The Customer is Always Right is a short story, part of a publication of stories entitled "The Babe Wore Red and Other Stories". The Customer is Always Right is the shortest as it is three pages. It was later re-published in the collection Booze, Babes, and Bullets.
It served as the opening sequence for the movie Sin City, which featured Josh Hartnett and Marley Shelton. The sequence served as the original proof of concept footage that director Robert Rodriguez filmed to convince Frank Miller to allow him to adapt Sin City to the silver screen.
The story involves an enigmatic tryst between two nameless characters; "The Customer" and "The Salesman". They meet on the terrace of a high rise building, hinting that although they seem to be acting like strangers, they do indeed have some sort of past. It is unclear what their past involves even as they embrace in a passionate kiss.
A silenced gunshot stabs the night air to reveal that The Salesman has shot The Customer. The reader is led to believe that The Customer had fallen into a serious and difficult situation and, with no other feasible alternative, hired The Salesman to kill her. Later information given by Frank Miller on the commentary of the Recut & Extended DVD Edition states that The Customer had an affair with a member of the mafia and, when she found out, tried to break it off with him. The mafia member then swore to her that she would die in the most terrible way possible, and when it is least expected. The Customer, having connections, hires The Salesman (who is referred to as "The Lady-Killer") to kill her. In the comic The Salesman is The Colonel, as Miller has verified in the BLAM! section page 29 of the one-shot issue Sex & Violence.
Everyone knows Robert Rodriguez‘s and Frank Miller‘s cult movie Sin City: finally, the authors have started to work on the sequel Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. Unfortunately, there have already been some problems on the set, since Jessica Alba doesn’t want to play the “hottest” scenes regarding her character, Nancy Callahan, since she doesn’t feel comfortable with her body anymore, after two children. Since she’s lately been the most talked actress of the film, we’re going to speak about her character, Nancy.
Nancy Callahan was born and raised in Basin City, lovely nicknamed Sin City, really not a good place to raise a child in. When she was only eleven, she was kidnapped by Roarke Junior, a child-raper and serial killer, whose actions were promptly covered by Senator Roarke, his father and the city’s most powerful man. Nobody thought Nancy would have come out of it alive, but, just before Roarke could begin with her, she was saved by police detective John Hartigan, who couldn’t care less of Roarke’s influence and shot the maniac’s ear, hand and genitals. Before Hartigan could finish Roarke, anyway, he was betrayed and shot by his partner, Bob, who sent him to a coma. Nancy witnessed the entire scene, and tried to tell the policemen what happened, but they declared the girl was too shocked to tell anything sensible, and discarded her story. She also tried to testify during Roarke’s trial, but Hartigan, blackmailed by the Senator, asked Nancy to step back, and to let them frame him for the raper’s actions. Faithful to her hero, Nancy agreed, but kept writing letters to John every week, for the whole eight years he was put in prison. She had to use a false name, Cordelia, since Senator Roarke was ready to kill anyone who could say something about his son, Nancy in first place. She hid for some time, and she tried to live in the darkest corners of Basin City, so that the Senator’s men couldn’t find her. At a certain point, she was assaulted by some boys, but she was saved by Marv, an ugly brute with a kind spot for ladies who would have become one of her closest friends.
Nancy grew up a beautiful woman, and started law school, so that she could become a lawyer and save her hero from jail. In order to pay her studies, however, she ended up being hired at Kadie’s Bar, a strip club (more a dive than something else). At Kadie’s, she worked as an exotic dancer, one of the tavern’s most popular ones, and she had the occasion of meeting many of the most peculiar citizens of Basin. She had many boyfriends, but her stories ended very soon: despite she tried to fall in love with some man, she couldn’t cancel her feelings towards Hartigan, who would stay her first and truest love forever. She had the occasion of meeting the (former) detective once again when he was let out of prison, after confessing all Roarke’s crimes as his own, fearing for Nancy’s safety (Roarke had sent him a girl’s finger, making him believe it was Nancy’s). The two soon found out that their reunification was part of Roarke Junior’s plan to find out Nancy’s hideout, since he had been obsessed with her since the day Hartigan denied him his pleasure with her.
Nancy Callahan is a kind woman, a rare sight in Sin City. Despite her golden heart and good character, she often finds herself involved in underground criminality’s operation, mostly because of her friendships, which go from Marv to the Old Town‘s prostitutes. With the years, she learnt how to take care of herself, and she has grown a strong instinct for survival; underneath the hard skin, anyway, there lasts a romantic spirit, the same she had when she was a scared, wounded eleven-years-old girl.
Rose McGowan's memoir Brave details alleged rape by Harvey Weinstein
In the book, actor also recounts her fight against the ‘Hollywood machine’ and its misogyny
Sian Cain
Tue 30 Jan 2018
After years of publicly accusing Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein of rape, the actor Rose McGowan has detailed the sexual assault she said occurred after their first meeting more than 20 years ago.
In her memoir Brave, published on 30 January worldwide, McGowan recalled first seeing Weinstein, whom she refers to only as “the Monster”, at a screening of her film Going All the Way during the 1997 Sundance film festival.
Then 23 years old, McGowan wrote in Brave that, after the screening, Weinstein allegedly summoned her to a meeting at a restaurant, which was later relocated to his hotel suite. McGowan described being shown to his room for what she believed would be a meeting to “plot out the grand arc of my career”.
Instead, she alleged, after a half-hour discussion about her career, he held her down on the edge of a jacuzzi and raped her. Later he allegedly called her and described her as “a special friend”.
“I felt so dirty. I had been so violated and I was sad to the core of my being. I kept thinking about how he’d been sitting behind me in the theater the night before it happened. Which made it – not my responsibility, exactly, but – like I had had a hand in tempting him,” she wrote. “Which made it even sicker and made me feel dirtier.”
Describing Weinstein as looking like “a melted pineapple”, McGowan said that immediately after the rape, she attended a photo opportunity for Phantom, another Miramax film she was in, where she allegedly told a co-star what happened. The co-star, who has previously been identified by McGowan as Ben Affleck, reportedly said: “Goddamnit. I told him to stop doing that.” Affleck has never responded to this allegation.
Many of Weinstein’s 80-odd accusers have alleged the disgraced media mogul asked them to visit him in various hotel rooms, where he’d either forcibly performed oral sex on them or demand it in turn. A spokesperson for Weinstein in the US told the Guardian: “Any allegations of non-consensual sex are unequivocally denied by Mr Weinstein. Mr Weinstein has further confirmed that there were never any acts of retaliation against any women for refusing his advances.”
“Mr Weinstein obviously can’t speak to anonymous allegations, but with respect to any women who have made allegations on the record, Mr Weinstein believes that all of these relationships were consensual.”
Detailing her fight against “the machine, the manufacturers of myth, the gaslighters themselves, the sacred men of Hollywood”, McGowan detailed a troubled childhood while outlining her thoughts on misogyny in Hollywood and wider society.
Beginning with her childhood growing up in the polygamous cult Children of God in Italy, the actor detailed her family’s escape to America after some leaders began advocating child abuse. After becoming a teenage runaway, enduring a three-year abusive relationship, and being sporadically homeless, McGowan said this background was instrumental in her decision to not press charges against Weinstein.
“No work would land me back on the streets, and homelessness was a death sentence. I knew if I died I’d be remembered for revealing my rapist, but not for my achievements. I didn’t want his name next to mine on my obituary,” she wrote.
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Rose McGowan: 'I have been silenced for 20 years' – video
Likening her career as an actor to being a sex worker, McGowan described her decision to shave her head as “a battle cry” against the pampering regime that she says once turned her into “the ultimate fantasy fuck toy by the Hollywood machine”.
She wore the infamous “naked dress” to the 1998 MTV Awards as “a reclamation of my own body after my assault”, she claims and, at one point, described keeping fake blood and wounds on her face after filming episodes of the witchery drama Charmed to see how the public would react to a wounded woman. “Nobody asked to help me. Not once. They would just avoid eye contact and look down at the floor,” she wrote.
In the book, she also detailed her marriage to the director Robert Rodriguez, who she claimed used his knowledge of Weinstein’s alleged assault to punish her, particularly in a scene in the film Planet Terror, in which a character played by Quentin Tarantino attempted to rape her.
“I was in a backward world,” she wrote. “I was losing my grip on sanity.” Afterwards, in what McGowan intepreted as a cruel demonstration of power, Rodriguez sold the film to Miramax, Weinstein’s studio.
In a statement to Vanity Fair, Rodriguez said the Weinsteins had priority on his next project at the time, and that the scene was “in every draft of the script since the first draft was issued to cast and crew [and] if there was any objection to the scene there was plenty of time to address it. It was never brought up as being an issue.”
McGowan ends the book by calling for more women in producing and directing positions, and asks for the support of groups like the Screen Actors Guild to protect women and children, particularly the establishment of an anonymous tips line for victims of assault.
