Pygmalion

The film's central relationship follows Shaw's: a wealthy man takes up a working-class woman, pays for her remaking so that she can pass in his world, and the story turns on whether she is more than what he has made of her. The etiquette lessons and the first public outing she has to survive are Pygmalion's set pieces. MEDIUM : While the film's original spec script (titled 3000 by J.F. Lawton) was written as a dark drama without explicit reference to Pygmalion, director Garry Marshall explicitly acknowledged the connection during production. Marshall famously stated that when he read the rewrites, he always viewed the project as a modern-day Pygmalion or My Fair Lady.

Shaw's title names the sculptor of Metamorphoses X, who makes a statue of a woman, falls in love with it, and sees it brought to life by Venus. The play turns the story into phonetics and class: Higgins remakes Eliza Doolittle's speech and treats the result as his creation. MEDIUM because the debt is to the myth, which Ovid's is the classic telling of, rather than to anything particular in his text; Shaw's ending pointedly refuses the lovers' union the myth ends with.