What Women Want

Nick Marshall, a creatives executive at the Chicago-based advertising agency Sloane-Curtis, is a proverbial guy's guy. In other words, he's a male chauvinist, which has gotten him to where he is in his professional life in the male dominated firm, and has allowed him to get almost any woman he's wanted sexually, at least those that buy into his masculinity. So it is a surprise when Dan Wanamaker, the managing partner, hires someone else for the open position of Creative Director, a job that most, including Nick himself, expected Nick to get. What's worse for Nick is that the hiree, external to the firm, is Darcy Maguire, a female, in Sloane-Curtis having lost all of the recent and lucrative female-centric accounts. In Darcy's process of getting the creatives, male or female, to think more about how a woman thinks to get those accounts, Nick goes through a series of incidents which, by the end, allows him to "hear" what women in his vicinity are thinking. Initially freaked out by this new ability, he begins to believe it to be a gift which he can use to his advantage: to get Lola, the coffee shop clerk who has constantly rebuffed his advances, to sleep with him; and to have a better relationship with his fifteen year old daughter, Alex, who is staying with him while her mother/his ex-wife Gigi is on her honeymoon and who has always seen him as an absent, deadbeat dad, it being a pivotal time in her life as she is thinking about losing her virginity to her eighteen year old new boyfriend, Cameron. Nick, however, sees the most powerful aspect being to undermine Darcy at every turn to get her job which he feels was his to begin with. Things take a turn when he starts to fall for her.