Pretty Woman

Julia Roberts brings mega-watt magnetism to an unforgettable rom-com

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Directed By: Garry Marshall
Other Notable Films From Garry Marshall: Overboard, Beaches, The Other Sister
Starring: Julia Roberts’s smile, Richard Gere’s suits, Hector Elizondo’s fatherliness, George Costanza’s repulsiveness
Screenplay By: J.F. Lawton
Movie Synopsis: A stoic businessman and a charismatic Hollywood escort unexpectedly fall in love after a chance meeting.
Signature Line: “Big mistake. Big. Huge. I have to go shopping now.”

THE INTRODUCTION
An accounting of time, and people, and context

Roundly speaking, every conversation about Pretty Woman eventually spirals its way back to the same central focus: the undeniable, unstoppable, staggering amount of charisma Julia Roberts had on display as Vivian Ward, the movie’s protagonist. That being the case, let’s begin this with a story about Julia Roberts’s charm that presages that: 

In December of 2024, Richard Gere appeared as a guest on The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast. He was there to promote his then-newest movie Oh, Canada, but the hour-long conversation covered a number of topics, including but not limited to the origins of his career, his affinity for gymnastics, and what he liked and didn’t like about being a very famous movie star. 

Along the way, he discussed Pretty Woman and how his involvement in the project came to be. He said that he’d had reservations about the Edward Lewis part initially because it didn’t seem like there was very much for his character to do in the movie (by this point in Gere’s career, he was already an awards-nominated actor, and so he was mostly interested in taking on meaty dramatic roles). After meeting with director Garry Marshall, though, who told him he felt the same way and that the two could figure out who the character was together, Gere agreed to meet with a 22-year-old Julia Roberts, who’d already been cast in the Vivian part. 

Gere explained that Marshall brought Roberts to his office in New York, introduced the two actors, then left them alone so they could talk. Forty-five minutes later, Marshall called Gere to see what he thought of Roberts. Gere took the call even though he and Roberts were still in the middle of their meeting. 

“I said, ‘She’s adorable, she’s great’,” Gere told Awards Chatter. “And while I’m talking to him, [Julia] takes a Post-It off of my desk and she writes something on it. Then she moves it across the table to me, and it says, ‘Please say yes.’ So how could you say no to that?” 

He couldn’t. 

And so he didn’t. 

A year or so later, Pretty Woman was released, with Roberts as its irrepressibly charismatic lead, and Gere as her slowly blossoming counterpart. The movie would go on to become a celebrated exemplar of its genre, as well as the biggest hit of Gere’s career, and Roberts’s, and Marshall’s, too—an indelible rom-com, born of charm itself.

THE VIEWING
A timestamped rewatch of Pretty Woman 

0:53: George Costanza’s here. He plays Phillip Stuckey, a slimy lawyer who will eventually prove himself to be the most deplorable character in rom-com history. As a matter of preparation, let’s just all go ahead and start pre-hating him right now so that we can be ready to fully hate him later on. Preheat the hate in your heart like how people used to have let their cars idle for a few minutes so the engine could warm up when it was cold outside. 

1:02: Richard Gere is here. He plays Edward Lewis, a very rich businessman who specializes in buying companies, breaking them apart, and then selling off the pieces. This is the most iconic role Gere has ever played, which is interesting to think about because he doesn’t really do much in it. He’s basically just a handsome man in a suit who’s meant to stand there and look stern. But that's how magnetic Julia Roberts is in this. She not only cements her character as one of the genre’s all-time greats, but she also pulls Gere’s character into the conversation as well. 

1:03: (By the way, if you wanna argue that Gere’s most iconic role is actually Zack Mayo from An Officer and a Gentleman or Martin Vail from Primal Fear, you’re welcome to do so. You’d be wrong, of course, but, I mean, go nuts.)

4:33: How’s this for a little wink at the audience: We’re about to meet Julia Roberts’s character. She’s a professional sex worker named Vivian. And guess where she lives? In a hotel apartment where the “TEL” on the neon sign doesn’t light up so it just reads “HO.” This is like in Interstellar when they took the guy who was supposed to be the greatest, most noble person on the Earth and named him Hugh Mann. 

7:17: Vivian’s headed to confront her roommate (Kit, played by Laura San Giacomo) in a shady nightclub because Kit spent their rent money on drugs. On the way, Vivian passes a crime scene where a homicide detective¹ is investigating the possible murder of a drug-addicted sex worker named Skinny Marie. As the detective interviews a witness, he says: “We just pulled her out a dumpster in the back. Who was her pimp?” If you turned on Pretty Woman and only saw this two-minute stretch, there's no way you’d have any idea you were watching one of the greatest rom-coms ever made. 

9:47: Kit is in the middle of running another sex worker off the stretch of street where she and Vivian work. “You see the stars on the sidewalk, babe?” she asks. “Well, Vivian and me, we work Bob Hope, we work the Ritz Brothers, we work Fred Astaire, we work all the way down to Ella Fitzgerald.” If you were a sex worker on Hollywood Boulevard in the early 90s, whose Walk of Fame star would you wanna work? I’d work Jean-Claude Van Damme’s star, and I would be in the splits the entire time I was out there. That’d be my thing. That’d be my gimmick. Everybody would know me. They’d call me Splits Serrano. And me and Skinny Marie, we would’ve been so in love. 

10:14: (Wait, wait, wait. I just looked it up. Jean-Claude Van Damme DOES NOT have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame?! What the fuck?! You’re telling me Fred Astaire deserves a star on the Walk of Fame but Jean-Claude Van Damme doesn’t?! Because the last time I checked, it was Jean-Claude Van Damme who beat Chong Li in the Kumite, not Fred fucking Astaire. Chong Li would’ve put Fred Astaire in the dirt. This is a travesty.)  

11:38: Vivian and Edward just met. He was stalled on the side of the road. Vivian asked him if he needed a date. He said no, that he just needed directions to Beverly Hills, at which point she got in his car and told him she’d take him there for $20. It’s crazy to think about all of the things that would’ve been different in the Pretty Woman universe if Edward had GPS. (Let’s come back to this point later.)

14:12: “You know your foot’s as big as your arm from your elbow to your wrist? Did you know that?” That's a thing Vivian just said to Edward. Two things to mention here:

1. I tried it. I put my foot up to my arm and yup, the distance from my elbow to my wrist is the same size as my foot. Crazy. 

2. See the look Edward is giving Vivian in the image above? That's from right after she says the foot/arm thing. It’s the exact moment Edward first starts to think, “Hmmm… there's something compelling about this woman. I think I would like to know more about her.” He’s an extremely jaded businessman who is the apex predator within an extremely hawkish corridor of the business world, and Vivian turned him into a curious kitten in two and a half minutes. 

14:38: Edward’s best joke in the movie: When he asks Vivian how much she makes, and she tells him $100 an hour, and he responds, “You make $100 an hour and you got a safety pin holding your boot up?” 

15:42: I don’t know that anybody has ever been more charming in something than Julia Roberts is in Pretty Woman. It’s unreal. I mean, Richard Gere himself is a charming dude. That's the only way you can put together the type of decades-long career that he’s put together. And still, when he stands next to Julia Roberts in this, it’s like he’s holding a flashlight standing next to the sun. He’s completely overpowered. She’s 95 percent responsible for the movie being as big as it became. (It made over $463 million dollars at the box office, which, if we adjust for inflation, is OVER $1.1 BILLION DOLLARS TODAY.) She’d been in a couple films before Pretty Woman (most notably 1989’s Steel Magnolias²), but this was the thing where you watched it and were like, “Okay, so she’s obviously gonna be the biggest movie star on the planet for a couple years now.” What a performance. 

20:34: Edward asked Vivian to join him in his hotel room. A funny running bit in the movie is that Vivian is always sitting on stuff that she’s not supposed to be sitting on. Right here, she accidentally sits on an important fax on the edge of Richard's desk. Later on, she sits on a plate of bacon and eggs, and a countertop in a store, and a countertop in a different store, and a ledge column on a patio, and the top of a piano, and the trunk of a car… 

22:36: Part of what makes Vivian so much fun to watch is the physicality that Roberts plays the character with. It’s little stuff she does. For example, look at how she stands when she first begins to interact with a bellhop who’s just delivered some champagne and strawberries to her and Edward:

Notice how open and accommodating and welcoming her posture is? She’s being totally sweet, and totally kind. 

After he stands there for a few moments in anticipation of receiving a tip, though, everything changes. She misinterprets the gesture as him judging (or possibly ogling) her, and as soon as she feels like something is a little off about the situation, she shifts to this stance

It’s a really funny beat that only works because Roberts is in total control of the moment. 

24:39: Here’s the entire conversation Vivian and Edward have when he decides he would like for her to spend the night with him:

Vivian: Listen, I… I appreciate this whole seduction scene you got going, but let me give you a tip: I’m a sure thing, okay? So. I’m on an hourly rate. Can we just move it along?
Edward: Somehow I’m sensing that this time problem is a major issue with you. Why don’t we just get through that right now?
Vivian: Great, let’s get started.
Edward: How much for the entire night?
Vivian (confused): To stay here? 
Edward: [nods yes]
Vivian: You couldn’t afford it.
Edward: Try me.
Vivian: Three hundred dollars.
Edward: Done. 

Four thoughts about this: 

1. Vivian and Edward had already agreed to a rate of $100 per hour. And we know that it can’t be any later than, say, midnight here. (When the movie starts, we see Vivian’s alarm clock wake her up at 8:55PM. I think it’s safe to assume that no more than three hours passed between that moment and this moment where she and Edward are negotiating.) So she’s gonna be there for probably eight or nine hours total. If she’s charging $300 for eight to nine hours, that means her rate just dropped from $100 per hour to around $35 per hour. 

2. You’ll notice in the transcript that as soon as Vivian said her number, Edward agreed. Anytime that happens in negotiation, that means you did a bad job of negotiating. You gotta always come in way too high and then work your way backwards from there. Make them tell you no at least once. That's why I begin every negotiation by asking for at least one million dollars. It doesn’t even matter what I’m being asked to do. A million bucks. Right out of the gate. (This strategy has not been successful for me yet. But that’s fine. I don’t need it to work every time. I only need it to work one time.) 

3. It’s pretty clear that Edward is a multimillionaire. Why did she think he wasn’t gonna be able to afford $300? And to that point…

4. Did you ever see that movie Catch Me If You Can with Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks? There's a part in it where Leo negotiates spending the night with a sex worker (Cheryl, played by Jennifer Garner). Guess what price he proposes at the start? $300. And guess what she does? She tells him to fuck off. They go back and forth on numbers for a bit, eventually settling on $1000 for the night. But here’s the kicker: That was happening in 1965. That means if we adjust for inflation, Cheryl got paid a little over $4,100 in 1990 money.³ That's why it’s important to do your research, regardless of what field of work you’re in. If Vivian had been better informed, she’d have been able to cite that Cheryl had set the market value on a full night’s worth of sex work more than three decades prior. She could’ve gotten more than 13x her asking price. But she didn’t know. Which is why she only got paid enough money to not even buy an XBOX.

28:45: Vivian has one rule for her professional sexual encounters: She does not kiss on the mouth. It's a common trope in movies that have sex work encounters. (The most recent time I saw it was in Magazine Dreams, which came out just a few months ago and is an absolute fucking bummer.) 

31:05: It’s the next morning. Edward tells Vivian that he didn’t know what she’d wanna eat for breakfast so he “took the liberty of ordering everything on the menu.” Then he seats her at a table that has this on it:

I tried to find a 1990 menu on the internet for the Beverly Wilshire Hotel (which is where much of this movie takes place) to corroborate the claim that this was “everything on the menu.” I wasn’t able to find one that showed food options, but I did find the wine list. There were more than 85 options for wine alone. There's no way that this was “everything on the menu” for breakfast. Edward is a liar.⁴ 

32:37: Shortly after Vivian agreed to spend the night with Edward, he almost kicked her out of the room because he thought she was doing drugs in the bathroom (turned out, she was just flossing her teeth). And I get it. I get why he would’ve kicked her out for doing drugs. For me, though, this moment is where I would’ve had to see-ya-later’d Vivian. I’m fine if you wanna smoke a little crack or whatever, but eating a pancake like this is absolutely unacceptable. 

34:34: Vivian’s listening to Prince’s “Kiss” while taking a bubble bath. It’s one of the all-time great songs. (I don’t mean that as hyperbole. In 2021, Rolling Stone had it at number 85 on their 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list.) It also fits perfectly with the situation Edward and Vivian find themselves in (“You don’t have to be rich, to be my girl”; “I just want your extra time, and your kiss”; “I want to be your fantasy, maybe you could be mine”; etc.).

35:01: Edward and Vivian are negotiating again. This time, Edward wants Vivian to spend the next six days with him. As established earlier, this should be very easy to calculate. Vivian has a rate of $100 per hour, and there are 24 hours in a day, which means she should ask for $14,400 ($2400 per day x 6 days). But Vivian, sweet as she may be, remains a terrible negotiator, so she only asks for $4000. Edward takes advantage of her naïveté and counters at less than half ($1800, which he argues is reasonable because she just charged him $300 for one night, and $300 x 6 nights is $1800). They haggle a bit more, eventually settling on $3000. That means her new rate is $20.83 per hour! What a disaster. Jennifer Garner’s Cheryl would’ve walked out of this negotiation with at least $25,000 in her pocket. 

41:12: Edward gave Vivian some money so she could buy upscale clothes to make herself presentable to his moneyed business associates. She tried getting some stuff from a very fancy store but got run off by these two:

The woman on the right is Dey Young, a character actor who popped up in tiny roles in two of my favorite movies (Spaceballs and Running Man), as well as two movies I kinda like (Executive Decision and The Mod Squad). I tried to find out who the woman on the left is, but she’s an uncredited actress. My theory is that she was so utterly hateable here that it ruined her career in Hollywood before it even got started. And honestly: Good. That's what you get for making Vivian feel bad about herself. And to that point…

42:37: Hector Elizondo is here. He plays Barnard Thompson, the manager of the hotel. A trick Pretty Woman makes use of over and over again is they carve out a bunch of space for Vivian to be happy and free and untethered from the social stigma of her profession—and then right when you let your guard down, they drop a character into the mix who makes her feel like shit (e.g.. the two saleswoman from the note above). Barnard is the opposite of that. He only ever treats Vivian with respect and dignity, which is a delightful surprise because the first time he sees her walking by he makes a very What The Fuck Is Going On Here face so it’s easy to assume he’ll go the other way with things. 

43:50: Look at how Vivian holds her money. This might be worse than the way she eats pancakes. 

44:47: Okay, Vivian’s got her wardrobe squared away. She told Barnard that nobody would help her when she tried shopping on Rodeo Drive, so he called one of the stores and told a friend that he’d be sending somebody to her stores. Great guy. Love him. Wonderful. 

47:57: Edward calls Vivian to say he’ll need her to accompany him to a business dinner that evening. As soon as they get off the phone, Edward asks his secretary to call her back so he can talk to her again, going so far as to blow off a meeting with his lawyer. This man spent one night with Vivian and is already jeopardizing a billion-dollar business deal just to hear her voice on the phone again. She’s like Helen of Troy, except but it’s Helen of Hollywood Boulevard.⁵

50:34: A perfect exchange:

Vivian: You’re late.
Edward: You’re stunning.
Vivian: You’re forgiven. 

52:23: Another funny running bit in the movie is that basically every guy Vivian talks to falls in love with her in about ten seconds (the one exception is Barney, who takes on a fatherly role). Right here, it’s Jim Morse, the old man who's at risk of losing his billion-dollar company to Edward. They’re supposed to be talking about deal details and future business plans and whatnot, but all Jim seems to be able to think about is how he was born 60 years too early.  

52:50: We’re at the escargot scene. I remember watching this part as a kid and being completely grossed out by the idea of eating snails. And I’m happy to report to you that as of today, I, a grown man, am still completely grossed out by it. They might be the most delicious thing in the world, but I promise you I will never know. I’m very food closed-minded. There are, like, eight things I like to eat, and so I just eat those eight things over and over and over again. Shoutout ignorance. Shoutout prejudice. Shoutout biases. 🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌

52:51: You know what? Let’s do this scene for this week’s FOOTNOTES:

55:10: Some sly character development here: When Edward and Vivian go to his hotel room the first time, he mentions that he never goes out on the balcony because he’s afraid of heights. (Really, though, what that means is that he doesn’t like the way it feels when he isn’t totally in control of every aspect of a given situation.) But after just one full day with Vivian, he is now sitting outside the door, one step onto the terrace. He’s opening up. He’s becoming a real person. Vivian is chaaaaaaaanging him.

56:33: Vivian notices that Edward, for the first time in the movie, is carrying some emotional weight on his face. They talk about how the dinner went (it ended with Jim leaving in a huff because Edward told him there was nothing he could do to prevent Edward from purchasing his company and selling off its parts). Vivian points out that it’s pretty clear the reason Edward is upset is because he likes Jim, to which Edward responds, “You and I are such similar creatures, Vivian. We both screw people for money.” What a dick thing to say right there. It’s the first time Edward’s done something to make me dislike him. 

58:35: It’s three o’clock in the morning. Vivian wandered down to the hotel restaurant to find Edward. He’s in there playing the piano while a couple of guys from the kitchen staff watch. He just paid those guys to do that, right? Like, he gave them $100 a piece or whatever and asked them to hangout, right? That's a funny rich guy thing to do. (If I had however much money Edward has, my version of this is I’d pay six or seven people to go into every place before I got there, and then whenever I walk in they all start to murmur like, “Holy fucking shit. It’s Shea Serrano.”) 

1:00:35: …Aaaaaaaaaaaaand now Edward is preparing to perform oral sex on Vivian on top of the piano. You can measure how rich a person is by what level of public sex act a hotel is willing to ignore them engaging in in hopes of keeping their business.

1:04:34: OH, BABY. THE SHOPPING MONTAGE SCENE. TRUE ROM-COM MOVIE SCENE ROYALTY. FOUR QUESTIONS ABOUT IT:

1. Does this count as a shopping montage, a makeover montage, or both? I think it’s more Shopping Montage than Makeover Montage, but only because there's no moment where Vivian gets a haircut. I really feel like you gotta have a haircut in there if it’s gonna count as a proper makeover montage. (And if not a haircut, you at least gotta replace some glasses with contact lenses.) 

2. Is this the best shopping/makeover montage that's ever been in a movie? Yes. For sure. Every other shopping/makeover montage is fighting for second place, including the ones in Airborne, Marie Antoinette, Blank Check, Dumb & Dumber, Mean Girls, Can’t Buy Me Love, The Devil Wears Prada, She’s All That, and Clueless. (Clueless is my personal second-place winner.)

3. What’s the best outfit Vivian tries on during the sequence? My vote goes to the brown polka dot outfit that she ends up wearing to the polo match later. (I’ll make sure to include a shot of it when we get there.) 

4. Has anybody ever eaten more shit in a scene than the snobby saleswoman does during the “Big mistake. Big. Huge” moment? I think she’s the runaway shit-eating winner in movie history. Like, it’s not even close. She eats more shit here than people who ate actual shit, like the lady from The Help who ate the pie with shit in it, or Divine from Pink Flamingos who ate the dog shit,⁶ or everybody from any of the Human Centipede movies. The snobby saleswoman is the shit-eating queen. Far and away. What a legacy. And to that point…

1:04:35: My favorite tiny piece of the shopping montage is the face Vivian makes when she realizes she’s standing outside of the store where the two snobby saleswomen work:

That look is saying, “You know what I wanna do? I wanna go in here and ruin a couple lives real quick.” It’s a perfect way for Vivian to cash in some of the goodwill she’s built up with the audience during the movie. 

1:08:46: Edward, Vivian, and Stuckey (George Costanza) are at a polo match. I’ve never been to a polo match or even seen a polo match on TV. I have no idea what the rules of the game are, and I will happily go my whole life without learning anything about polo. Shoutout ignorance. Shoutout prejudice. Shoutout biases. 🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌

1:09:45: If I had to designate something the all-caps SINGLE MOST CHARMING MOMENT JULIA ROBERTS HAS IN PRETTY WOMAN, it’s this part here where she wanders up next to Edward at the polo match, hears him cheer something that's just happened on the field, immediately joins in with the clapping, shouts “Well done!” and then does the Arsenio Hall dog pound WOO-WOO-WOO fist pump. It’s a perfect movie moment. 

1:09:55: A horn sounded during the polo match, and this announcement blared over the intercom: “That’s the chukker, ladies and gentlemen. Falcons 7, Gems 4.” I tried to Google “What is a chukker in polo?” but then my laptop just called me a “wetback” and told me to go back to Mexico. 

1:13:57: After Stuckey told Edward he suspects Vivian is a corporate spy, Edward tried to assuage him by explaining that Vivian is a sex worker. Upon finding out, Stuckey wandered over to Vivian, degraded her, then propositioned her. I hate this guy a whole bunch. Like, he’s at the I WOULD CUT ACROSS TWO LANES OF TRAFFIC TO HIT HIM WITH MY CAR IF THE OPPORTUNITY PRESENTED ITSELF level of hate for me. (And we haven't even gotten to the truly terrible stuff he does yet.)  

1:16:09: Edward and Vivian are fighting in the hotel right now (it’s part of the fallout of Stuckey having approached her). It’s a fucking monster of an argument. Here’s the worst part of it:

Edward: I hate to point out the obvious, but you are, in fact, a hooker. And you are my employee. 
Vivian: You don’t own me! I decide! I say who, I say when, I say… who! 
Edward: I refuse to spend the next three days fighting with you! I said I was sorry, I meant it! That's the end of it! 
Vivian: I’m sorry I ever met you. I’m sorry I ever got into your stupid car! 
Edward: As if you had so many more appealing options. 
Vivian: I’ve never had anyone make me feel as cheap as you did today. 
Edward: Somehow, I find that very hard to believe. 

I am now officially a member of the FUCK EDWARD political party. 

1:18:53: Vivian and Edward made up. She didn’t even make it to the elevator before he’d talked his way back into her heart. If I was Vivian, I would’ve listened to Edward’s apology, been like, “Okay, I forgive you,” and then that night when he went to sleep I’d have set his bed on fire with him in it. It would’ve been a thing nobody at that hotel ever forgot. Our story would’ve been the number one true crime doc on Netflix for three weeks straight. (AMERICAN ARSON — The Splits Serrano Story.) 

1:20:10: We finally get the full Vivian backstory: She dropped out of high school and followed a guy to Los Angeles when she was a teenager. The guy eventually left her, and so she was stuck in a new city with no degree, no money, and no career prospects. She tried working menial jobs for a while but couldn’t afford to pay the rent. She was too ashamed to go home, and so she turned to prostitution, and she’s been in the trade ever since. 

1:23:56: Edward arranged for a private jet to whisk him and Vivian off to an opera in San Francisco. Right as the performance is about to start, he says, “People’s reaction to opera the first time they see it is very dramatic. They either love it or they hate it. If they love it, they will always love it. If they don’t, they may learn to appreciate it, but it will never become part of their soul.” I said the same thing to Larami the first time I showed her a Manu Ginobili highlight compilation on YouTube. 

1:26:50: You know what I’ve come to realize while working on GOOD MOVIE? I am an absolute sucker for any time there's a moment in a movie where the camera stays trained on an actor for an extended amount of time while the actor wordlessly reacts to something offscreen. That's what’s happening right now as Vivian watches the opera. Roberts fucking crushes this. My guess is this is the scene where she earned the Best Actress nomination she got at the Oscars that year. (She lost to Kathy Bates, which I don’t hate because Bates was outstanding in Misery. That being said, if you were to tell me that the Academy were retroactively stripping Bates of the award and giving it to Roberts because they found out Bates was doping, I wouldn’t be all that upset.)

1:26:51: By the way, the opera Vivian and Edward are watching is called La Traviata. It’s about a courtesan (a sex worker who mainly has upper-class clients) who falls in love with a wealthy man. Between this and the Prince song from earlier that was also secretly about the plot of Pretty Woman, I just wanna give a nice thumbs up to director Garry Marshall. Great work, Garry.  

1:27:52: Okay listen: I’m about to make an extremely nerdy observation here in a second. But before I do that, I’m gonna say seven really cool phrases so as to proactively offset the extreme nerdiness of the observation. Got it? Great. Here we go:

1. Blast Radius

2. All-Terrain Combat

3. Maserati Erection

4. Apocalypse Linebacker

5. Chainsaw Samurai

6. Tornado Vortex

7. Roundhouse Kick

Now that that's out of the way, the extremely nerdy observation: 

Edward is decidedly winning this game of chess. He’s up a full exchange, as well as a couple of pawns. I would guess he’s four, maybe five moves away from a checkmate, assuming Julia does not resign beforehand, which she should. 

1:30:14: After a lovely day together where the two behaved as proper girlfriend and boyfriend, Vivian… KISSED EDWARD ON THE LIPS WHILE HE SLEPT! THEY’RE FALLING IN LOVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THIS IS THE GREATEST DAY OF MY LIFE!!!!!!!!!!!! (We can ignore that they’ve only known each other for five days. Don’t think about that part. Just think about LOVEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.)

1:33:34: Vivian tells a story from her childhood: When she was a little girl, she would pretend she was a princess trapped in a tower by a wicked queen and that a knight would ride up on a white horse, draw his sword, and then rescue her. And that's all well and good, or whatever. But I mention it here because: She starts the story by saying, “When I was a little girl, my mama used to lock me in the attic when I was bad, which was pretty often.” Umm, WHAT? She just breezes right past this horrible, horrible thing her mother used to do to her, and Edward doesn’t ask any questions about it. He’s just like, “Oh. Locked you in the attic, huh? Child abuse. Cool, cool, cool. So, about this knight...” 

1:40:47: Edward had all the pieces to finally takeover Jim Morse’s company, but he changed his mind at the last second because of something Vivian said to him earlier. None of the details of the deal matter, I just wanted to call out that it was happening because it leads us to…

1:43:15: Gah. The worst part of the movie. Stuckey shows up at Edward’s hotel room to discuss the deal-gone-awry. Edward’s not there, though; only Vivian is. Stuckey lets himself in, pours himself a drink, talks shit to Vivian, accuses her of costing Edward’s company millions of dollars, then smacks her and mounts her after she falls to the floor. (It seems pretty clear he intends on raping her). And I just do not understand any of this sequence. Like, why is it in this movie? I’m assuming it’s a holdover from the original version of the script, which was decidedly darker. But still. Just delete it. There's no need for it to be here. Remember when The Departed came out and some people tried to get a version of it without the part at the end where the rat runs across the patio balcony? We need that here. Get the people who photoshopped the rat out of The Departed to axe this scene from Pretty Woman. 

1:43:16: (By the way, Edward shows up during the attack, pulls Stuckey off Vivian, punches him in the face, then kicks him out, so I guess there's at least that. But still. Fuck Stuckey forever.)

1:48:29: Oh no. Vivian is leaving. 😭😭😭😭😭 Edward told her he had to go back to New York now that his business is done but he would set her up with a condo and an expense account, and that he’d like to see her anytime he’s in town. She told him she didn’t want the stuff, she just wanted to be with him forever. Edward said he wasn’t capable of maintaining a relationship like that, and so she left. What a moron, this guy is. EDWARD, YOU FOOL, DON’T LET HER GO. SHE’S THE LOVE OF YOUR LIFE. I KNOW YOU’VE ONLY KNOWN HER FOR A WEEK, BUT I DON’T CARE. TELL HER YOU LOVE HER. TELL HER YOU’LL DO ANYTHING FOR HER. DON’T LET HER GO, EDWARD. DON’T LET HER GO. 😭😭😭😭😭

1:51:34: Vivian’s back at the apartment she shares with Kit, packing up her stuff because she’s moving to San Francisco to start anew. As Vivian gets ready to leave, she takes a handful of money and stuffs it into Kit’s jacket pocket. How long do you think Kit waited to use it on drugs after Vivian left? I’m guessing 45, maybe 50 minutes. 

1:54:20: My favorite conversation between two characters in Pretty Woman who aren’t Vivian and Edward happens right here. Kit, who Vivian encouraged to enroll in beauty school, is talking to another sex worker named Rachel about Rachel taking over Vivian’s spot in the apartment. Kit asks Rachel if she has a lot of stuff to move in, to which Rachel responds with a completely unbothered, “No, Carlos burned most of my stuff when I said I was moving out.” Her deadpan delivery turns the bleak assessment into such a sharp comedic moment. I know there was no way we were ever gonna get a big-budget sequel to Pretty Woman with Julia Roberts in it, but I feel like we should’ve at least gotten a straight-to-video sequel called Pretty Women that just followed Kit and Rachel for a week. That movie would’ve been great. 

1:54:21: Oh, wait, wait, wait. I just remembered that we’re supposed to tally all the things that would’ve been different in the Pretty Woman universe if Edward had access to GPS, thus erasing his encounter with Vivian. Let’s do that now:

If Edward had GPS and didn’t need to get directions from Vivian, then:

• Vivian would’ve remained a sex worker for the foreseeable future;

• Kit would’ve never been inspired to enroll in beauty school, and thus remained a sex worker too (and probably stayed addicted to drugs);

• The two snobby saleswoman never would’ve had to confront the awfulness of their own existences;

• Jim Morse’s company would’ve gotten purchased, broken down, and sold off by Edward’s company, and that would’ve netted Edward a nice check, yes, but also it would’ve cost thousands of people their jobs;

• Some members of the hotel kitchen staff would’ve never seen a rich man perform oral sex on a woman on top of a piano; 

• Stuckey would’ve never gotten fired because Edward probably would’ve never walked in on him assaulting a woman;

• And Rachel would still be living with Carlos, which was clearly a volatile situation.

I wonder how different my life would be if I didn’t have GPS?

1:54:57: Oh, man. Just like what Vivian laid out in her story earlier, Edward (a knight⁷) rides atop a white horse (standing through the sunroof of a white limousine) with his sword (umbrella) drawn to rescue Vivian from her tower (a third floor efficiency apartment she shared with a drug addict). Great payoff, all the way down to the grey suit (his coat of armor). 

1:55:56: Vivian and Edward’s final exchange:

Edward: So what happened after he climbed up the tower and rescued her?
Vivian: She rescues him right back. 

I’m so happy they ended up together. 

1:56:26: The movie’s over. Good movie. 

ACCIDENTAL SIMILARITIES
Things that last week’s movie (Mission: Impossible — Fallout) has in common with this week’s movie 

• Both movies have scenes where someone gets punched.

• Both movies have scenes where a guy makes a decision based on what his heart wants rather than what his brain tells him to do. (Ethan opts to save Luther’s life and lose the plutonium rather than let Luther die while keeping the plutonium away from anarchists; Edward opts to save a floundering company, thus costing his own company millions of dollars.) 

• Both movies have scenes where a woman wraps one or more legs around a guy. (Vivian wraps her legs around Edward while the two are in the bathtub; Ilsa wraps one of her legs around Solomon Lane’s head when she’s choking him out.)

• Both movies have scenes where the main guy is woken up by something unexpected. (Ethan gets woken up by a nightmare; Edward gets woken up by Vivian kissing him.)

• Both movies have scenes where a guy walks into a bar, talks to a woman, then leaves the bar with that woman. 

• Both movies have guys with an affinity for close-up magic. (Pretty Woman opens with a magician at a party doing some sleight-of-hand tricks from a group of onlookers; Ethan Hunt is famously also a sleight-of-hand enthusiast.) 

THE LAST BITS
Things that I Googled while watching Pretty Woman 

• How tall is Julia Roberts? She’s listed on the internet as being both 5-foot-8 and 5-foot-9.  

• Were Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett married or did they just date? They were married for about two years. (Lyle Lovett being able to convince Julia Roberts to marry him is proof that anything is possible.) 

• What hotel did they film Beverly Hills Cop at? The Millennium Biltmore Hotel, although in the movie it’s called The Beverly Palms Hotel.

• Who sings the “Pretty Woman” song? Roy Orbison. 

• Did Henry Winkler have Roy Orbison tattooed on his butt in The Waterboy or was it someone else? It was Roy Orbison.

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Next week’s movie: Inside Man

You can rent Inside Man everywhere you rent movies from.

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​​This essay was edited by Hannah Giorgis. The FOOTNOTES video was produced by Richie Bozek.

1. Hank Azaria in his first-ever movie appearance.

2. This is a good movie but it fucking sucks to watch because Julia Roberts dies in it and then Sally Field gives one of the most heartbreaking monologues ever put to screen.

3. That's $10,183.97 in 2025 money.

4. Some other movies that have taken place at the Beverly Wilshire: Clueless, Sex and the City: The Movie, and Escape from the Planet of the Apes. I thought that it was the same hotel as the one from Beverly Hills Cop, but it’s a different one.

5. I’m not certain that this joke makes sense historically.

6. This legitimately made me gag when I watched it.

7. Coincidentally, Richard Gere would play Lancelot in First Knight five years after this.