CLIP THE STEPFORD WIVES USA 2004, DreamWorks LLC and Paramount Pictures Corp. PRODUCTION: Frank Oz DIRECTOR: Nicole Kidman (Joanna Eberhart), Matthew Broderick (Walter Kresby), Bette Midler (Bobbie Markowitz), Glenn Close (Claire Wellington), Christopher Walken (Mike Wellington), Roger Bart (Roger Bannister). CAST: , novel by Ira Levin, 1972; film by Bryan Forbes, 1975. BASED ON: The Stepford Wives SYNOPSIS Joanna Eberhart is a top New York TV executive who specialises in reality TV shows in which women are more successful than men. After her shows get cancelled, Joanna is fired and has a nervous breakdown. Her husband Walter, a junior executive in the same TV company, takes the family to live in the superficially ideal small town of Stepford, Connecticut, where Claire and Mike Wellington are the town’s leading ideal couple. Walter and Joanna notice that people are very unnatural as the men are all “nerds” and the women are all blonde and with perfect figures. Joanna recovers gradually and enjoys the company of the only “normal” woman in town, the writer Bobbie Markowitz. The men spend all of their time at the Stepford Men’s Club but their wives to be at home all the time, doing the housework while waiting patiently for them to come home. expect During the 4 July , a woman collapses, and Joanna sees sparks coming out of her ears; from that moment, she starts to suspect that things are not as they seem. Meanwhile, Walter is amazed when a man asks his wife for twenty dollars and she inserts his into her mouth and then out twenty one-dollar like a cash dispenser. Mike reveals that all of the Stepford women who were brilliant professionals but not devoted housewives were converted into robots. Claire, a scientist and engineer, to be the brain behind the whole project: she had transformed her unfaithful husband Mike into a robot and had decided to give a chance to other couples to improve their family life by creating Stepford. During a ball, Joanna and Walter destroy the computerised system that allows men to control their wives so that they can return to be as they were before. The Stepford families still go on living in the town but now their lives have become “real.” Joanna and Bobbie decide to tell the world the whole story of Stepford, Joanna with a TV report and Bobbie with a novel that becomes a bestseller. th square dance cash card spits notes turns out GLOSSARY : : : : : : : cash card bancomat to expect aspettarsi note banconota to spit sputare square dance quadriglia submissive sottomessa to turn out rivelarsi