him.

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If You Grew Up on This

You may love this film. Plenty of people do, and nothing on this page asks you to stop. Vivian is funny, smart and more alive than anyone else on screen, and wanting to be her made sense. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be chosen, and sometimes the limousine really does come. The useful thing is to look at it clearly from where you stand now.

Some questions to sit with:

• What is your bus: a plan you made for your own life that you set down when someone else’s got louder?
• Who is your Kit: the friend you were headed somewhere with, before a rescue came along?
• When have you felt most respected? Whose money, name or approval was in the room?
• Whose world did you learn in your last relationship? Did anyone learn yours?

Hollywood chose the knight. You get to choose your own ending.

You’re the audience now. You know there was a bus.

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Related: Mannequin → · Labyrinth → · Resources →