Editing Woman of the Year (section)

===Reshoots===
The film was originally shot with a different ending, but it proved unpopular at test screenings. The decision was made to change it, and the final fifteen minutes of the film were re-written and shot. In the original ending, Sam went missing after returning the child to the orphanage, while he was supposed to write an article about an upcoming boxing match. Tess decides to take over for him and visits the gym to learn about the fight. Sam, who is in a language school trying to learn French and Spanish to "be important", is shocked when he sees the article. He goes to the fight, where he encounters Tess. She insists that she did the work to be a "good wife," and states her dedication to Sam. He says that he does not want either extreme; he just wants her to be "Tess Harding Craig" (as in the released ending).<ref>{{cite journal|title=Interview with Ring Lardner, Jr|journal=On Writing|date=August 1997|volume=7|url=http://www.brisbin.net/Tracy-Hepburn/Articles/T-H/Retrospective/thumbnails/origWOTYending.pdf|access-date=September 5, 2011|publisher=The Writers Guild of America, East, Inc}}</ref>

Ring Lardner Jr. describes in Archive of America Television oral history interviews (2000) that changes made to the ending of the film were against the wishes of Katharine Hepburn, and were implemented while both screenwriters were on vacation in New York.  The changes were instigated by [[Louis B. Mayer]], producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz and director George Stevens, with the actual new ending being written by John Lee Mahin (who was uncredited). In an interview, Lardner indicated that these parties all believed that Tess Harding "had to get her comeuppance for being too strong in a man's world, so they wrote a scene where she tried to fix breakfast ... and gets everything wrong." Lardner and Kanin were given some room to rewrite the new ending on returning from New York, and in the same interview Lardner recalls "some of the worst lines we rewrote, but we couldn't fix it, we couldn't change it fundamentally".<ref>Archive of American Television - EMMY TVLEGENDS Ring Lardner interview 2000</ref>