Patricia Resnick was at the start of her screenwriting career when she discovered the fine line between art and life. At 26, she found herself interviewing secretaries at a Los Angeles insurance firm to research a new project, co-produced by Jane Fonda, about the friendship between three female office workers. She learnt about their workplace dynamics over lunchtime martinis. She tried to sift truth from gossip. She had a flash of inspiration that would shape the cult 1980 movie starring Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton, 9 to 5.
“Jane had a stack of data about women in the workplace – she wanted to come up with a story that would tell it in a comedic way,” Resnick says. “I would take the women to lunch and they would all say this secretary is sleeping with the boss. But [when I spoke to her] she started to cry and said, ‘I’m not – he’s after me.’ She flinches at the memory. “I absolutely believed her.”
Leading ladies (from left) Marina Prior, Casey Donovan and Erin Clare in the Australian version of 9 to 5 The Musical.Credit:Louise Kennerley
Resnick speaks to me a fortnight before 9 to 5 The Musical, which she adapted for Broadway and the West End, premieres in Sydney. Conceived and set to music by Dolly Parton, it arrives in Australia during a moment in which we’re collectively reimagining our relationship with the office. After two years of working from home, who isn’t at least a little nostalgic for the chance to compare notes from our personal lives with colleagues in the lunchroom? To vent about bad management over knock-off drinks?
Although 9 to 5 is an office comedy, its roots are political, she says. It was inspired by 9to5, a grassroots organisation led by working women in Boston tired of being subjected to workplace indignities. According to the February 2021 Netflix documentary 9to5: The Story of a Movement, female workers received roses rather than raises. One secretary was asked to sew the crotch of her boss’ pants while he was wearing them. Throughout the ’70s, the National Association of Working Women’s 9to5 fought for better pay, an end to sexual harassment and the right to benefits such as paid maternity leave.
Resnick, who has worked on shows such as Better Things and Mad Men, remembers this era. Growing up in Florida, she recalls other families would go boating. Hers would go to protests. She was briefly involved in the women’s movement.
“But I was interested in trying to write a good movie that people would enjoy,” she says.
Original cast (from left) Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton and Jane Fonda in the 1980 film version of 9 to 5.Credit:20th Century Fox
She has a mordant sense of humour. This will come as little surprise to anyone who’s watched 9 to 5. In one scene, the three female leads, who work at a firm called Consolidated Industries, spill their workplace woes by smoking joints together. Then there’s the plot line in which Tomlin’s Violet Newstead, a plucky widower who’s passed over for a promotion, accidentally laces the coffee of Franklin Hart, the boss who sexually harasses Parton’s Doralee Rhodes, with rat poison.
“Originally, it was even darker,” laughs Resnick, whose screenplay was reworked in parts by late director Colin Higgins. “My first draft, I had them actually trying to kill him in funny ways.”
Patricia Resnick, 9 to 5 writer.
Franklin Hart Jr, played by Eddie Perfect in 9 to 5 The Musical, is an amalgam of every office villain – an incompetent and lecherous bigot likely to have landed his role via family connections.
Despite all the talk of female empowerment, the pandemic has pushed women, tired of juggling childcare and work, to abandon careers. In September 2021, a US-based McKinsey report found that one in three women had considered leaving their jobs in the previous year. Four decades after she wrote it, Resnick says, the world of 9 to 5 seems almost idealistic.
“Now people would kill for a 9 to 5 job,” she says. “Back then female clerical workers would eventually be able to afford a small house, buy a decent car.” She sighs. “I know enough about Australia, especially Sydney, to know that is no longer the case.”
You can’t talk about 9 to 5 without conjuring Parton, patron saint of hard-working women. The legend goes that she came up with 9 to 5, the anthem of anyone who’s ever laboured for a living, by clacking her acrylic nails, dreaming up a bass line that mimics the rhythm of a typewriter. Well, I tumble out of bed and stumble to the kitchen/pour myself a cup of ambition. And later: barely getting by/ it’s all taking and no giving. Is there a lyric that sums up the gig economy with more precision?
“9 to 5 has been the wallpaper of my life,” laughs Marina Prior, who along with Casey Donovan and Erin Clare, play the trio of friends in the Australian production.
The three stars of the show play office workers who bond over their chauvinist boss and plot their revenge.Credit:Peter Brew-Bevan
“I was a young girl when it came out and I can relate. It’s an earworm that never gets weary. It is always a joy to sing it,” says Prior, who plays Violet Newstead, the role Tomlin made famous in the film.
Rehearsal footage shows her shimmying to the left and right, the notes dazzling, hymn-like when sung in her famous soprano. Dancers whirl between desks, copy machines. The humdrum business of the office remade, in the way of the musical, into a fantasy about overcoming limitations, realising your potential.
Violet, says Prior, who’s 58, is a powerful middle-aged woman, the kind of character still rare in theatre. “She’s really comedically gorgeous and gutsy,” she says. “[So often] you are cast as a mother figure.”
Prior, who built a career that began with Phantom of the Opera in the 1990s, while raising five children, understands mothers can be severely underestimated in the workplace.
Casey Donovan, Marina Prior and Erin Clare bring the ’80s vibe to the Australian stage.
“There is a speech at the end of the play that triggers me,” she says. “It’s about how women are late picking up their kids and late getting to work and there’s this constant guilt as a working mother. I have experienced that for 26 years. And then, there’s men and women getting equal pay for equal work – that’s still not the case!”
In 9 to 5, Violet has a teenage son. She ascends Consolidated Industries to become its first female CEO. Along with coworkers Judy Bernly and Doralee Rhodes (Fonda and Parton respectively in the film), she remakes the workplace to better accommodate women. They introduce initiatives such as truly flexible hours and in-house childcare that are still considered radical today.
Donovan, 33, plays Judy, a thirtysomething who enters the workforce for the first time when her husband, Dick, in another grand cliche of office work, leaves her for his secretary. For Donovan, 9 to 5, at its heart, is a story about female solidarity.
Patricia Resnick (left), Dolly Parton and musical arranger Stephen Oremus; the team behind 9 to 5 The Musical.Credit:AP Photo/Seth Wenig.
“It’s about women coming together, empowering each other, lifting each other up,” she says.
Donovan was drawn to Judy, she says, because of Get Out and Stay Out – a plaintive ballad in which the character articulates her self-worth after years of mistreatment.
“Then there’s I Just Might – Judy is down and out with a Xerox machine, picking up paper and she’s saying, ‘I just might make it, I just might get through life,’” Donovan says, passion rising in her voice. “And then Dick comes in and says, ‘here are the divorce papers’.” She pauses. “And then you see her picking herself up and dusting herself off.”
We can read 9 to 5 as a satire about the pitfalls of office life. “It points to general bad behaviour and the lack of care of those around you,” says producer Suzanne Jones, who fell in love with the musical after seeing it on the West End. “It’s also about the desire to make the world a better place, reaching for a purpose.”
Four decades before the rise of #MeToo, it shows us how gender and power can shape our professional trajectories. But it also explores the divide between how women are seen by society versus how they see themselves. There’s no better avatar for this than Parton, who, through talent and grit, overcame roots in rural poverty to become a trailblazing superstar.
Parton, now 76, whose life inspired the character of Doralee Rhodes, has never explicitly identified as feminist. The excellent podcast Dolly Parton’s America puts this down to ‘Dollitics’ – a desire to protect her relationship with fans from different sides of the political divide. “I’ve leaned over. I’ve leaned forward,” she joked to a 2014 interviewer from Billboard who brought up Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg’s manual for making it as a woman in the office.
The film’s cast come together to present at the 69th Primetime Emmy Awards in 2017.Credit:Phil McCarten/AP Images
“You look at Dolly, you see her in interviews – she is the first person to be in control of herself, she isn’t the butt of jokes, she makes the joke first,” says the rising actor and singer-songwriter Erin Clare, who plays Doralee, the part that, thanks to the film, has become synonymous with Parton’s off-screen persona.
“Doralee has such strong morals and values. She’s accepted by the women later on, but she doesn’t have to prove herself. She’s like ‘I’m me – take it or leave it’.”
For Clare, 31, nothing sums this up better than Backwoods Barbie, the song Doralee sings after she’s rejected by the women she works with. I’ve always been misunderstood because of how I look/Don’t judge me by the cover ’cause I’m a real good book.
“It’s the only country song in the show,” Clare says. “I think that every woman who has grown up in the ’90s or the early noughties has experienced internalised misogyny in our female counterparts. But we’ve also seen the rise of female empowerment. I’ve had my world view shift. I’ve seen both sides of the coin.”
When Resnick was writing 9 to 5, she says, she was chronicling the time she was living through. She could never have predicted the way her work would come around again.
“The thing that is new that I put in for the West End is that Violet makes a speech at the end about the big guy and the little guy, who they are in the office and how they want to be treated, and it generally gets roaring big applause,” she says. “But the part that gets my heart pounding the most is when 9 to 5 comes on. The beat makes people very, very happy. But if you listen to the words, it’s kind of a dark song.”
9 to 5 The Musical opens February 16 at the Capitol Theatre.
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