It’s an idea that many would call sexist. But it has just about everyone talking about it.
A husband and wife hit hard by the recession go to Las Vegas to try to recoup. A business mogul eyes the woman, is smitten and offers the guy a million bucks for a night with her. The husband takes the money, and off she goes.
That’s the plot of the high-grossing Paramount film “Indecent Proposal,” starring Robert Redford, Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson and directed by Adrian (“Fatal Attraction”) Lyne.
Sexist. Sleazy? Amy Jones, the movie’s screenwriter, says not at all.
“`Indecent Proposal’ is a love story about forgiveness,” Jones says. “I was interested in this couple who’ve been together a long time. How do they stay together?
“This is the after-`Pretty Woman’ story. You fall in love, you marry, it’s wonderful for a time and then suddenly-what happens in almost all marriages-someone does something to the other person that almost can’t be forgiven. How do you deal with it? Some couples break up. If you really love each other, in my opinion, you forgive each other and go on.”
Jones has written or co-written a range of movie scripts, from a coming-of-age comedy, “Mystic Pizza,” to a family comedy, “Beethoven.” She also has directed such films as “Maid to Order,” with Ally Sheedy, and “Love Letters,” with Jamie Lee Curtis.
“She’s a good writer,” says Ivan Reitman, executive producer of “Beethoven.” “I think the combination of `Beethoven’ and `Indecent Proposal’ will probably be the real breakout for her . . . She has a real great sense of characterization, and brings a wonderful humanity to the people she writes about.”
Her sensibilities, she says, draw her to stories emphasizing “male-female relations and the war between men and women.”
“Indecent Proposal” is based on Jack Engelhard’s 1988 novel of the same name, which was bought by co-executive producers Tom Schulman and Alex Gartner. The book centered on two men-an American Jew who had fought in the Six-Day War and an Arab billionaire who makes a similar $1 million offer.
When the producers hired Jones, they told her not to read the book but to develop the concept of a couple in Las Vegas and a mogul who offers $1 million to spend a night with the wife.
“In the book, the rich man is a demonic figure,” Jones says. “The plot is about one man selling his soul to another. The woman’s irrelevant. In the movie she’s the strong central character.
“I wrote a script that in many ways is a female fantasy-about a woman who has a great marriage but who is also so desirable that two men actually are in love with her. It’s about betrayal in a relationship-her betrayal of her husband because she really wants to sleep with the mogul, and his betrayal of her because he allows her to do it. I think the movie plays better for women than men.”
Jones, who has a degree in art history from Wellesley College got her film start with “A Weekend Home,” a documentary that focused on a brief visit with her parents in Buffalo, N.Y. It won the American Film Institute Student Film Festival award. One of the judges was director Martin Scorsese. That contact led to a job as his assistant on the film “Taxi Driver.”
She moved to California and worked as a film editor for producer-director Roger Corman, considered the king of the B films. After a five-year stint she directed “Slumber Party Massacre” in 1982 and the romantic drama, “Love Letters,” released in 1983.
Then she wrote “Mystic Pizza,” the story of three young women mired in small-town America. Her experience with the movie that launched several careers, notably that of actress Julia Roberts, was as agonizing as it was energizing.
Pitched to studio after studio, initial interest was followed by turndowns, Jones says.
She recalls one studio that “called me in and asked, `Could you make these women into boys? Then we’ll do it.’
“It made me very angry-we’d been subjected to endless male-bonding comedies for years.”
Samuel Goldwyn Co. agreed to produce and distribute the 1988 film (and eventually reaped the unanticipated profits that accrued), but Donald Petrie directed the film, not Jones, who received credit as screenwriter.
“You have to understand-`Mystic Pizza’ was my `Diner.’ When Barry Levinson wrote `Diner,’ it was his movie, his life. That was `Mystic Pizza’ to me, and I lost it. And it was really hard.”
In the six years since, Jones says she has stuck largely to writing. These days she’s working on two original scripts, but for the most part she has been doing rewrites.
“You get paid more for rewrites than for original scripts,” she says. “If I worked full-time doing rewrites, I would make well over $1 million a year. You have to force yourself to keep doing originals. One of the incentives against it, though, is the pain that comes when you write something original that means something to you deeply, and then it’s changed by five other writers.”
The script for “Indecent Proposal,” which she says is “90 percent” hers, is a case in point. Some of the rewritten scenes, Jones suggests, involved crucial moments.
“This is (about) a husband and wife who have been together ever since they fell in love in high school.
“They feel they can take the (mogul’s) offer because they have such confidence in their relationship. They think nothing can change it. She says, `Hey, we slept with other people before we were married.’ The subtext is that she’s a little attracted to the rich guy. So they both make terrible mistakes: He doesn’t stop her, and she really wants to do it. Redford falls in love with her, she leaves her husband, he rebuilds his life and career, gives the million away to charity and comes back for her.
“Now in the scene, as I wrote it, Moore turns to Redford and says, `I can’t go on with you. I don’t love you. You can’t give me the one thing I want most-my husband.’ And she leaves him.”
In the final script, which evolved in the customary Hollywood way with the input of other screenwriters, the producers and director, the male star “gets a heroic moment,” she says.
Producer Alex Gartner declined to discuss details of the rewrite process but praised Jones’ work: “We had a lot of discussion with Amy. She brought so much to it. The execution of the couples’ needs evolved over many drafts.”
Letting the Redford character exit gracefully, Jones acknowledges, “may have been a very wise thing to do.” But, she says, “I don’t agree with it. I think he should be dumped. And I always did.”
Still, Jones stressed she didn’t want it to appear that what she was saying about the rewrite was “sour grapes because I don’t feel that way. I’m very happy with the picture.”
Weighing the movie’s mixed reviews against the nearly $25 million it grossed during its first five days in release, Jones is pragmatic.
“It’s much better to have bad reviews and great grosses than to have great reviews and bad grosses,” she says.
Jones is married to Michael Chapman, a cinematographer. They have a 12-year-old daughter. Jones is considering penning a script about a group of girls a bit younger than the “Mystic Pizza” bunch-roughly 13 to 15.
If she does write it, she’d want to direct it.
“I’ll have to be really brave,” she says, thinking back to “Mystic Pizza.” “I’ll have to be ready for heartbreak.”
WHAT THE CRITICS HAD TO SAY
“Working with a ridiculous premise and Amy Holden Jones’ badly underwritten script … the director of `Flashdance’ and `Fatal Attraction’ has come up with the sort of sexy pop parable that is his specialty.” – Janet Maslin, New York Times
“What starts as exploitative moral controversy collapses into a fairly conventional romantic triangle. There’s crying, shouting, too much drinking-but none of it disguises the film’s fundamental sexism. ” – Bob Strauss, Los Angeles Daily News
“The screenplay half-heartedly attempts to divert the possible outrage of some female viewers by having Diana (Demi Moore’s character) be seen largely as the maker of her own decisions.” – Philip Wuntch, Dallas Morning News
“The script … draws on the same kind of generational envy that haunted Jones’ highly effective “Love Letters” of 1983-the perception that things will never be quite as fine and full-bodied as they were with the characters’ parents.” – Dave Kehr, Chicago Tribune
