Working Girl

Similar to Breakfast at Tiffany's (see blog post), the opening sequence of the 1988 film, Working Girl, features an Academy Award winning song, Let The River Run, written and sung by Carly Simon.  After the camera shows you all sides of the Statue of Liberty from an aerial view of the New York harbor, it pans down to a Staten Island Ferry carrying passengers from that borough to the southern tip of Manhattan.  

Working Girl was directed by Mike Nichols and starred Melanie Griffith (whose mother, Tippi Hedron portrayed the character Melanie Daniels in Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 film, The Birds), Harrison Ford, Sigourney Weaver, Joan Cusack, Alec Baldwin, Kevin Spacey, and Olympia Dukakis.  Besides the above Academy Award, it received five other nominations: Best Picture (lost to Rain Man), Best Director (Nichols lost to Barry Levinson, Rain Man), Best Actress (Griffith lost to Jodie Foster in The Accused), and Best Supporting Actress (both Weaver and Cusack lost to Geena Davis in The Accidental Tourist).

In the above ferry is Tess McGill (Griffith), a secretary from an Irish working class background who is employed by a large investment company in the World Trade Center.  She has a "fire in her belly" to rise to the executive level in her career, but is held back by the lack of a proper formal education.  When her boss (Weaver) suffers a skiing accident and will be out of the office for an extended period of time, Tess takes advantage of the situation by attempting, with the help of Jack Trainer (Ford), an executive at another firm and her boss's boyfriend, to set up a merger between two companies that will catapult her career.  The merger is a success and McGill and Trainer fall in love.

There is some very good dialogue in the film, such as:

Tess:  I have a head for business and a bod for sin.  Is there anything wrong with that?

Jack:  Uh, no, no.
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Mick (Tess's former boyfriend): Will you marry me?

Tess:  Maybe.

Mick:  You call that an answer?  

Tess:  You want another answer, ask another girl.
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Cynthia (Tess's friend):  Whaddya need speech class for?  Ya talk fine.
_____

Tess:  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. 
_____  

Since 9/11, I have had mixed emotions watching Working Girl, especially that opening sequence when you can see the ferry approaching the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan, the way they were back in 1988.  Many of the people represented in the film were killed when the Twin Towers were attacked and went down, including the spouse of a colleague of mine at Seagram's.

On Friday, September 7, 2001, the 100th birthday of my father (who died twenty years earlier), my son, Bret, and I were at the U.S. Tennis Open in Flushing, Queens, New York, watching Venus (21) and Serena Williams (19) win their respective semi-final singles matches.  

Four days later, I was at my desk at the Anti-Defamation League office on the east side of Manhattan near the United Nations when a colleague told me that an airplane had hit one of the Twin Towers. My immediate reaction was that it was an accident. Such a thing happened to the Empire State Building during WWII.   However, when a second airplane hit the second tower, I knew it was no accident. My city and my country were under attack.

What I remember most about that day was how I got home, a mere 14 miles or 22.6 kilometers. Normally I took public transportation, a subway and a bus. However, because of the attack, all such transportation was shut down.  I was 56 years-old and in good aerobic condition as a former runner who had continued exercising. So, I started walking.  There was no alternative.

I, along with thousands of others, headed uptown to the foot of the Queensboro (or 59th Street) Bridge.  The eastbound side of the bridge was closed off to vehicular traffic allowing it to be used only by pedestrians returning to the Borough of Queens.  The first half of the bridge is uphill and the second half downhill.  At about the midpoint of the bridge I looked south and saw the eerie black cloud of smoke from what was left of the Twin Towers floating across the East River toward Brooklyn.  That made the news reports of the attack more real.

Once over the bridge, I walked and walked and walked along Northern Boulevard with hundreds of others for as long as I could, at least two hours.  Some of my fellow travelers shouted that our country was at war. Then, I called my ex-wife, Bonita, to please come and pick me up. It normally should have taken her no more than 30 minutes to get where I was. However, because of the cancelled public transportation, it took her two hours.  It was a very long commute that day, one all New Yorkers will never forget.

As an American who remembers 9/11, I took special satisfaction when, on May 2, 2011, in Abottabad, Pakistan, Osama bin Laden, the man who boasted of being responsible for the attack on the Twin Towers, was killed by United States Special Forces. As the great American boxer, Joe Louis, once said, "You can run, but you can't hide."