LURKING GIRL

WORKING GIRL (1988)
dir: Mike Nichols

LURKING GIRL
MAD #288, July 1989
w: Frank Jacobs
a: Angelo Torres

Movie about Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith), a secretary from Staten Island that takes the initiative while her boss Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver) is laid up and works on a deal with Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford).

New Dorp Lane is one of the main streets of Staten Island. Gorillas in the Mist was one of Sigourney Weaver's other movies. Ivan Boesky was one of the first people to be arrested for insider trading.

Tess is smarter and more ambitious than the people who work above her. Her boyfriend Mick (Alec Baldwin) doesn't treat her well and ends up cheating on her. Her co-workers set her up with a job interview with a man who turns out to be a sexual predator (Kevin Spacey unseen here, playing against type) and she fights back which gets her fired. The human resources director (Olympia Dukakis) gets her a job at another branch in the firm.

Michael Douglas' character Gordon Gekko from Wall Street makes a cameo in the first panel. Something Wild was a previous Melanie Griffith film. Nora Dunn and Joan Cusack are two of Tess' co-workers caricatured in the third panel. Olympia Dukakis' cousin Mike is in a picture in the last panel.

Tess gets a job at a different branch of the firm working under Katharine Parker, who ends up mentoring her and listening to her ideas. She proposes the idea of merging with a radio company but gets dismissed and told by Katharine to keep trying. Katharine breaks her leg skiing and takes a leave of absence, so Tess takes advantage of this time to pretend being the boss. While house sitting for Katharine, she sees Katharine was planning to propose Tess' merger idea as her own. Later that night, Tess crashes an executive meeting and meets Jack Trainer.

The middle panel has MAD editor John Ficarra, who was also from Staten Island.

The editors must have allotted four pages to the movie and then realized it wasn't enough, since most of the last half of the movie is condensed on the last page.

After a night of drinking, Jack takes Tess home. She attends the acquisitions meeting the next morning and when she gets there she finds she'll be working with Jack. He assures her nothing happened, and they agree to put it all behind them and work together. They become romantically involved, and he tells her there's someone else he plans to break up with. That other woman is Katharine Parker. When Katharine gets home, she finds out Tess has been assuming her position and crashes a meeting just as Tess and Jack are about to finish merging the company with that of Mr. Trask (Philip Bosco). Katharine accuses Tess of stealing her idea when she was the one who stole it from Tess. Katharine is sent packing and Tess is promoted.

The Year of Living Dangerously was another of Sigourney Weaver's earlier movies. Nostromo was the ship in Alien. In Dan Quayle's, campaign for Vice President, he said he looking like JFK would win him votes, but the most famous line in his debate was his opponent telling him “you're no JFK”