When Hollywood Did It Right: WORKING GIRL

(Note: This essay is part of a series that highlights a time when (and how) Hollywood was America’s greatest soft power weapon and consistently made movies that average Americans actually wanted to see.)

EPISODE THREE: WORKING GIRL

There is a sense in which selling movies ought to be the easiest thing in the world. When done right, movies are like a drug. They make the audience feel really good and the best of them encourage the audience to return to the theater to do it all over again… to chase the dragon, if you will.

Think about the way your brain lights up after those first few seconds of silence following “A Long time ago in a galaxy far far away”, when the words STAR WARS explode on to the screen accompanied by John Williams’ most famous score. I’ve never done hard drugs, but I imagine that, for me anyway, the experience wouldn’t be much different.

The best filmmakers of the 80’s and 90’s, and in this context the word “filmmaker” includes not just directors but writers, producers and studio executives as well, understood that every time they made a movie, it wasn’t just a chance to make a little money, but also an opportunity to create a repeat audiece of happiness addicts who can’t wait to return to the theater in hopes of replicating the intense emotional experience of sitting in the dark and laughing or crying or screaming along with a couple hundred of their closest friends.

They also know how to stick the needle in, jam the plunger home and hook the audience hard right from the very opening frames. There are a lot of ways to do it, of course… that great “Star Wars” opening splash was one way. Steven Spielberg found another one when he began RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK with one of the greatest “cold open” action/comedy sequences of all time.

With WORKING GIRL, director Mike Nichols acomplished this feat via one of the best opening credit sequences of the 1980’s.

I’ve seen it a hundred times, maybe two hundred times, and the hairs on the back of my neck still stand up every time that stunning helicopter “God shot” of Lady Liberty fades in over that syncopated drumbeat musical intro. And then Carly Simon’s ethereal vocals kick in as New York, gleaming brightly in the “magic hour” and promising that “if you can make it here you can make it anywhere”, comes into view behind her. It’s stunning aspirational heroin, for me, no matter how many times I watch it.

To the extent that current New York City Mayor Eric Adams is right, that New York has a brand, it’s movies like “Working Girl” which helped create that brand in the first place. The “Working Girl” opening doesn’t just speak to New York’s brand, though, rather it suggests a durable American brand. A brand for which we all used to feel immense affection, back when Hollywood still took pride in projecting an aspirational love of country, not only to Americans, but to the rest of the world.

Just like the “Star Wars” and “Raiders” set-ups, by the time the camera moves inside the Staten Island Ferry and settles on Tess (Melanie Griffith) and Cyn (Joan Cusack), along with their impossibly tall 80’s hair, celebrating Tess’ birthday in an endearing working-class commuter sort of way, we already know what kind of movie this is going to be, and we are well-and-truly hooked.

The story itself hangs on the three movie stars… Griffith in her finest performance, Harrison Ford out-rogue-ing even his own portrayal of Han Solo, and Sigourney Weaver as the stylish blue-blood senior executive and would-be mentor-turned-Cruella DeVille. But the cast is loaded top-to-bottom with great actors, many of whom would go on to become movie stars in their own right, including Alec Baldwin, Joan Cusack, Kevin Spacey, Oliver Platt and David Duchovny… those last three in tiny little throw away blink-and-you’ll-miss-them roles. Here in the post-Movie Star era, it’s hard to think of a comparable movie in which even the cameo roles are filled by actors who went on to become stars. It just doesn’t happen anymore.

The messaging is different too. “Working Girl” comes from an era when filmmakers (again directors, writers, producers and studio executives) seemed to understand subtext better than their modern counterparts. “Working Girl” is effective feminist agitprop, yes, but it’s delivered in a package so sweet that you can hardly taste the medicine as it goes down.

The message of “Working Girl” is that there is indeed something “Systemic” to blame for Tess McGill’s troubles… but it ain’t The Patriarchy. There are plenty of powerful men who treat her shabbily, who harrass and betray her… Oliver Platt, Kevin Spacey and Alec Baldwin come to mind. But the worst betrayal in the movie comes at the hand of Tess’ female boss Katherine Parker (Sigourney Weaver), who emotionally manipulates Tess into believing that she intends to act as a mentor to Tess when the truth is she intends to do no such thing. When push comes to shove, Katherine steals Tess’ best idea, a betrayal which becomes the “inciting incident” that kicks off the plot.

In direct violation of every modern Hollywood “content” requirement, the two characters who finally give Tess the trust, support and opportunity she craves are both men, first Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford) and then CEO Oren Trask (Philip Bosco). They see something in Tess that no one else, man or woman, can see.

Certainly there are plenty of men behaving badly in all the ways that we now collectively place in the category of “toxic masculinity”, but not Jack Trainer. Jack does not take advantage of Tess when she’s drunk. And throughout the film he always treats Tess as an executive, not as just another pretty girl. It turns out that the real problem at the heart of “Working Girl” is a system that allows too much power to accumulate in the hands of individual people, men and women both, who sometimes turn out to be shitty human beings.

Early in the story, when Tess’ best friend Cyn catches her trying to pretend to be an executive and warns that she’s going to ruin her life and career, Tess responds angrily…

“No, I'm trying to make it better! I'm not gonna spend the rest of my life working my ass off and getting nowhere just because I followed rules that I had nothing to do with setting up, OK?”

later in the film, after her scheme has been exposed, she attempts to explain herself to Jack and Oren Trask…

“You can bend the rules plenty once you get to the top, but not while you're trying to get there. And if you're someone like me, you can't get there without bending the rules”

This last is not only a reality we used to understand universally as Americans, it was a lesson we all felt responsible for passing along to successive generations. Throughout your life, you are going to face barriers to getting what you want or getting where you want to go… when you come across those barriers, you have to find a way around, over or through… it’s your responsibility, no one else’s. Whining won’t help because the world doesn’t owe you anything.

We used to understand this in our bones. And it made us tough in all the ways that younger generations seem not to have learned.

This was a common theme in the movies of the 80’s, including THE SECRET OF MY SUCCESS. “The Secret of My Success”, like “Working Girl”, is a movie about all the ways in which powerful shitty people use “The System” to keep their subordinates down. And the rules that “Brantley” and Christy” break to get ahead are some of the same rules Tess McGill breaks on her own way to the top.

Movies like “Working Girl” and “The Secret of My Success” suggest, correctly in my view, that “The System” is not misogynist, homophobic, racist or even anti-male… but rather that it can be all of those things. It is a human system, run by individual people, which means it is inherently flawed… it can be cruel, it can be unfair… and it does whatever it needs to do to throw barriers up in the face of anyone… anyone… who threatens to rise up and replace any shitty human at the top of the heirarchy.

In both “Working Girl” and “The Secret of My Success”, the villains are villains because they are bad people, not because they are a part of some systemic evil. They are backstabbers and they are liars and they are bullies. Good filmmakers understand that when Audiences go to the movies, they want to boo actual villains… not esoteric concepts like collective guilt.

You can’t boo The Patriarchy or Systemic Racism.

You can, on the other hand, boo Katherine Parker, Mick Dugan, Lutz and Bob Speck.

And we mustn’t forget that at its heart, Working Girl is a love story, and quite a transgressive one by 2024 standards. Here in modern Hollywood it often seems as if screenwriters are discouraged from writing flawed female characters, or worse, female charcaters who discover that they need something, anything, from a man (spit!).

In that sense, “Working Girl” is a real throwback. Long before they fall in love, Tess McGill finds that she’s not perfect, that she does need something from Jack Trainer… she needs his wisdom, his expertise and his contacts. But Jack Trainer needs something from Tess McGill, too… he needs her passion, her willingness to embrace risk and her fresh outside-the-box ideas. They each fill in the gaps in the other’s resume (literally and figuratively), and together they achieve more than either one of them could have by themselves.

Does the fact that Tess needs Jack, that she couldn’t make it to the top alone like one of modern Hollywood’s “strong empowered girlbosses”, somehow diminish her accomplishment? Of course not. Rather, the fact that Jack and Tess fall in love while they are supporting each other on their climb up the ladder of corporate America makes the story that much better.

The best screenwriters understand that Tess’ flaws are crucial to the development of her character, just as Jack’s flaws are crucial to his own character arc. The movie literally would not work without them.

(Above: Jack Trainer takes a risky stance on gender… “You're the first woman I've seen at one of these things that dresses like a woman, not like a woman thinks a man would dress if he was a woman.”)

Because that’s life isn’t it? We don’t pair off because we see someone across a bar and think “holy cow, she’s hot!”… well, OK, not just because of that. Ultimately people fall in love because they need each other. However they begin, relationships endure best when they are between two people who bring something to the relationship that makes them stronger as a couple than they could ever be alone. One of the reasons why “Working Girl” works so well is that Tess and Jack’s relationship is no different.

Here in “The Biz”, we call this “making the characters relatable.”

When audiences can see themselves and their lives, flaws and all, reflected in a movie… when they can relate to the characters’ problems, hopes and desires… when they can feel a universal human aspiration fulfilled… well… the addiction may begin with that first soaring shot of Lady Liberty, but it’s brought home when Cyn stands up in the middle of her secretary pool, thrusts her hands in the air and shouts the news of her best friend’s personal and professional success, and Carly Simon begins to sing once again as we fly away from that final gleaming wide shot of the Big Apple.

That’s what the great movies do. They make us feel like the characters’ story is our story. And sometimes, they can inspire us to overcome our own limitations and succeed in all the ways our movie heroes and heroines do when we see them on Friday nights, thirty feet tall.

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