As the director Garry Marshall remembers it, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Dreamworks executive who was then at Disney, called him with an idea for a movie about a hooker who falls for a mogul. "He said, 'I have this piece that's a little too dark for us, but maybe you can give it a different twist,' " Marshall recalled this week.
As a reference point, they used "Mona Lisa," Neil Jordan's fine, dark film about a call girl. "He said, 'If 'Mona Lisa' is a 2 and 'My Fair Lady' is a 10, give me a 7 or an 8,' " Marshall continued.The result, of course, was "Pretty Woman," directed by Marshall and starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, to be released Tuesday on a 10th-anniversary DVD from Touchstone. Together with "Runaway Bride," also directed by Marshall and issued this past Tuesday on tape and disc by Paramount, that makes two Roberts-Gere video vehicles in one week.
The ending in "Runaway Bride" isn't any unhappier. "I've spent my career being put down for happy endings," Marshall said, "but that's all right; that's my specialty." No one is blaming him for "Pretty Woman," which stands as something of a landmark. "Back then, the general opinion was that no romantic comedy could make it internationally because they only wanted action," Marshall said.
Then audiences saw Roberts. She had appeared in "Steel Magnolias" a year earlier. "Wonderful, but crying mostly," Marshall said. How funny was she? "I tested her, but I couldn't find her unique humor. So I said, 'Julia, I'm going to bring in an actor who is much, much funnier than you are. He's going to improvise, so try to stay with him."
The actor was Charles Grodin, who didn't get the Gere part but did reach Roberts. "Suddenly she had that championship spirit that has carried her for 10 years," Marshall said.
On the "Pretty Woman" disc, he adds many asides during a director's commentary. The Gere character, Edward Lewis, is "businessman rich," he says. "That's all the audience needs to know." But he felt it imperative to make clear that Vivian Ward (Roberts), already a streetwalker in a film that would have enormous appeal with teenagers and pre-teenagers, was not a drug user.
To accomplish that goal, he had Edward confront Vivian clutching something in the bathroom. It turns out to be not drugs but dental floss.
A native of the Bronx, Marshall speaks in a classic New York accent. In New York, he says on the disc, people steal your equipment. In Los Angeles, where the film was shot, everybody wants to be in the movies, so you say "action" in a whisper. He has a bit part in "Pretty Woman," sweeping the sidewalk in front of the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel.
Ten years later, it was entirely different working with Roberts and Gere on "Runaway Bride." Both actors gave it their all, but this time they had cell phones. "People trying to get on the set, shooting with long lenses from faraway rooftops," Marshall said. "What happens with big stars is that they bring along other agendas," he said. That can't be helped.
"I don't let lawyers and agents on the set," he said. "That's why they're on the cell phones.