The story behind the original production...

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https://lebeauleblog.com/2014/12/27/what-the-hell-happened-to-madeleine-stowe/5/

Stowe ended the year starring in the girl-power Western, Bad Girls.

Stowe played a prostitute who shoots a customer who gets rough with her friend played by Mary Stuart Masterson. She is sentenced to hang for her crimes, but is rescued by fellow prostitutes-turned-gunslingers, Andie MacDowell and Drew Barrymore.

The original director, Tamra Davis, was fired by the studio after a few weeks of shooting. Barrymore, who was friends with Davis, threatened to leave the project. Production was shut down for two weeks during which a completely new script was written and director Jonathan Kaplan was hired. Kaplan had directed Stowe in Unlawful Entry. The actresses were sent to “cowboy camp” to learn to ride and shoot during the two-week delay.

Reportedly, not all the actresses got along. The original production design for the movie was monochromatic. This resulted in all four lead actresses fighting over a red costume designed for Stowe. Bad girls indeed. The production design was completely reworked during the two weeks that production was shut down.

Considering that the whole movie was reconceived in fourteen days (ten if they took off weekends) it’s probably no surprise that Bad Girls was panned by critics. It opened in first place at the box office but ended up grossing only $15 million dollars.

https://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/the-movies-of-94-the-buried-history-of-bad-girls-a-would-be-feminist-western-turned-flop/

According to those who have read early drafts of the script, it was originally a revisionist Western about women and sexual violence. One key scene from the screenplay, in which one of the heroines bites off a guy’s genitals while performing oral sex, prompted a studio meeting in which Davis recalls a group of male executives expressing their extreme discomfort with the scene. Johnston, who had written The Prince of Tides and Under the Cherry Moon, and would go on to write Seven Years in Tibet, saw her name moved all the way to the bottom of the list during rewrites.

When Davis was taken off Bad Girls and replaced, the studio claimed it was because she was falling behind schedule. But those familiar with the history of the production believe Davis was replaced for more insidious reasons; Bad Girls was too overtly feminist, and the studio freaked out. As a form of damage control, Fox brought on super-producer Lynda Obst for the reboot. Obst was upbeat at the time, but later admitted that the studio meddling that included her hire had ruined the film. Dermot Mulroney, who plays the male love interest in Bad Girls, was very open in an interview during the press run, saying, “The studio was dissatisfied with the way things were going. When they see dailies about women just sitting around, and they paid for this big action film … ” It seems this was the real reason why Davis was fired. Tamra Davis had intended to make a neoclassical indie Western about women in the West, and Fox was expecting a straightforward Hollywood Western, like Young Guns with girls. How this miscommunication got far enough down the line for the movie to start shooting and Fox to fire Davis is a mystery, but it’s hard not to feel regretful that Davis didn’t get to realize her vision in a non-studio setting. Bad Girls could have been great.