The original script for the 1990 movie Pretty Woman was called 3000, which is the price the hooker was paid for a week’s services (remember, this was 25 years ago). It was going to be a low-budget film, but then Julia Roberts fell in love with the script.
Roberts described the original script as "a really dark and depressing, horrible, terrible story about two horrible people and my character was this drug addict, a bad-tempered, foulmouthed, ill-humored, poorly educated hooker who had this weeklong experience with a foulmouthed, ill-tempered, bad-humored, very wealthy, handsome but horrible man and it was just a grisly, ugly story about these two people."
Which may be realistic, but it wouldn’t do once Disney’s Touchstone Pictures acquired the project. The script went through six rewrites by several writers before it became the Cinderella story we know, in which the two protagonists lived “happily ever after.” The movie was a big hit, and transformed Julia Roberts from an actress to a movie star. Read the story of the making of Pretty Woman at TCM. -via Uproxx