Donna Summer: She Works Hard for the Money

Quote from director Brian Grant on the making of the video: "I met Donna in Los Angeles and had dinner with her one night. I asked her where she got the idea for this song. She told me that she had actually gotten it right in that very restaurant [Chasen's]. A very expensive restaurant in L.A. full of very wealthy people that served very expensive food. She said that if you go downstairs to the washrooms, there is a black lady or black man as an attendant who hands you a towel when you are done washing your hands or gives you perfume or aftershave. She said she was eating there one day and went down to the restroom and this little black lady gave her a towel. When she came back up, she was thinking that exhausted woman is stuck down there with no windows and she really works hard for the money. Then she sat down and wrote the song about a working woman.

So I thought it would be good to do the video as a tribute to working women and wrote a story based on that. I think it might've been the first proper narrative I ever directed. It's about a working woman with two unruly kids who works three jobs every day struggling to make ends meet and gave up everything she wanted to do. She'd always wanted to be a dancer. So the video shows what her life is like and then turns into a fantasy of what she really would like to have done. Like I said, it was meant to be a tribute to working women. An interesting story, when we were in pre-production Donna said she wanted to play the waitress. I wasn't sure because this wasn't a fun video, it was a serious video that had a meaning, a point. I told her that nobody would believe her as a waitress because she was Donna Summer, a famous pop star. Eventually she agreed and I told her that she should be more of the narrator like it was a documentary and she was an observer. I think that made all the difference because I think it gave the video some weight compared to if she would've just sang it the normal way."

Featured in 1st Annual MTV Video Music Awards (1984)