Fifty Shades of Grey author EL James threatened to withdraw her support unless her original dialogue was retained for the much-hyped big screen adaptation, reports the Daily Mail’s Baz Bamingboye.
Studio Universal hired the award-winning playwright of Closer and Dealer’s Choice, Patrick Marber, to hone James’ famously iffy prose. But Bamingboye suggests James went through the final screenplay and removed all Marber’s tinkerings, threatening to alert her fans on social media if she were challenged.
The Hollywood Reporter also claims James, and not director Sam Taylor-Johnson, had final say over the movie’s dialogue. In particular, the author refused to allow a subtle change to the film’s denouement in which Dakota Johnson’s Anastasia Steele was due to mutter the safe word “red” while enjoying the attentions of Jamie Dornan’s kinky billionaire Christian Grey. In the final version, Taylor-Johnson and fellow film-makers were overruled, and Steele speaks the word used in the novel: “Stop.”
“It ended on a really smart note and Erika wouldn’t allow it,” a source told the Hollywood Reporter. “It’s just a bummer.” Another person close to the production said James “was given a lot of power and has used every opportunity to flex that power”.
Taylor-Johnson has admitted to fighting with the author over the movie, telling Porter magazine: “It was difficult, I’m not going to lie. We definitely fought, but they were creative fights, and we would resolve them. We would have proper on-set ‘barneys’, and I’m not confrontational, but it was about finding a way between the two of us, satisfying her vision of what she’d written as well as my need to visualize this person on screen, but, you know, we got there.”
Taylor-Johnson’s film is being released in time for Valentine’s Day on both sides of the Atlantic. Observers expect it to be one of 2015’s biggest movies, with a predicted opening of more than $60m in the US alone.
Universal is expecting to capitalise heavily on James’ existing fanbase. The British author has sold more than 100m copies of Fifty Shades of Grey and its two sequels, and the studio hopes to make at least two further films.
Recent reports suggest the film may cleave more closely than previously expected to the original novel in terms of genuine erotic content, with around 20 minutes of total footage given over to sex scenes. Early expectations fired by footage screened for critics and cinema owners in March last year were for the big-screen version to veer closer to “moon-eyed” romance than a hardcore BDSM tone.
