Part 2
They had no money. They were just getting started. So they checked into a hotel and took one room, because they'd been friends since they were little and there was no reason for two.
Then she drops the line that every writer in the audience should be jealous of: "I looked cheaper then than I even do now." Self-deprecating, specific, funny, and it hands you the visual for free. Also: "Judy didn't look any better." Two sentences, and you can see the whole motel-lobby frame.
The front desk decided they were hookers. That's the inciting incident, and it arrives without announcement.
They went out to look around the city. When they came back, their luggage was sitting in the hallway and the door wouldn't open for them. Locked out. No conversation. Just a verdict, already executed.
Management had thrown their things out of the room. No appeal, no refund, no explanation worth repeating. That's the escalation — and notice how she never bothers to editorialize. She just reports the state change.
They had no reservations back home, so they asked if they could at least leave their bags in the lobby while they killed time. That's the beat where the comedy turns slightly cold. Two young women, thousands of miles from Sevierville, negotiating for floor space.
So they wandered. They didn't know where to go. They ended up somewhere they didn't plan to be, and a man made an assumption about them that was just as wrong as the hotel's.
And that's where this part of the story opens into the thing nobody expects — the part with the gun. I'm not blowing that reveal here. It belongs in the next pass, and it deserves the space.
But I want to flag why the story works before we get there, because this is where the two audiences should start leaning forward.
Structurally, it's a scene. Setup, inciting incident, escalation, reversal, punchline. It has a protagonist with a flaw the audience loves, a friend who's functionally a co-lead, an antagonist that's an institution rather than a person, and a final image you can cut to. Real life handed her a screenplay and she just didn't shoot it yet.
[[AD]]
And in 1980, she finally did shoot something.
That's 9 to 5, directed by Colin Higgins, released December 19, 1980, by 20th Century Fox, 109 minutes. Higgins had already made Harold and Maude in 1971 and Foul Play in 1978. The cast: Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Dabney Coleman, and Dolly Parton in her feature film debut as Doralee Rhodes.
Genre fan, here's your angle. 9 to 5 is a workplace revenge comedy where three women turn the tables on a boss who deserves every bit of it. It's a crowd-pleaser with teeth, and Doralee is the character with the most teeth.
Craft nerd, here's yours. The movie contains the line: "I'll turn you from a rooster to a hen with one shot." And Dolly has tied that line back to her own life — to this trip, to that night, to a mouth that said it before a script ever did.
Look at what that one sentence is doing. It establishes backstory, delivers a threat, defines the character's whole worldview, gets a laugh, and sets up the movie's central dynamic — all in eleven words. Most scripts spend a page and a half trying to do half of that.
Genre fan, here's what it does for you. That line is the movie's thesis in a single breath. It's the promise of the premise. Everything 9 to 5 is selling — the fantasy of the underdog with the upper hand — is compressed into one drawl.
Now, the honest ledger. The 9 to 5 screenplay is credited to Colin Higgins, with the story by Patricia Resnick. Writers wrote it. That's a fact, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise just because the anecdote is prettier. But the story Dolly tells about where the line came from is also a fact — it's her account, she's told it more than once, and it's the one she's sticking with. Hold both. That's what grown-up film writing looks like.
The song side of 9 to 5 is its own build. Dolly wrote and performed the title track, and it went to number one. It was nominated for Best Original Song at the Academy Awards and lost to "Fame." That's not a small nomination. That's a country songwriter walking into the pop charts and the Oscars in the same year.
The franchise kept compiling too. There was a 9 to 5 television series in 1982 and 1983. In 2009, 9 to 5: The Musical opened on Broadway and picked up four Tony nominations, including Best Original Score.
And here's a craft-nerd footnote that stops people cold: through Sandollar Productions, Dolly Parton holds an executive producer credit on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Sandollar also backed Father of the Bride in 1991. Yes, that Sandollar. Yes, that Buffy. The rhinestones were running a production pipeline the whole time.
She also hosted Dolly! on ABC starting in 1976, and later built a whole second act on streaming — Dumplin' on Netflix in 2018, Dolly Parton's Heartstrings on Netflix in 2019, and Dolly Parton's Christmas on the Square on Netflix in 2020. In 2022 she was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. In 2023, Rockstar.
