Bondage and bust-ups

EL James

EL James

Published Feb 6, 2015

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EL James threatened to get her many fans to boycott the 50 Shades of Grey film if the scenes differed from her original vision.

According to on-set insiders, the author engaged in furious debates with director Sam Taylor-Johnson and award-winning playwright Patrick Marber, who was roped into the project to improve the story-telling in the screenplay and add depth to the principle characters Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele.

James, however, allegedly removed every line written by Marber, saying “Nothing he has written is in my book!”. She then threatened that if the film didn’t play out in the manner she wanted, she would advise her followers to boycott the film. Eager to keep James onside because of the revenue at stake for the film and its potential sequels, Taylor-Johnson gave in to the author’s demands.

The director has already revealed that she and James did not see eye to eye. In an interview with Porter Magazine, she said the two of them “definitely fought”.

"It was difficult, I'm not going to lie," she said.

"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 visualise this person onscreen, but, you know, we got there."

But another film-maker close to the project goes one further, insinuating that James was on a power-trip and that studio executives were forced to consider a lot of bad ideas.

“It’s a very frustrating thing about Hollywood when someone has a bad idea, and the bad idea happens.”

One of the chief sticking points was the ending of the film. In the book, Anastasia asks Christian Grey to give her a good beating. However, when he obliges, she recoils and says “stop”. In the Marber rewrite, the film ends with the word “red”, the safe-word the two S&M playmates have agreed on.

Industry sources are adamant that Marber’s ending would have been the “cooler” option, but James wanted none of it. It sparked what one source described as “the most petty and ridiculous argument in the world”. – Tonight Reporter

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