Long before a movie finds its place beside the family DVDs, it can live a completely different life on paper. That earlier version is usually invisible once the jokes are polished, frightening scenes disappear, and a hero becomes somebody children can actually root for. Nevertheless, buried in old drafts and abandoned treatments are films we would barely recognize: Christmas stories with killings, animated adventures built around adult anxieties, fairy tales carrying R-rated jokes, and beloved characters who began life considerably meaner. Hollywood rewriting is often discussed as if it were housekeeping. In these cases, it changed who was allowed in the theater.
#1: Enchanted (2007) began as an R-rated comedy
Disney eventually gave audiences Giselle singing to birds, making dresses from curtains, and treating modern Manhattan as though a fairy-tale prince might appear around every corner. Bill Kelly’s first screenplay lived in a much racier neighborhood. Written in the late 1990s, the early version drew inspiration from adult comedies of the era and was considered unsuitable for the Walt Disney Pictures label. One discarded joke had the newly arrived Giselle mistaken for a stripper, a long way from the wide-eyed Amy Adams character children came to know.
