‘Indecent Proposal,’ popular 1990s erotic thriller, turns 30

The year was 1993. Erotic thrillers were all the rage, and director Adrian Lyne was the genre’s king.

His 1987 hit “Fatal Attraction” had captivated and infuriated audiences with its plot about a murderous spurned mistress. Could lightning strike twice? 

One oft-quoted line answered that question: “Suppose I were to offer you $1 million for one night with your wife.”

This was the irresistible central premise of Lyne’s “Indecent Proposal,” starring Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson as Diana and David, a loving but financially strapped couple approached by John Gage, a playboy billionaire (Robert Redford) with a twisted proposition. 

The film was a massive hit. At the same time, it was derided by critics and won multiple Razzie awards.

It was satirized and referenced countless times in pop culture, including on episodes of “The Simpsons” and “Mad About You,” and the 1996 Farrelly brothers comedy “Kingpin,” which also starred Harrelson.

It was widely labeled sexist for using Moore’s character as an object of sexual barter — a theme made comically literal in a scene featuring a scantily clad Moore rolling around on a money-covered bed.

“It made me sick,” Betty Friedan, author of “The Feminine Mystique,” said in the Los Angeles Times.

Perhaps sensing the furor to come, Lyne even included a cutaway shot of a woman reading Susan Faludi’s feminist tome “Backlash” in the film.

For screenwriter Amy Holden Jones, whose previous work, 1988’s “Mystic Pizza,” had made little impact upon its initial release (despite starring a new talent by the name of Julia Roberts), the “Indecent Proposal” script was a career game-changer.

But it wasn’t easy, she told The Post.

“It was an incredibly sexist era,” Jones said, adding that “all I had to do was never be annoyed at the fact that they brought in other writers, never blame people, never cause a problem. Because if you caused a problem, you would just be gone.”

Despite questionable third-act changes to her script “by a series of, exclusively, men,” Jones stands behind the polarizing film.

The creator of the Fox series “The Resident” — whose “Mystic Pizza” was reassessed to acclaim years later — thinks it stands the test of time as a hugely entertaining moral quandary.

“I watched it again last night for the first time in a long time,” she said, “and it held up better than I thought!”

Jones took us through creating the scandalous screenplay on its 30th anniversary, and explains why she thinks the conversation around the film missed the mark.

“It’s sexist to say that you can’t show a woman on-screen doing something morally ambiguous,” she said.

It’s about trust, not money

“I had been looking for a story to write about why some relationships last and some don’t. I had my own theory, which was that it was the capacity to forgive. The concept of the script was, how do you come back from things like an affair, and have a marriage go on? How does a marriage last over time? There’s no couple in the world where there isn’t a point where something terrible happens between them that seems unforgivable.”

In the original script, Diana doesn’t actually do the deed 

“The very first draft had more in it about trust. What happened was that the man paid the million dollars and she did not sleep with him. He paid in order to make her husband believe she had, and then the marriage fell apart over that trust issue. And the [execs] came back to me and said, ‘No, she has to sleep with him.’ “

Jones wanted Diana to dump both men

“I thought she should leave both men at the end. I brought it up several times, including once the movie was greenlit. And that was basically laughed at. No one would consider it, really.”

Redford insisted his character be nicer 

“I always had a lot of trouble with the movie after [David and Diana] split up. The men in charge, and particularly Redford, decided to make [Gage] very sympathetic. In the original script, it was a clear journey where she came to realize that she was his next acquisition. There were four or five people that Redford cycled through to work on his character. In my draft, what she said to him was that you can’t buy love, and then she left him. He had that changed, because Robert Redford couldn’t be left.”

One Vegas scene was a breakout for a future star

“At the gambling table, there’s someone who was an extra, who talks to Woody. He improvised lines, and he says, ‘You think she’ll ever come back to you after she goes to gamble for Gage?’ That’s Billy Bob Thornton.”

Moore’s character isn’t as passive as critics claimed

“If you look at it carefully, Redford is constantly asking Woody for permission for his wife. And what Woody is constantly saying is, ‘You’ll have to ask Diana. It is her decision.’ There’s a crucial scene where Redford says, ‘What would you say if I offered you a million dollars for a night with your wife?’ She jumps in and says, ‘He’d say go to hell.’ She controls that scene.”

The idea of a remake has never materialized — and Jones isn’t surprised

“They’d have to do something very different. It would have to be much more raunchy. But I don’t know why you would reboot it. I think it still works. And by the way, today’s morality, you know, you’ve got a [former] president [discussing] groping women’s p – – – ies  — are we really supposed to say that if some woman in Vegas got offered a million dollars that would bail out the family, who’s in financial trouble, that we should all say she shouldn’t do it?”

Jones got the brunt of the blame for the movie’s message

“When the film was released, it caused a great deal of controversy, because, you know, how could I write this thing about a woman spending the night with this guy for a million dollars? The idea that a woman should not be tempted by any of those things, or she should be so pure that you can’t make a movie about her feeling that way — I mean, go watch some French cinema! It’s more complicated than that. I’m as big a feminist as you’ll find, but part of feminism for me is that women can be portrayed not as visions of perfection on-screen, but as whole human beings with choices.

“Here I was, struggling desperately to succeed in a massively male-driven industry. I mean, run entirely by men, everything greenlit by men, all movies directed by men, the vast majority of big screenwriters men, and you get a hit movie which has been controlled by all those people, including the male star and the director, and you slaughter the female screenwriter for what you consider its traitor quality that a woman decides to leave with a man for money. I mean, yeah, I considered that anti-feminist bulls – – t. And I still do.”