The Secret of My Success is a 1987 American comedy film produced and directed by Herbert Ross, and starring Michael J. Fox and Helen Slater. The screenplay was written by A.J. Carothers, Jim Cash and Jack Epps, Jr. from a story written by Carothers.
Well educated, Kansas born and raised, Brantley Foster sets out to make his fortune in New York. Unfortunately, when he arrives, the job he is promised fails to materialise, so he reluctantly looks up a distant relative, Howard Prescot, who runs a multimillion dollar corporation. Starting at the bottom, doesn't appeal to Brantley so he pretends to be an executive, while keeping this a secret from "uncle" Howard and Brantley's dream girl Christy.
This film provides examples of:
- The '80s: This film oozes the era, especially the synth-heavy music soundtrack and numerous montages. Not to mention dirty crime-ridden New York City, Wall Street corporate raiders, poofy hairstyles and dorky glasses.
- Actually Pretty Funny: Brantley freaks out upon realizing Vera is his aunt (by marriage) after having sex with her; Vera herself just finds it hilarious (and remains eager for further trysts).
- Anticipatory Lipstick: Brantley makes the mistake
of complimenting the looks of his boss' wife when she's feeling unattractive. As "Oh Yeah" by Yello plays, the boss' wife prepares to seduce him (to his dismay) as she applies her lipstick. - Bathroom Search Excuse: Brantley Foster has to hide from Howard because he's in his executive persona, and he barges into Christy Wills's office. When she notices him, he says "This isn't the men's room?"
- Bavarian Fire Drill: Brantley plays the part of a mid-level executive so well that no one catches on to what he's doing. It helps that his mailroom job lets him go anywhere in the building unnoticed, talk to almost anyone, and observe the workings of the corporation in a way that the other executives can't. It's this last aspect that makes him lethal to his uncle's plans for the company.
- Broken Pedestal: Brantley respects his Uncle Howard's success in business until he discovers Howard's "business acumen" consists of cutting as many jobs as possible whenever the going gets tough, before selling to another company, getting on the executive board there and continuing on regardless. Then he loses all personal respect when Howard spends an entire afternoon making excuses for cheating on Vera.
- Bow Chicka Wow Wow: The soundtrack of this film is what many people think of when Bow-Chicka-Bow-Wow rolls out.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: Howard Prescott, in more ways than one.
- Late in the film, it's revealed that he married into the Prescott Family, because Vera was the founder's daughter, and convinced her to let him run the company in her stead, as a means to take over her father's corporation. But his shady business practices ran it into the ground, leaving the Pemrose Corporation ripe for a takeover by Davenport Enterprises. Rather than try to save the company, he brokers a deal with Davenport's CEO to save his own position, and would have ruined Davenport Enterprises unchecked.
- He also has an ongoing affair with one of his employees (Christy), whom he strings along by promising to leave his wife, Vera, for her. So Vera has an affair with Brantley, since it wasn't long before she realized her husband was cheating on her. But after learning how badly Howard's been running her father's company, she teams up with Brantley to save it... and Brantley successfully wins over Christy as well.
- "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: Howard's penchant for cutting jobs instead of hiring, as well as his general disdain for Brantley in general, sends him into the lowest tier of the company, where he can get a look at the unedited numbers from the various divisions and spot truly redundant positions without Howard noticing one of his executives is fully aware of the actual state of the company.
- Daddy's Girl: Vera was apparently close to her father, the founder of Pemrose. Her anger at Howard is partly because he's running what her father built into the ground, causing her to be a massive Spanner in the Works for his whole plan.
- Dogged Nice Guy: Christy isn't at all impressed with Brantley when she first meets him, but he keeps at it. After a short time spying on him for Howard, she realises none of it is a facade.
- Elevator Conference:
- A variation. Brantley stops the lift he's in to use it as an impromptu dressing room and come out as Carlton Whitfield.
- Christy and Brantley enter an elevator ranting about how the latter has cost them both their jobs. A Smash Cut later, they made up and are halfway through making out.
- Elevator Going Down: The film ends on one of these.
- A God Am I: Played for laughs. Brantley's Mean Boss insists Brantley call him God, which becomes a Running Gag in the movie.
- Gold Digger: It's implied Howard only married Vera just so he could climb the corporate ladder. On top of his serial adultery, he is incredibly neglectful of Vera.
- Honest Corporate Executive: All the executives see Carlton Whitfield as this, being a fresh-faced new hire who is exactly what the failing company needs to save itself. Admittedly, he is everything he looks to be... except for the whole fact he never actually got hired for the job.
- I Have Many Names: Brantley only had two: his real name, Brantley Foster, and his alias for faking his way into a position of prominence at his uncle's company, Carlton Whitfield. However, the nature of the business world leads to people referring to him casually as only a first or last name. When, at a party, he's addressed by all four names by various partygoers, he explains to his date that his parents weren't satisfied with just one name."My monogram looks like an eyechart."
- Interrupted Intimacy: Brantley ends up having an affair with his boss's wife who turns out to be his aunt-in-law!, Vera. When she comes to his office, looking for seconds (which is one-sided this time), they get busted when his uncle shows up unexpectedly, to talk to him.
- Invented Individual: Brantley sees how poorly the company is being run and decides to create a position under the name Carlton Whitfield, to influence and improve the company's operations. Sort of overlaps with Character Name Alias, as Carlton Whitfield was the name one of Brantley's neighbors back in Kansas.
- Laser-Guided Karma: All Howard's scheming and backstabbing his wife is what eventually causes her to throw her support behind Brantley to save her father's company, giving him just enough stock to have a controlling interest in the company.
- Lucky Charms Title: The movie title is sometimes stylized as The Secret of My Succe$s.
- MegaCorp: The Pemrose Corporation and the Davenport Corporation. The impending merger between the two is central to the Carlton Whitfield side of the plot, in that his uncle is trying to secure his position while having everyone below him ripe for dismissal.
- Mock Millionaire: Brantley is a lowly office worker who pretends to be a high-profile corporate executive. By the end of the film, he's bypassed every floor of the building to end up the new CEO, and likely now genuinely has made his first million.
- Mrs. Robinson: The company president's bored wife pursues mail boy Brantley, who is also her nephew, though she didn't know it at first.
- Newcomer Saves the Day: Brantley applied at a time that his uncle's company was ripe for a takeover. But after going over the company's ledger and hearing from their dissatisfied business partners, Brantley soon realizes that the real problem is his uncle's lack of business sense, having discovered several ways he could personally do much better. So he devises a way to save the company, by buying it out from under his uncle... with help from his uncle's wife: Brantley's aunt, Vera.
- Out of Job, Into the Plot: Brantley's planned job is literally going under as he walks through the door, with the man who hired him leaving after letting him know he was both hired and fired on the same day.
- Pointy-Haired Boss: Howard is an incompetent executive who only rose to the top by marrying into the Pemrose family and plans to remain at the top by sweet-talking the Davenport Corporation.
- Right Through the Wall / The Immodest Orgasm: Brantley has moved to the city and is living in a crappy apartment, complete with incredibly loud, horny neighbors. At one point, when they're getting it on while he's trying to work, he goes to the fridge for a beer, grabs a stick, and begins waving it like he's holding a baton. We know that they do this a lot because he can mouth along with their dirty talk, and cracks his (overflowing) beer right at the moment of climax. Then he sits down at his desk and says, "You guys were good tonight."
- Running Gag: Elevator 3, because of Brantley's double life, continually has a problem with getting stuck or people opening it to see him in a state of undress.
- Secret Identity Blunder: mail room employee Brantley Foster is pretending to be executive Carlton Whitfield. Whenever "Carlton" is around in casual clothes or "Brantley" is around in a suit it creates confusion. When he visits a company picnic with his girlfriend (who only knows about "Carlton") she's surprised when different people call him Brantley, Foster, Carlton, and Whitfield.
- Self-Made Man: The late Mr. Pemrose was this: Vera, his daughter, wistfully remembers how he started in a crappy apartment like Brantley's.
- Sex at Work: While hiding from his mailroom boss in a supply closet, Brantley stumbles upon two coworkers having extremely noisy sex (so noisy they don't even notice he's there). Later, he has sex with Christy in Elevator 3.
- Single Woman Seeks Good Man: Brantley earns Vera's affection by helping lift her spirits. When Brantley turns her down, she begins dating Melrose, the streetwise mail room staff member who helped Brantley get there. By the credits, it's clear she's more than happy with the swap.
- Sleeping with the Boss: Brantley's uncle Howard Prescott, CEO of the Pemrose Corporation, has an ongoing affair with Christy, one of his employees who is also Brantley's Love Interest. The untangling of this Love Triangle is part of how everything gets solved.
- Sleeping with the Boss's Wife: Vera Pemrose Prescott is the wife of Howard Prescott, the CEO of the Pemrose Corporation. She seduces Brantley Foster, an employee at Pemrose, and has a sexual encounter with him. She only did so because she wanted to get back at her husband for having an affair. Foster himself only finds out that Vera is his boss' wife right after he sleeps with her. He also discovers that she's his aunt, because at that exact same moment she finds out that he's her nephew by marriage.
- Spanner in the Works: Twice, both caused by Howard's cluelessness.
- Due to Brantley meeting Vera, she ends up discovering exactly what her father's company really needed.
- Howard notices that he can't find any trace of any 'Carlton Whitfield' on the company's payroll... so has Christy spy on him to find out what he's there to do.
- Surprise Incest: Brantley is asked to escort the wife of his boss to her country home. She takes an immediate liking to him and convinces him to stay for a swim, which leads to her seducing him. Not long after, Brantley realizes that she is his Aunt Vera (very distantly; his boss, Mr. Prescott, is also his uncle by a different marriage). Brantley is disgusted, but Vera isn't - she later pursues him sexually.
- Sympathetic Adulterer: Vera Prescott. She is depicted as a sympathetic adulterer because she only engages in an affair after discovering that her neglectful husband, Howard, has been serially cheating on her and running her late father's company into the ground.
- Travelling Salesman Montage: After a rapid-fire sequence of rejections, Brantley declares, "Whatever the exception is, I can fix it. I can be older, I can be taller, I can be anything." The interviewer asks, "Can you be a minority woman?"
- Two-Person Pool Party: Vera Prescott seduces Brantley at the country house's swimming pool.
- Two-Timer Date: Brantley struggles to secretly hold down two jobs and uses the elevator for a changing room when he dashes back and forth to fulfill his responsibilities. He even manages to carry off the charade on a weekend trip and manages to have a girlfriend while having an affair with his own aunt.
- Uncomfortable Elevator Moment: When Brantley is caught changing clothes in the elevator.
- Won Over by Earnestness: Brantley's ability to persuade people with optimism is his biggest advantage as he climbs the Wall Street ladder. He seduces Vera with an honest, kind appraisal of her looks and personality, gets Christy to join his work to expand the Pemrose Corporation by showing his ideas are both positive and practical, and charms several financial backers Vera introduces him to at a garden party. It all comes in handy when all the people he's shown his earnestness back Brantley's power play to save Pemrose from a hostile takeover, by backing his acquisition of a controlling share of the company's stocks, allowing him to remove his evil uncle from the CEO position and take charge of the company himself and finally apply his ideas.