by Becky Aikman
“There were directors who used their powerful positions to get girls to do things,” she would say later. “It was a skanky time. It would have been less objectionable if I had had any creative . . . oh, anything. But I was just a facilitator.”
So no, Callie did not let her mind go there that night in 1987, to the painful subject of her squandered abilities, whatever they might be. Instead, in the solitary predawn clarity and fatigue of her car, she had an epiphany, born equally of frustration, chafing intelligence and throttled talent: two women go on a crime spree.
She would create a movie about outlaw women on the run, busting out of tedious, thwarted, humdrum lives—lives like hers—for freedom that let them finally become their true selves. She imagined it all: a movie unlike any she had ever seen, where women drove the story, maybe even got to drive the car. Written by a woman. Why not her?
What came to her seemed fully formed, not so much a plot as a feeling, that thing that would wallop people as they walked out of the theater, if by some outrageous turn of events the movie ever got made. “I saw, in a flash, where those women started and where they ended up,” Callie said. “Through a series of accidents, they would go from being invisible to being too big for their world to contain, because they’d stopped cooperating with things that were absolutely preposterous and just became themselves.”
All she had to do was figure out how to get these two normal women, living everyday lives, into this extraordinary place, this extraordinary mind-set. “We would get to see them in this full glory. And then they would have to leave, not kill themselves, because that’s never how I thought of it. But literally, they would have to fly.”
This couldn’t be a book or a short story or a poem, Callie realized. It had to be a movie, because she saw it all visually. The Grand Canyon figured in there somewhere—she saw all of it in that flash. She would write this story. And perhaps in this act of creation, she might find her own true self.
Callie tuned out the reality that no one who worked in movies would care about her and her half-formed vision. Why should they? Callie was a Hollywood nobody who knew nobody outside her circle of relative nobody friends; she was a woman in a man’s town; she had no credits, no bona fides, no cred, no hope. In a business full of boy wonders with filmmaking degrees, she was a college dropout who had never written anything more than a few unfinished short stories and a rejected TV script she had spitballed with a friend. She had this embryonic idea for a screenplay, but unlike every film school grad trying to peddle a high-concept action picture about two guys who . . . (fill in the blank), she had come up with the kind of movie that nobody actually made, that nobody had ever made. Two women in a car—so elementary it was groundbreaking.
Looking back years later, Diane Cairns calculated the odds that Callie’s idea would ever reach completion: “Just to write it and get it made—astronomical. To get it made well—impossible. To go through what this movie went through—once in a lifetime. Ten lifetimes.”
But Callie had only this one. Silence descended as she cut the ignition. She decided to tell no one. She would start writing dialogue on a legal pad after work.
—
NOTHING IN CALLIE’S BACKGROUND destined her to create anything of note, much less a breakthrough in the realm of cinema. She’d grown up in Paducah, Kentucky, far from the buzzy outposts of the East and West coasts, and the South in all its contradictions had molded her into a person sporting plenty of her own. It instilled in her a lifelong appetite for bluegrass music and chess pie, a selective capacity for both genteel manners and hell-raising defiance, and a southern eccentricity that she knew people everywhere else found colorful, even entertaining. Even so, Callie was attuned to the dark side of the region’s special brand of crazy, one that fed an acute sense of injustice. “A lot of really bad things went down in the South,” she once said in an interview. “There’s a lot of rationalization that goes on there. I mean, it’s known for hospitality and lynching.”
Born in 1957, the third of four children, Carolyn, later nicknamed Callie, spent her childhood just outside Paducah, a sleepy town that had served as a vigorous hub for steamships and railroads back when steamships and railroads mattered. The family made its home in an 1890s log cabin shaded by pine, oak and magnolia trees that were ideal for climbing on summer days.
Her mother, Virginia Khouri, the model for Callie’s gracious side, was artistic and pale as porcelain. She led the Paducah Art Guild and threw herself into church work—“All my family are much better Episcopalians than I am,” Callie says—while her father, Eli Khouri, a first-generation Lebanese with an infectious laugh, kicked into overdrive as a chief of surgery at the local hospital and head of the regional medical association. Callie adored him and for many years considered their relationship the most significant of her life. “I don’t think anyone has ever had a greater influence on me,” she says. “He was an overachiever the likes of which I could never touch.” He assured Callie that ultimately only her own high achievement would grant her meaningful satisfaction.
Segregation was still a glaring fact of life when Callie was a young girl in the sixties. Black customers had to mount an outdoor staircase to sit in the balcony of Paducah’s Columbia movie theater, and schools weren’t integrated until 1966. The Metropolitan Hotel on the South Side had long been a rousing stop on the chitlin circuit, hosting musicians like Louis Armstrong, B. B. King and Ike and Tina Turner, unwelcome elsewhere in town but endowing it with a soulful musical legacy.
Callie, a tall, rangy teenager with long blond ringlets and an intellectual bent, was alert to the hypocrisy. It was difficult for her to get one thousand percent behind her heritage, she says in retrospect, “and yet there are so many things I love about it—the crazy, wonderful, funny people set in their ways, their food, their rituals and music.” She filled the cultural void of a backwater upbringing with reading: P. G. Wodehouse, Dorothy Parker and James Thurber, with generous helpings of Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller.
The small-town languor fired up a rebellious side as well. Callie stole out of the house just about every night, boosting the car at the age of twelve to joyride with friends. The relatively privileged perch of the Khouris might have allowed her to become an oblivious party girl, but she lapped up adult conversation, and her critical mind wouldn’t rest in the face of absurdities and unfairness. In the school library, she came across copies of Ms. magazine, which blew apart her perception of the place of women in Paducah, where the few who held jobs did so out of economic necessity and were looked down upon for it. She remembers thinking, Oh my God, there’s not anything they’re going to let us do if we don’t take it ourselves.
This premature awareness of all kinds of bias rendered her opinionated, outspoken, sharply funny, sometimes angry, but also a bit vulnerable, because she took it all so personally. Then something happened that cranked up the vulnerability and left her foundering.
On an August weekend when Callie was sixteen, she stayed home while her parents attended a wedding in Louisville. In the middle of the night, Eli woke Virginia to complain of a headache. “It’s my brain,” he said. “Call an ambulance.” He knew. Dr. Khouri died of a cerebral aneurysm within twenty-four hours, on Monday, August 19, 1974. He was forty-seven years old.
There had always been a lightness to the family, a sense of fun. It disappeared overnight, replaced by an absence that could never be filled. Virginia grew quiet, retreated, after that staggering early death, and as time went on she turned ever quieter.
Callie, who was about to enter her senior year of high school, engaged in her own sort of retreat. “For a good ten years after that, I don’t remember being fully conscious about much of what I was doing or why,” she says. During that lost and drifting decade, she struggled with depression, piercing enough for her to seek treatment, although she never sank so far as to consider suicide.
When she enrolled at Purdue University, fo
r no particular reason except that it was a humongous place where she could get lost, Callie majored in landscape architecture, a pursuit with no particular appeal. “You could have said I would be a pinball major, and I would have said okay,” she says. Later she switched to theater, remembering how high school productions served as a refuge from a sorrow-filled house. She never heard about opportunities for women to direct or write. Acting seemed like her only opening, but she was appalled that the parts open to women were limited, shallow and steeped in sexuality: hookers in Hot l Baltimore, courtesans in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. “College was a wasted experience,” she says.
—
IN 1979, CALLIE LEFT SCHOOL and moved to Nashville, where every night promised a party at live venues that rocked to a mixed brew of southern roots rock, bluegrass, jazz, honky-tonk and rockabilly, but, surprisingly, not much country back then. The constant lineup of musical talent spoke to the twenty-one-year-old’s ill-defined but powerful yearning for a creative life. Yet after picking up some work at a local theater, she wound up waiting tables at clubs like the Exit/In, lugging trays of boilermakers to drunken shitkickers who felt that their admission stamps entitled them to cup her ass as she threaded her way through close-packed tables. “You just feel hands on you,” she says. One boss, who liked to flash photos from Hustler to the staff, fired Callie for not being “a good sport.” The expected response to such affronts, maintaining a blank façade, felt obliterating to her.
One night a young country singer named Pam Tillis set up to play. “Could somebody bring me a Coke?” she asked. Callie stepped up onstage. The two women, both on the cusp of finding their way in their early twenties, sized up each other’s sangfroid and intrinsic intelligence with a jolt of reciprocal recognition.
“Hi, who are you?” Pam said in a soft twang. “You’re not just a waitress.”
Callie ricocheted back, “You’re not just a singer.”
They were tight as thieves from then on. “We kind of looked at each other and thought, Yeah, I know you, and then we just started hanging,” Callie remembers.
This entailed double-teaming the after-hours party scene, holing up all night reading copies of the New Yorker and generally forging the kind of friendship that proves that while men might have their place, ladies still need their ladies. “We had more power as a team” was how Callie saw the relationship. “We were very different, but together, we were like a third thing.” Stronger, surer and a lot more laughs.
They were also nicely balanced. Pam was messy and scattered; Callie, methodical. Pam was innocent, even naive; Callie, more jaded, with what Pam called a smart-ass mouth. “We were both ultimately ambitious for all our being goofballs,” Pam says. They would remain friends for life, telling each other when they were crazy, when to trust their guts, when to move on. In all their differences, loyalty and affection, Pam and Callie were the precursors of Thelma and Louise.
—
AFTER NEARLY FOUR YEARS IN NASHVILLE, Callie’s gut told her it was time to hit the pike. She had befriended performers and songwriters, bucking them up as they won acclaim and record deals, but she couldn’t kid herself that she was a musical talent herself. “I can play the radio,” she liked to say. She had a spark that was not being lit. Maybe acting was the answer after all. An offer to crash at a songwriter’s place led Callie to Los Angeles at the end of 1982. With her ever-marketable waitressing skills, she soon set herself up with an apartment in West Hollywood, acting classes with the renowned Peggy Feury at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute and a job at the Improv, a comedy club in the heart of Hollywood that was the piping hot center for stand-ups angling to become stars.
Miracles could happen every night in that combustible room. The hand of a network might reach down and offer a $50,000 pilot deal to a comic who’d been working by day cleaning apartments, grateful to rake in a couple hundred dollars and two free-drink tickets for twenty minutes at the mike. Jerry Seinfeld hit early. So did Paul Reiser, Jay Leno and the Wayans Brothers. Robin Williams and Saturday Night Live headliners popped in often, while scouts from networks and films scrutinized the talent from the floor.
Callie was once again waiting tables in the orbit of other people’s creative whirl. She hooked right into the social scene, where conversation was fierce, funny and competitive. “He always goes on last? He got a TV deal? He got on Carson?”
The atmosphere could be harsh, comics topping each other, zap-zap, with the meanest, most negative, most aggressive comeback always winning the biggest laugh. Everyone was fair game, but Callie could sling it with the best of them. “You had to have your sword ready at any time,” she says. “Okay, motherfucker, you want to go? Let’s go.” Callie dated some of the Improv talent, but very few comics, especially voracious ones starting out, pulled off steady relationships. Sex was regarded as a perk of playing Indianapolis.
Callie didn’t present herself as a person who could be taken advantage of. If she did, she knew, people would. But the late-night lifestyle entailed hazards. Two thugs with a sawed-off pump-action shotgun held up Callie and Larry David one night as he walked her to her car. Once when Pam visited, some men jumped the friends as they left a party, knocked Pam down and took her coat, while Callie, unwilling to let go of even a nickel she had worked so hard for, held tight to her purse. Pam, usually the ditzy one, transformed on the spot and took charge. “Callie! Quit your dogheadedness!” Pam yelled. “Let! It! Go!” Callie dropped the purse, and they ran.
Surrounded by comics, Callie never considered trying stand-up herself—not that it was a field that would have welcomed her. Women weren’t perceived as having the requisite aggression, and audiences weren’t comfortable with those who did. Only Roseanne Barr, able to own her hostility and wield it with caustic self-possession, killed on Carson, the sole major female breakthrough since Joan Rivers.
If there was a smaller group than women stand-ups, it was women writers. Jim Vallely, a comic and friend who later wrote for television, admired Callie’s clever smackdowns at all-night hangouts and asked her to collaborate on a spec script for Bill Maher, an Improv buddy. The verdict was crushing when they turned in their draft: “You guys write like a couple of actors.”
Yet two years of lessons and auditions had given Callie no purchase on acting, either. Striking in thrift-shop clothes and cowboy boots, with long, wavy hair, she attracted attention, but not the kind she craved. She didn’t enjoy being looked at, at least not the way prospective agents looked at actresses, and so she aspired to play character roles. “Debra Winger was having the career I would have wanted,” Callie says, “because she was beautiful but not that kind of beautiful.” What’s more, Callie panicked that she might actually get a part, “and then there would be a permanent record, and it would be awful.”
By 1985, she realized that acting wasn’t going to happen for her. Still afflicted by the long malaise after her father’s death, still smarting from his adage that only achievement would give meaning to her life, she hit a wall. She quit her job and moved out of Hollywood to the little shared house near the ocean in Santa Monica. The distance might help her think things over, recalibrate her breakneck pace, reconsider a career, perhaps find a foothold in the film business. To most of the comics, it was as if she had disappeared.
“Those early years in her twenties, being smarter than so many of the guys she was hanging around, and knowing it, I know she got hurt,” says Vallely. “She took a big hunk of hurt and turned it into Thelma & Louise. I think she became a great writer because she lived some life.”
Film was the art form of the moment, where the stakes were higher, the stars brighter and the visions grander, the principals—actors like Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, Eddie Murphy and directors like Spielberg, Coppola, Scorsese and Lucas—its reigning cultural gods. Callie started at the bottom of the bottom, again, landing a gig as a receptionist for a company that made music videos and
commercials, the tawdry, slippery beginner’s rung on the ladder to Mount Olympus. She was a long way from Paducah. The hazing rituals of comedy were nothing to what the movie business held in store.
CHAPTER 2
PROSTITUTES AND EMPTY-HEADED BLONDES
Oddly, someone like Callie might have found a warmer reception in the earliest days of cinema, when it was the bastard child of the arts in a new century. Filmmaking welcomed innovators, inventors, outsiders, immigrants—all the sorts of nervy geeks who latch onto a new technology in its semiamateur phase. This unexplored territory was wide open for women, too, like Lois Weber, a writer, director and performer from 1907 through the early twenties. More prolific than D. W. Griffith, Weber owned her own studio and scandalized audiences with stories that championed birth control and temperance and opposed abortion, poverty and religious hypocrisy. Dorothy Arzner, the first woman admitted to the Directors Guild, broke in as a writer and editor on such smoldering projects as 1922’s Blood and Sand with Rudolph Valentino but threatened to leave Paramount in the late twenties unless she could direct, which she did, outfitted androgynously in pants and a coat.
Some of the foremost pioneer screenwriters were women as well. Anita Loos applied her sharklike wit to well over a hundred scripts by 1915, more than a decade before she published the gal-pal novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Frances Marion chalked up more than three hundred film credits, writing roles for no less than Mary Pickford, Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Marlene Dietrich and Myrna Loy. These women made boatloads of money, which was when the trouble started. Once filmmaking ceased to be a lark and turned into a business, studios modeled themselves after businesses everywhere else—hierarchical and run by men.
It’s hard to believe that from the late 1920s to the mid-1960s, scholars identify only two women directors: Arzner, who quit in 1943, and Ida Lupino, who started six years later. Lupino was a former film noir trouper who had held her own on-screen with George Raft and Humphrey Bogart. Unable to get the juicy roles she craved, she formed her own production company in 1948 and went on to direct seven steely melodramas like the rape-themed Outrage in 1950 and Hard, Fast and Beautiful in 1951, all while pretending to know less than she did around the crew. Lupino professed, “You don’t tell a man, you suggest to them, ‘Let’s try something crazy here. That is, if it’s comfortable, love.’”