Off the Cliff

by Becky Aikman

  She peeked out the window. “There were these girls by the pool in micro-bikinis with these enormous breasts,” she says. “I was twenty-five years old, and I had never seen breasts like that, all pumped up. There were guys with big hair and chains and the whole thing, and they thought it was just so funny to push these girls into the pool. The girls would giggle and get out of the pool, and the guys would do it again and again and again. I was like, ‘Where have I landed?’”

  One of her first outings was a dinner where she was seated next to Joan Rivers. “She was hilarious,” Amanda says. “I was the youngest at the table, and she took one look at me and saw raw meat.” “You’ve moved to LA?” Rivers asked. “Well, first thing, we’ve got to give you some tits. And look at that little button nose, it’s just off-kilter. Yeah, we’re going to do that, too.”

  Amanda played along, but she was shaking by the end of the meal. “Everything was so surface, so about the way you look,” she says. “My God, I had to toughen up, I really did.”

  But she also perceived that in contrast to England, where people regarded her as “a little blonde behind a typewriter,” Los Angeles was a city where someone could reinvent herself, given enough energy and conviction. Hollywood appeared so wide open, so thrumming with enterprising zeal, that it seemed possible to turn herself into something more, a little blond producer. It was heartening that men and women there were unashamedly passionate about everything to do with film and fearless about seizing opportunity. They galvanized her to muscle her way into music video production, eventually starting her own company.

  Until she and Callie started working together, Amanda felt like an alien in Southern California, set apart by her self-deprecating British humor and her refusal to take everything seriously, but the two clicked right away. “Her being from the South, we really connected,” Amanda says. “We were both refugees, able to poke fun and see through a different lens. We could see that this place was . . . ridiculous.”

  —

  HER HUSBAND’S CONNECTIONS and Amanda’s own resourcefulness got her nowhere with Thelma & Louise as fall and winter rolled by. She walked the script into the office of Julien’s agent, Jim Crabbe at William Morris, but he told her later that he didn’t remember it crossing his desk. Harvey Weinstein’s office got a copy, but she never heard back. The same with Amy Pascal, a new production executive at Columbia. Amanda theorized that the bolder tastemakers in town might get what she was peddling, but she couldn’t slip it past their minions who didn’t have the authority to challenge the standard molds.

  A British producer, Stephen Woolley, a partner of the writer-director Neil Jordan, assigned one of his development executives to take a meeting, the first of three that Amanda and Callie snagged at small-time indie companies. Each time the objections were firm and always the same: no one would take a liking to women who committed violence, and no one wanted to watch them drive off a cliff. “Can’t they just shoot the guy in the leg?” posed one executive. Another asked, “Don’t you think you should have a guy shoot the guy and the women should just run?”

  The absolute deal breaker was always the ending. “Maybe the Grand Canyon should be more like a ditch,” someone said, “and they floor it and land on the other side.”

  Callie wouldn’t entertain suggestions; she wouldn’t play the game. “I wasn’t interested in telling anybody else’s story,” she says. The goal wasn’t fame or riches—she wanted to make Thelma & Louise.

  “Let’s go, we’re out of here,” Callie would say to Amanda before turning to address the executives in a flat, dismissive tone. “We’ve got nothing to talk about. You’re not going to talk me into anything, and I’m not going to talk you into anything. So we’re done.”

  The first couple of times, the two friends broke into laughter as they headed out the door, vowing, “We’re not going to change a thing.” But after their third and final impasse, at a company called Palace Productions on Third Street, dejection trailed them as they trudged home along the wide, flat Santa Monica beach. It seemed increasingly farfetched that anyone would be willing to make Thelma & Louise the way it was written. No one saw what Callie and Amanda saw.

  “This whole issue of the women being unsympathetic—come on!” Amanda railed, her voice rising with exasperation. “Guys can be unsympathetic and violent and unpleasant and abusive, and they get away with it. But you put trousers on the women and they’re outrageous?”

  The disappointment made her frantic. By now it was the spring of 1989. Months had passed on their fruitless quest, and a clock was ticking. Amanda was heavily pregnant and would soon return to England for the birth, with Callie stuck behind, still churning out godforsaken music videos.

  Callie stopped short. “We were sure there would be plenty of people who don’t understand this and say no,” she assured her partner. “We only need one yes.” If they tapped out all their resources in Los Angeles, maybe they could find some foreigner who hadn’t wised up to the ways of Hollywood to put up the cash.

  “I was savvy enough, as was Callie,” Amanda says, “to know that as soon as you start diluting something you are passionate about, it will dissolve into nothing. I’ve seen what happens when people get stuck in the Hollywood machine and their movies morph into something they don’t recognize. If you stick to your vision, you can at least sleep at night. You may not be the biggest hotshot, but at least your conscience is clear.”

  —

  AMANDA SOUGHT ADVICE FROM SOMEONE she had met through friends: Mimi Polk, a thirty-year-old American who ran the Los Angeles production company of Ridley Scott, the British director best known for the science fiction features Alien and Blade Runner. They sometimes worked with foreign investors, Amanda had heard.

  “Mimi,” she said as she turned over the precious bound pages, “am I going mad? Why do I think this is such a brilliant thing? Why doesn’t anybody get it?”

  Six weeks passed without a word. When Callie said good-bye to Amanda just before she left to have the baby, the mood was glum. “I can’t believe it,” Amanda said. “Not even Mimi is getting back.”

  But when Callie picked up the phone a few weeks later, Mimi Polk was on the line. Callie heard a crisp, professional voice cut through all the layers of rejection and indifference and say the magic words: “I loved your script.”

  You . . . what?

  “I love the characters. I think they would be accessible to a lot of people.”

  Callie absorbed this news with as much outward composure as she could muster. Finally . . . the kind of reaction she had been expecting all along. Finally . . . a believer, a believer with some connection to people with clout. But she froze at Mimi’s follow-up. “Is it all right if I let Ridley see it? Not to direct, but maybe he would be willing to produce.”

  “It had all gone so well,” Callie says. “The momentum had started with the idea and then kept up through the writing, and now I was coming to the moment when a real director was going to read it.” Oh my God, she thought. Is this where the whole thing ends?

  She consented, then steeled herself for more rejection and delay, but Mimi called back about a week later. “Ridley loves it, too,” she said. “He’d like to meet with you.” Callie froze again. “The only difficulty is that you would be a first-time director,” Mimi continued. “You are going to have to make a choice. Do you want to take a shot at directing it yourself? Or do you want this first movie to be with bigger stars and a bigger-name director, which would really put you on the map?” Ridley had no interest in directing this script, she said, but he might produce it for another director.

  Callie rang Amanda straightaway. The news stirred up a monsoon of emotions—justification, joy, relief and, for Amanda, irritation that Mimi had cut her out of the picture by contacting Callie directly, but Amanda didn’t flinch. She knew that she could speak up for a producer credit, but she also felt the most righteous action she could take for
her friend, for the script, was to let it go and walk away.

  “Callie,” Amanda said, “this could be a magic wand. They can wave it and make the movie happen. You’re an idiot if you don’t do this with them. It’s going to get made.”

  Perhaps, but in what form? “Oh my God, the Scott brothers,” Amanda says later, conflating Ridley with his brother Tony, the hotshot behind Beverly Hills Cop II. “Yes, of course, you think, Tits and Bullets—perfect!”

  Ridley’s work had more taste, the two friends agreed, but could he understand this profoundly female story? His movies were overwhelmingly commercial sci-fi epics, strong on action, light on character, guy movies, except for his casting of Sigourney Weaver in the lead of Alien, a part originally written for a man. Callie knew the gamble she’d be taking by relinquishing this exquisitely balanced script.

  Take this opportunity, Amanda advised, and the story would benefit from the kind of clout they couldn’t hope to summon on their own. “Callie, it’s now going to be a Ridley Scott movie,” she cautioned, “which is a completely different animal than what we envisioned. It’s going to get a lot of attention. It’s going to be a movie that everyone is talking about.”

  They couldn’t be sure what else it would be. Back and forth, they tried to parse just who Ridley Scott was and what his intentions were, little considering that Hollywood had been working the same puzzle for the previous ten years.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE EPIC IN RIDLEY SCOTT’S HEAD

  It was customary in the movie business to read scripts late at night, propped on a pillow in bed. Ridley Scott never worked at night. “You think you’re winning,” he says. “You’re not.”

  The director approached the script for Thelma & Louise the way he read any new material, at seven in the morning, at his sharpest. He sat on a hard chair with good light in the study overlooking the formal garden at his eighteenth-century home in the affluent Hampstead area of London, a cup of strong, hot coffee at his side. No one was permitted to enter the room until he finished.

  Mimi Polk had pitched the script as a possible project for him to produce and told him something about the writer being a friend or a friend of a friend who had been a receptionist at a place that made videos or commercials. He couldn’t quite remember. Ridley was skeptical of any amateur who claimed to have written a screenplay. Nevertheless, right away, he started laughing. By nine o’clock, he reached the last page, where the car leaped off the cliff. Wow, he thought. “The script flew,” he says. “It was very well written. I started to see faces. I started to think, Damn! This could be this, this could be that. This is good enough to get any actress.”

  After seven years at art school, Ridley benefited from what he considered his greatest gift—his mind saw everything in picture form. “I could see the film almost immediately as I was reading,” he says. “I thought, This is epic. The landscape should be epic. The ending would be epic. But, unusually, it was a comedy. I mean, it was funny.”

  He knew this wasn’t for him. It was too much from a woman’s point of view, full of womanly banter and a wrath he couldn’t quite grasp. But he knew there had to be some director who could carry it off.

  On that morning in the early spring of 1989, Ridley formed a firm opinion about Thelma & Louise. It was an epic comedy about how women act when guys aren’t around, and it would end not with tragedy—he didn’t see the ending as tragic—but with the right decision. As long as a studio doesn’t try to make it better by not having them go off the cliff, he thought. “They have to,” he insists. “I saw it more as them continuing their journey. It was what they were intended to do.”

  He asked Mimi to set up a meeting with this Callie Khouri person as soon as he returned to LA.

  —

  WHEREVER DIVERSITY IN THE WORKPLACE is an issue, as it certainly was and is in the movie industry, it’s essential that some white guy stick his neck out to start to set things right. That guy doesn’t have to be a flaming activist, but he has to be able to empathize with the group that lacks a voice, to listen to the people who’ve been deprived of power up to now, to be willing to give over some responsibility, to trust their judgment, to stand up for their point of view. Could Ridley Scott be that guy? Aside from the casting coup with Sigourney Weaver in Alien, his oeuvre was largely devoted to guys waging battles with robots or monsters or other guys. His agent, Jeff Berg, called him Mr. Macho, and he wasn’t alone. “He hadn’t been any kind of a woman’s director,” says Susan Sarandon, summing up the industry consensus. “He was seen as a very male, very macho action director.”

  Yet for all the typically eighties subject matter of his movies, they lacked the formulaic simplicity of the typical eighties blockbuster. Ridley Scott’s films possessed a sumptuous visual splendor, an elegant pace and a dark moral ambiguity that tipped in the direction of art. Hans Zimmer, the film composer who often collaborated with Ridley, says, “The bottom line is that Ridley just wants to make a really good movie, and it never occurs to him to be patronizing about the characters, or sexist, or whatever words you want to pick.”

  It would strike many in Hollywood as odd that a European man like Ridley Scott could become a champion for a movie that tapped a powder keg of outrage about American women and their place in American society, but he didn’t think about that on the morning he read the script. He liked it. It made him laugh. It made him see pictures.

  —

  RIDLEY HAD MADE FIVE MOVIES by this time, and yet as a personality he was something of an unknown on the Hollywood scene. Pale, freckled, with the short, stocky stature of a Celtic Briton, he rarely socialized in Los Angeles, preferring his home in London and often filming and editing abroad. In a town built on faux friendships, Ridley Scott didn’t do chitchat; he worked. People in the business knew his work, certainly, and his perfectionism had earned him a reputation for being somewhat crusty, if not outright difficult, but few would have known him well enough to be aware that at least one formidable woman had figured prominently in his life.

  “My mom was four foot eleven and insisted she was five feet tall,” says Ridley. She ruled a pack of three sons through an itinerant boyhood set mostly in Northumberland, an industrial county wedged hard against the Scottish border and the coast of the North Sea. Ridley was born in 1937, following his older brother, Frank, who grew up to serve in the merchant navy, and six years before the youngest, Tony. Their father, Francis, served in the Royal Engineers during World War II, rising to acting brigadier general, while his wife, Elizabeth, imposed discipline on the home front and continued her rigid reign when the family reunited after the war.

  “By the standards of mothers today, she must sound pretty tough,” Ridley concedes. “If I broke my arm, it was my fault. If I fell in the sea, it was my fault. You were not allowed to be ill.” Her favorite expression was “Pull yourself together.”

  Ridley got the belt and he got the stick. “To me, it was a medal of honor,” he recalled later. “If I got a bruise on my ass from a cane? It was normal.”

  Yet the family was tight, according to Tony. “Dad was a very gentle and sweet man,” he said. “Mum was the matriarch and the patriarch of the family. She ran the roost with a steel fist, but at the same time there was respect and love for her. The driving force Ridley and I have comes from Mum, but they were chalk and cheese.”

  Ridley stumbled and brooded through a bewildering array of ten or eleven schools as the family followed his father’s career, first to Germany during the rebuilding after the war, then back to Northern England. “I hated school,” Ridley says. His performance reflected his disdain. Years later he framed a report card and hung it in his London office. It showed him ranked 29 out of 29 in his class—no half measures.

  But he could do one thing inordinately well—he could draw and paint. He and his father sat quietly together making watercolors on a balcony in Bavaria, and he gave Ridley books for his birthdays: How to Draw Boats
, How to Draw Horses. It was his mother who first took Ridley to the cinema—The Black Swan with Tyrone Power was the first; Great Expectations and Citizen Kane made big impressions. Soon he started to go alone, nursing a secret ambition to work on a film someday, maybe as an art director, a promising job title that he spotted in the credits. This was an absurd ambition for a shy, underachieving, working-class boy from the North. “It was just too silly for words,” he told himself. “I wouldn’t dare.” The film industry was the far side of the moon.

  When a teacher suggested he switch to art school, Ridley jumped headfirst, and “the world began for me—I adored it.” He thrived at the local West Hartlepool College of Art for four years, followed by three more earning a degree in design at the Royal College of Art in London. There was no course of study for film, but he borrowed a Bolex camera to make a short, Boy and Bicycle, on a budget of £65, drafting Tony to perform as star and chief equipment carrier. After graduation in 1961, Ridley scored a job as a set decorator at the BBC, where he talked his way into a quickie directors’ training course. That catapulted him into overseeing episodes of hits like Z Cars, a police drama shot with social realism.

  Ridley thought like an artist but was sharp to the ways of business, too. He bit when Gerber, the baby food company, offered him a chance to moonlight by making his first commercial. The young star spent the shoot spitting the product into the director’s lens, but at the end of a day Ridley was handed more cash than he earned in a month at the BBC, and he savored a budget that allowed him to create a tight visual gem on a short turnaround. A company that he formed, Ridley Scott Associates, soon emerged as one of the most successful and innovative makers of commercials through the seventies and eighties, many of them directed by Ridley or others on his roster, including Tony, who had followed him from art school into the field.

  Ridley seized the opportunity to experiment with the charged emotional and marketing possibilities of moving images. Each Ridley Scott commercial got the mini-masterpiece treatment, storyboarded, designed, lit with perfection and shot by Ridley himself. A sentimental, nostalgic 1973 ad for Hovis bread, featuring a boy with a bicycle in a picturesque village, was voted Britain’s all-time favorite commercial. It was nothing like his 1979 “Share the Fantasy” ad for Chanel No. 5, an erotic reverie intent on a woman lounging by a swimming pool and the brazenly phallic figure of a man who rose from the water between her legs. That one turned heads with a glossy hint of kink.