Off the Cliff

by Becky Aikman

  Many who succeeded tried to bend the rules to their will, carefully, strategically plotting their campaigns. So did many who failed. Then again, there was the naive option, the one with virtually no record of success, the one that would defy most of the givens and much of the advice that Hollywood had come to sanction. That was the option Callie Khouri chose: create a story from the heart, a story about grown-up women, not teenagers, where what’s at stake is bigger than who gets to sleep with whom, and hope that the strength of that story will somehow allow it to live.

  CHAPTER 5

  TITS AND BULLETS

  Perhaps the screenplay for Thelma & Louise came so easily to Callie because, after all the years of pining for something meaningful to accomplish, years of self-doubt, vexation and disrespect, she knew, finally, at the age of thirty, exactly what she wanted to say.

  “I was the product of a lot of wasted years and bad relationships and ennui and the frustration of not really knowing what I wanted to do,” she wrote later. “And I just wanted out of that.” So she dreamed up two women who broke free of the conventions that governed their lives, just as she wanted to break free of hers. For about four months after the idea struck, the characters lived in her head, and the details coalesced. She began to write in the off-hours from the music video grind, finishing the whole thing about six months later, in the summer of 1988.

  She’d never enjoyed herself so much as when she was scrawling the script longhand in notebooks and on legal pads on the glassed-in porch of the bungalow in Santa Monica. Sometimes she took the pages to the beach to write in the sun. When she could, after hours, she let herself into the office of one of her employers to type up the drafts on a clunky word processor. She and David had broken up by then, and she withdrew from the rest of the social scene. Finally, her father’s prognostication came to be: that she would find true happiness through accomplishment.

  “I had never done anything like it, and there was no expectation,” she says. “I didn’t have to deliver anything to anybody. It was as pure as the process can be.”

  The characters, a couple of smart, funny, authentic southern gals, fast friends like Callie and Pam, seemed to know what to do. Callie established why the cheerfully scattered housewife Thelma Dickinson might want a break from her domineering doofus of a husband, Darryl, the philandering manager of a carpet store. Louise Sawyer, a tightly wound coffee-shop waitress, had frustrations of her own, including her boyfriend, Jimmy, an itinerant musician with commitment issues. Callie gave the women a breather, letting them head out on a weekend escape at a borrowed fishing camp, gleefully tearing out of town in Louise’s convertible, a bright red 1966 Impala in the script. If you stopped right there, you’d have the premise for a Tina Fey–Amy Poehler vehicle, a screwball comedy stocked with the wisecracking rapport of longtime friends.

  Are you at work? the script had Thelma ask Louise on the phone in a typical exchange.

  No, I’m callin’ from the Playboy Mansion.

  And when Thelma maintained that she didn’t know how to fish, Louise countered, Neither do I, Thelma, but Darryl does it; how hard can it be?

  The good-time vibe rolled on when they stopped to eat at a roadside honky-tonk, with Wild Turkey and margaritas on the side. Callie had read a few screenplays and skimmed a couple of how-to books to get a sense of format and structure, but once her story arrived at the saloon, she bolted off any conventional course, flipping the comic tone she’d established and taking the rest of the film someplace completely unexpected, someplace wilder and weighted with conflicting impulses toward emancipation and dread.

  The flashpoint occurred when a slick charmer named Harlan steered Thelma out to the parking lot and tried to rape her. Louise cut him short by jabbing a pistol into his neck. But even as he backed off from the rape, Harlan taunted Louise with some crude, ill-advised lip, and, impulsively, she blew him away. A crime of passion? Indefensible? Either way, it turned a lighthearted girlfriend romp—okay, a chick flick—into something else entirely.

  It got crazier when the women made a rash call to run rather than face a probable murder charge. Louise was dead certain no one would believe their story, and Callie elliptically signaled why throughout the rest of the script. Something had happened to Louise in Texas, something she vehemently refused to discuss, but she made enough unguarded slips to indicate that she had been raped herself, and the law had left her undefended.

  The rest of the script unspooled as a gonzo road movie, two women on the run toward the Mexican border, the cops in pursuit. Once Thelma and Louise turned desperado, Callie let them revel in becoming freer, wilder, more tuned in to themselves and not caring what anybody thought, as she cut them loose to play out high-spirited fantasies of rebellion. She treated Thelma to an ecstatic night in the sack with a sexy drifter they picked up on the road. She gave Louise the chance for a bittersweet breakup with Jimmy. Strapped for cash, Thelma tried her hand at holding up a convenience store, and when a truck driver heckled the friends with obscenities, they didn’t cower or cringe; they blew up the truck. All of this was far enough out there for female characters in a movie, but it wasn’t until the very end that Callie unleashed them completely, letting them take flight, literally, into a cinematic stratosphere exceptional for its audacity. With the law at their backs, Callie had them gun the engine of the car and hurtle it right off a cliff into the Grand Canyon. Just as she had envisioned it from the beginning.

  The novice screenwriter didn’t see that final flourish as the characters killing themselves. She thought it carried to the extreme an irrepressible impetus to bust out of an untenable life. “They flew away, out of this world and into the mass unconscious,” Callie wrote afterward. “Women who are completely free from all the shackles that restrain them have no place in this world. The world is not big enough to support them.”

  For Callie, the journey was about seeking justice in a society where there was no justice. “It required a certain somnambulism to get through a world that thought so little of you,” she says. She shook those characters fully awake.

  —

  THE TARGET LENGTH for most screenplays was 120 pages. Callie’s clocked in closely enough at 135, but she didn’t realize how unusual it was in other respects. Despite the tragic ending, her script felt buoyant and liberating. Lord knows, it was funny. And not only were the main characters female, they weren’t anything like any other women in the movies—the randy teenagers or the wives or girlfriends or moms of somebody else who drove the plot. Thelma and Louise were working-class women, not glamorous in any traditional sense. What’s more, they weren’t kids who were first learning the possibilities of life, but adults, disillusioned by its limits but capable of willing themselves to an astonishing place.

  The men matched them in movie-character peculiarity, all of them flawed versions of the sorts of everyday guys we encounter in real life, but miles away from the big-screen Rambos, Indiana Joneses and Star Wars heroes of the day. The script captured the absurdly narcissistic Darryl in two stage directions: “Polyester was made for this man,” and “He is making imperceptible adjustments to his overmoussed hair.” Jimmy, a musician of indeterminate means, was a feckless lover doomed to realize what he had in Louise only when she was lost to him. Hal, the cop hot on the ladies’ tail, was torn between duty and sympathy for their plight. The sexy drifter personified that ultimate rarity, the sex object as a man.

  —

  “YOU CAN WRITE A TRUE STORY that never really happened,” Callie would say about the screenplay for Thelma & Louise. It wasn’t about Callie Khouri, but it was unmistakably her. She had never been raped or perpetrated a crime spree, but the frustration, the rage over constant disrespect, the yearning for self-expression—she had seen enough of that in her years of low-wage work to make a church lady want to blow something up. Anyone who knew Callie could spot elements of her personality in the wary, jaded Louise, with her cutting wit and what her Nash
ville friend Pam called “a pretty good bullshit meter.” Pam, on the other hand, was all over Thelma, from the lovable ditziness to the chaotic packing technique, suitcase spilling over with frilly excess. Their friendship, in which two individuals bound together become a third, bigger thing, was the heart of the story. And a sudden plot shift, when Thelma took charge in a crisis, mirrored the robbery years before when Callie lost her cool and the usually scattered Pam kept a level head.

  Other touches from Callie’s life made it in there, too. There was the introspective ride through Monument Valley. The time she was walking down a street and a man in a car said something so vile that the thought flashed through her head, If I’d only had a gun . . . And Louise’s catchphrase, the same one Callie often employed herself: “You get what you settle for.”

  Although she still worked in video production, Callie was so far removed from the power centers of Hollywood that she nurtured her creation in chaste obliviousness to the norms. She didn’t see anything universal in the story; it felt too personal to her. And she didn’t see anything especially commercial, either. She wasn’t writing the kind of movie that got made, she says. “I was writing the movie I wanted to see.”

  —

  AS FOR WHAT WAS LIGHTING UP the movie industry at the time, Thelma & Louise couldn’t have been more out of sync. It might have been seen as the female version of the countercultural road movies of the sixties and seventies. But their defiance of the mainstream had lost favor with the studios by the eighties, replaced by a quest for surefire blockbusters, products of the Reagan years, all bluster, muscle and triumphant endings.

  Early eighties popcorn movies like the Indiana Jones series charmed audiences with the old-fashioned storytelling of studio B pictures, but by the mid- to late eighties, the byword was action, and action meant large men with large guns. They appeared in ever-splashier versions of the same movie, sequel ready, featuring a guy—better, two guys—battling flamboyant evildoers to the accompaniment of fast-cutting MTV-style visuals, pounding scores, gunshots, explosions, car crashes and a landfill’s worth of slow-motion shattering glass. Walking briskets like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger emerged as stars, and women were relegated to set dressing, decorative and provocative.

  These features earned the label “high-concept,” because they could be summed up in a few words, a simple poster and a punchy television commercial, which became critical for roping in opening-weekend crowds as movies released wider and wider. Marketing budgets soared, scaring off anyone inclined to tell a smaller, more emotional story, which was pretty much how Hollywood defined the Women’s Picture.

  In 1985, the cartoonist Alison Bechdel devised what became known as the Bechdel Test to call attention to the disparity. To pass the test, a movie had to meet a spectacularly minimal standard: it had to include at least two female characters with actual names, they had to have at least one conversation with each other and that conversation had to be about something besides a man. From 1985 to 1989, only a little more than a third of movies passed the test.

  From what Callie could see, all this represented a missed opportunity for the film industry to draw ideas for stories from the culture at large. Outside of movie theaters, the eighties were a decade marked by epic change for women, a tangle of firsts and frustrations in the emerging struggle over women’s rights. There were new benchmarks set by Sandra Day O’Connor, Sally Ride and Geraldine Ferraro, offset by the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment and reports that women made only sixty-eight cents for every man’s dollar. Growing pains played out in the workplace and at home, as the women’s movement challenged the very nature of work and family life.

  Such a profound cultural disruption would seem to offer fertile material for either comedy or drama. Women and men alike might have wanted to let off steam by seeing the turmoil play out on-screen. But studios shied away, just as they had shied away from depicting the Vietnam War for its duration. In 1981, Jane Fonda managed to push through a project that once again served up issues disguised as pop entertainment. The movie 9 to 5, a comedy about secretaries who took revenge on a sexist boss, earned more than $100 million to rank as the number two movie that year. But no one rushed to follow up such a solid blockbuster with copycats about secretaries blowing up their typewriters or flinging them through shattering glass, or any other women objecting to anything else.

  An industry truism emerged, soon to be set in stone: women’s stories belonged on television. When a couple went out on a date, the thinking was, the men chose the movies. Women could watch Dynasty or The Love Boat at home.

  —

  CALLIE KHOURI LIKED going out to the movies, but she hated most of the movies she saw. The year before she wrote Thelma & Louise, she was horrified by Beverly Hills Cop II, directed by Tony Scott, the younger, less cerebral brother of Ridley. Especially galling was the climactic shootout, when a cop blew away the movie’s glamazon secondary villain, played by Brigitte Nielsen. After her body flew through the air to land with a shuddering thump, the shooter punctuated the moment by turning to Eddie Murphy and declaring with a grin, Women! Murphy cut loose with his trademark braying laugh. In the theater where she saw the film, Callie remembered, “the audience went crazy.” It didn’t merely offend her; it scared her.

  Beyond such outright hostility, she was fed up with the “bimbos, whores and nagging wives” of most movies and hungry to see a woman as a complete human being, someone she might want to know. There was a handful of women, at most, who made Callie want to proclaim, “Right on, man, she is a righteous chick.”

  Callie could get behind 1984’s The Terminator, which saw Linda Hamilton battling a cyborg played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Her character wasn’t cowering or shrieking; she fought for her life. Callie also approved of Raiders of the Lost Ark, from 1981, because Karen Allen held her own as Harrison Ford’s droll sidekick. But her replacement in the 1984 sequel, a high-maintenance showgirl played by Kate Capshaw, exasperated Callie by squealing helplessly and fussing about breaking a nail, while Indiana Jones grumbled dismissively: The biggest trouble with her is the noise.

  Yet the traditional notion of a women’s film, all weepy and profound, didn’t appeal to Callie, either. She hankered to be entertained, to enjoy a little fantasy, to take a ride with characters who were identifiable but still larger-than-life.

  In the summer of 1988, when she completed that draft of Thelma & Louise, she felt like she’d nailed it. Callie showed it to a few friends. Amanda Temple, Callie’s video production buddy, called as soon as she finished reading, too thrilled at first to exclaim much beyond “Oh my God!”

  “It’s ready to go,” Amanda finally insisted. “You need to get an agent, and you need to get this off the ground.”

  David Warfield read it, too. In the year after their breakup, he and Callie kept running into each other at stoplights, to the point where it seemed absurd not to stop and chat. They reconciled, this time deciding to live together. In the meantime, this screenplay had somehow appeared. David had been trying to get his own movies set up as a producer, so he’d been around a bit. As far as Thelma & Louise went, he doubted that the moneymen would underwrite that ending, but he also said this: “It’s 9 to 5 meets Easy Rider.” And he added: “You are going to win the Oscar for this.”

  Please! It was just as plausible that she’d be cast as the next Die Hard supervillain. Nevertheless, Callie nursed a more realistic fantasy. She thought someone who didn’t know any better might invest some money—$5 million would be nice—so Amanda could produce and Callie could direct. If she had her druthers, she would cast the rising indie favorites Holly Hunter as Thelma and Frances McDormand as Louise.

  Callie wasn’t so naive that she couldn’t foresee pitfalls. She was savvy enough to know that in the male-driven, violence-tinged world of movies of the time, where women were sex objects at best, Thelma & Louise would have to blast through barriers as diverse as the old
-boy network, the star system and the creaky, dated inertia of a company town. If this script ever makes it to the big screen, she thought, it would be a miracle if they haven’t changed the title to Tits and Bullets.

  CHAPTER 6

  UNLIKABLE

  Amanda Temple didn’t waste a minute getting Thelma & Louise into the hands of anybody who could help, delivering the pages on three-hole-punched paper held together with little brass fasteners. During the fall of 1988, she sent out ten, then twenty, thirty, maybe even forty copies. Usually she delivered them in person, the better to plead, and kept up the pressure with a demoralizing burden of daily phone calls. Sometimes Callie dropped the script off herself. Most of the time, the response was no response. First, they solicited agents in hopes that one would represent Callie as a screenwriter. No one would. Then they tried to find some tony little art-film producer to put up some money. No one did.

  “It drove me mad,” Amanda says. “We were these two blond girls walking around with a script. It was like we were invisible or a joke.”

  Callie couldn’t have asked for a more fiercely determined ally. Amanda’s belief in the screenplay was unshakable, and she enjoyed some helpful film-biz cachet. Besides her music video production credits, she was married to Julien Temple, a young English director who had made the British feature film Absolute Beginners. Amanda and Julien touched down in Hollywood during the mid-eighties, when Warner Bros. put them up at the Sunset Marquis, a hotel near the clubs along the Sunset Strip. The place attracted a mongrel mix of rock ’n’ rollers and other entertainers who lounged by the courtyard pool. After Julien left for the studio on their first morning there, Amanda faced the question of where she, a production secretary back in London, could secure a place for herself in this tantalizing town.