General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Working Girls

Working Girls is a 1986 American independent drama directed by Lizzie Borden that follows a single day in the working life of sex workers at an upscale Manhattan brothel. The film centers on Molly (Louise Smith), a photographer who works part-time at the brothel to fund her art practice, as she juggles clients, coworkers, and an ambitious madam while trying to keep her sense of self in a business where the personal and professional blur.¹ Borden presents prostitution through the lens of labor, offering what Janus Films describes as an empathetic, often humorous depiction of women for whom the work is "just another day at the office."¹

Key fact	Detail
Director, year, country	Lizzie Borden, United States, 1986¹
Runtime and format	93 minutes, color, 1.66:1 aspect ratio¹
Lead cast	Louise Smith as Molly, Ellen McElduff as madam Lucy, Amanda Goodwin as Dawn, Marusia Zach as Gina²
Screenplay	Lizzie Borden and Sandra Kay, from a story by Borden²
Budget	$300,000, co-produced by Borden's Working Girl Corporation and Andi Gladstone's Alternate Current³
Festival recognition	Premiered at Cannes in the Directors' Fortnight; won a US Dramatic Special Jury Recognition at the 1987 Sundance Film Festival⁴
Distribution	Miramax; released unrated in the United States³
Restoration	New 4K restoration by the Criterion Collection and UCLA Film & Television Archive with the Sundance Institute; Criterion Blu-ray released in 2021¹^•⁴

Spoilers

Premise and approach

The film follows Molly and her colleagues through the routines of a day shift at a midtown Manhattan apartment brothel: greeting clients in a pastel-hued reception, changing sheets, answering the phone, and logging earnings in a ledger overseen by their boss, Lucy.⁴ In the film's fiction, the brothel charges $80 for a half hour and $150 for an hour, with extra fees for what the AFI Catalog summarizes as kinky sex, and enforces a rule that the women take no money from clients until they are fully undressed.³

Borden deliberately avoided the conventions of earlier films about prostitutes. She and her writing partner set out to avoid both a "prostitute-with-a-heart-of-gold" story and an "extraordinary-circumstances-forced-her-into-prostitution" story, preferring a straightforward depiction of the work as a business.³ Borden told Cineaste that she wanted to place prostitution "solidly in the context of work as opposed to sex," calling it "a business transaction, pure and simple, between prostitute and john."⁵ The Los Angeles Times critic Sheila Benson wrote that the film's long day was "funny, insightful, banal, sad, tedious, informational, infuriating, everything but erotic."⁶

Origins and research

Borden developed the project after meeting well-educated women who worked a few shifts a week at brothels to earn extra money or pay for their education.³ She had assumed prostitutes worked the streets, but learned that street prostitution makes up only about fifteen percent of the business, and spent six months visiting New York area brothels and interviewing prostitutes, madams, and clients.³^•⁵ The film was also inspired by the experiences of sex workers Borden met while making her previous feature, the underground feminist film Born in Flames (1983).¹

Sandra Kay, the co-screenwriter, is the pen name of actress Marusia Zach, who plays Gina in the film.³

Production

Principal photography began in March 1985 in New York City on a budget of $300,000, with funding that included grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Jerome Foundation.³ Borden built the brothel set inside her own downtown Manhattan loft, using movable walls to create the rooms the script required.³^•⁶ She shot on Super 16 mm film and blew it up to 35 mm for distribution.³ Judy Irola was the director of photography, and the artist Nan Goldin provided still photography and the images of Molly's artwork.²^•⁴

Casting was shaped by the film's nudity. Most actors would not consider the role of Molly, so Louise Smith, who had worked with experimental theater directors Meredith Monk and Ping Chong but had never appeared in a film, took the part as a challenge.⁵ The female leads were played mainly by off-Broadway actresses, while most of the men were not professional actors, recruited through friends and ads in sex magazines.³ The Screen Actors Guild denied the film a low-budget contract after deeming its script pornographic, telling Borden she could pay her actors whatever she wanted, a concession she asked to have formalized in writing.⁵

Release and censorship

Borden released the film unrated rather than risk an X rating from the MPAA, since it contains full frontal male and female nudity; people connected to the MPAA informally advised her that the rating board would require numerous cuts even though the film was not pornographic.³ At the 1986 Toronto Festival of Festivals, the Ontario Film and Video Review Board demanded two cuts; the festival, which had a policy against screening censored films, appealed, and a five-member appeal board upheld the ruling while recommending that only a short scene depicting the "graphic manipulation of a man's penis by a woman" be cut. The festival left the decision to Borden, and the film screened as planned.³

After doing well on the festival circuit, the film had trouble finding a distributor because it fit neither the art house nor the pornographic category. Miramax Films acquired North American distribution rights in January 1987 and positioned it as a quality picture rather than a sex romp, though Borden objected to ad photos showing three of the women in spike heels and black drapery as presenting the opposite of the film's message.³ After Miramax acquired the film, Harvey Weinstein suggested Borden recut it to add back outtakes, which increased the comedic aspects.³ Working Girls opened in San Francisco on 5 February 1987, in New York City on 27 February 1987, and in Los Angeles on 13 March 1987, and grossed about $3 million in its initial theatrical run according to Billboard.³

Reception and legacy

The film won a US Dramatic Special Jury Recognition at the 1987 Sundance Film Festival, where it was also nominated for the Grand Jury Prize for Dramatic, and Louise Smith received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Female Lead in 1988.⁴^•⁷ On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 91% Tomatometer based on 23 reviews.⁸ When Anthology Film Archives restored the film in 2016, New Yorker critic Richard Brody called it "a feminist masterpiece."⁴

The film later disappeared from view; Borden has said the prints were lost when Miramax moved to The Weinstein Company in 2005.⁹ Its return began with the 2021 restoration: a new 4K digital transfer supervised by Borden was released by the Criterion Collection as Spine #1087, with special features including a 2007 audio commentary with Borden, cinematographer Judy Irola, and actor Amanda Goodwin, conversations with Borden and filmmaker Bette Gordon and with members of the production, a roundtable with sex workers Antonia Crane, Daphne, Selena the Stripper, and Jo Weldon, and an essay by the writer and film curator So Mayer.² The restoration opened at IFC Center in New York in July 2021.¹⁰ In 2026, BFI Southbank marked the film's 40th anniversary with an International Women's Day screening introduced by Mayer.⁵

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1980s › Released 1986 to 1989

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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