Off the Cliff

by Becky Aikman

  Advertising made Ridley very rich and very busy—he sometimes made two commercials a week, completing more than a thousand commercials in little more than a decade. “You know how when you get hot you can do anything?” he says. “I loved the work and the pressure. There was a bit of stress, but there’s positive stress and negative stress. Negative stress is sitting around when you’re doing nothing, and I don’t like relaxing. Positive stress is where you feel elevated and usually you are in the face of some bloody huge quandary. I kind of like that. My work is my pleasure.”

  But it drove him crazy as he approached his forties and other British ad directors made the leap to feature films before he did. He used his sizable stash of money to hire screenwriters to develop a property for him, settling on The Duellists, based on a Joseph Conrad story, a period piece about two French army officers who obsessively, even absurdly, fought each other for twenty years. It won the best first work award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1977, when Ridley was thirty-nine. He started prepping another art house project, a nonoperatic version of Tristan and Isolde.

  That’s when he took a sharp turn and went Hollywood, never to pivot back. On a visit there in the spring of 1977, Ridley took in a movie that had opened that week, Star Wars. He flipped over the clever use of the landscape of Morocco, which he knew from commercials, over the mix of animals and human beings in the characters, over the technology of the spaceships. It stirred his competitive juices to the point of anguish. “My biggest compliment when I see a film is if I’m in a fit of total depression,” he says. “I walked out—damn!”

  He set aside the beautiful hand-drawn storyboards for Tristan and Isolde, determined to take a new direction. Other directors had already turned down an outer-space project called Alien, a seemingly standard monster movie set on a spaceship. But when the script came Ridley’s way, it lit up his design imagination. He envisioned chilly, sinister imagery drawn from French heavy-metal comics and commissioned the Swiss artist H. R. Giger to create a monster that shunned the sci-fi cliché of dragonlike creatures.

  Long after its release in 1979, what people remembered most about Alien, aside from the ravishing look of the thing and the hideous monster that pursued the crew of the doomed ship, was the lead role, named Ripley. Alan Ladd Jr., then the head of 20th Century Fox, said to Ridley during preproduction, “What do you think if Ripley is a woman?”

  “It was not for any reason,” Laddie recollects. “I wasn’t trying to make it a women’s picture. It was just a different way to go about it.”

  Ridley, heedless that Laddie was one of the only executives at the time who entertained the idea of movies with prominent female roles, and pretty much unaware that women rarely played the leads in anybody else’s Hollywood movies, didn’t see a problem with that. “Great idea,” he said. “Why not make the hero female?”

  “I never thought about it,” he says. “I only think about the film. Every film is like a painting. I only think of the painting.” His mind shifted immediately to the look of the star. “We need to find somebody who is physically powerful”—a tall order in a field of actresses prized for their passivity and delicate physiques.

  The casting process lasted until just three weeks before the start of principal photography. When he heard about an imposing actress named Sigourney Weaver, who had never done anything of note outside of off-Broadway, he requested a meeting over sushi in New York.

  “This giant walked in,” he says, his face lighting up at the memory. “She had an Afro in those days. It made her a foot and a half taller. I thought she was about seven foot three.” Ridley was convinced.

  But Laddie wasn’t, even after a screen test. As he hesitated, one of his production executives, the British-born Gareth Wigan, invited a dozen secretaries into the room to watch. “Who likes her?” Wigan asked, and all the hands went up. They told him they admired Weaver’s strength. It reminded them of Jane Fonda.

  The role of Ripley is often cited as a milestone for women in film, although the intention was mostly to ratchet up the shock value by placing a woman in jeopardy, as schlockier horror movies did. “I always felt that the decision to make Ripley the survivor was not made out of any great feminist sentiment,” Sigourney Weaver said. “It was, ‘No one will ever guess that this girl will end up being the survivor.’ It wasn’t a statement of any kind, but he really made it work.”

  Reviews for Alien were mixed, but its critical stature grew over time as viewers came to appreciate Ridley’s visual artistry. With $79 million at the box office, the film was considered a hit, just not on the level of the Lucas-Spielberg blockbusters that then roamed the earth. And its novel look was hugely influential. All that gave Ridley enough cachet to land his next film, the futuristic thriller Blade Runner, released in 1982, which allowed his design sensibility to run wild. The story of a Philip Marlowe–like bounty hunter on the trail of rebel androids granted Ridley license to create an original world of dense, murky layers, centered in a decayed megalopolis with elements drawn from Hong Kong, Los Angeles and the north of England—industrial noir. Smoke, grime and rain added even more depth and dimension, a stark contrast to the art direction for typical movie versions of the future—so antiseptic that one could only assume that most of the androids were Roombas.

  Blade Runner wielded influence over the look of every futuristic movie that followed—it put the dys in dystopia—and eventually surpassed even Alien to be regarded as a landmark of cinema. But it was considered a cult obsession at the time. The New York Times review captured the critical consensus by calling Blade Runner “muddled yet mesmerizing,” and the movie was a flop. “Blade Runner was a disaster,” Ridley says. “When it was made, no one saw it. No one understood it, except some diehards. It was not a good result.”

  Yet Ridley wasn’t humbled. To Hollywood players, he was a newcomer, but as he saw it, he had run more film through cameras in commercials than most anyone in the industry. He was forty-three on that set of Blade Runner, and he damn well knew what he was about. “They would never take into account that I’d been in business since I was twenty-seven, in New York, London and LA. I simply stood my ground because I knew I was right. I wasn’t a twenty-five-year-old to get beaten up.” He took particular heat for not communicating well with Harrison Ford, who played the lead, and later Ridley acknowledged that he paid most of his attention to the visuals at Ford’s expense.

  Given all the fuss over special effects and production issues, the women in Blade Runner didn’t attract much notice. The star was a man, yet three female characters were commanding figures—Sean Young portrayed a somewhat typical love interest, but Daryl Hannah and Joanna Cassidy played androids that were fierce and physically robust. Whatever Ridley might say about his attitudes toward women, it’s clear from his choices that he admired strapping ones, not simpering helpmates. He didn’t mind showing them in their underwear, like the white cotton skivvies Sigourney Weaver wore at the climax of Alien, or in nothing but sequins and body paint, which barely covered Joanna Cassidy in Blade Runner. He liked to look at attractive women, but he invested them with personalities like his own, or his mum’s—people who got stuff done and made their marks on the world.

  Witness one of his most renowned sixty seconds of footage, the 1984 Apple television ad. An Orwellian pageant that famously omitted any shot of the Macintosh computer that the ad was promoting, it ran just once, during the Super Bowl. Ridley cast actual skinheads from the National Front to play automatons listening to a ranting leader on a giant TV, interrupted when a female athlete in red running shorts heaved a sledgehammer through the screen, a powerful blow against the man. Yet once again Ridley insists that any feminist message was inadvertent.

  When asked if there was any significance that the athlete was female, Ridley replies with a mischievous smile: “No—she had a great ass. ”

  CHAPTER 8

  D-GIRLS

  Diane Cairns sent her assistant t
o drag a desk chair from the office next door when Mimi Polk showed up in the spring of 1989 with the new, unknown screenwriter. Callie Khouri cut an unusual figure in jeans and a pair of red Tony Lama cowboy boots with butterflies tooled on the sides. The agent, always outfitted in a uniform of three-inch pumps with a tailored dress or skirt and jacket, had never seen cowboy boots before in a professional setting. She masked any reaction with a proper game face.

  As an agent for writers, not top directors or stars, Diane didn’t command one of the offices with commodious seating areas belonging to ICM colleagues like Joe Funicello, who represented Jodie Foster, or Ed Limato, who handled Mel Gibson and Michelle Pfeiffer. It was Diane’s strategy to slip these sorts of luminaries the script for Thelma & Louise. From there, it was a question of maneuvering it around the Hollywood game board, into the sight lines of people at the studios and, God willing, onto the screen.

  Like everyone else who’d heard about the script, Diane had a far-from-promising introduction to it. She’d gotten the tip when she was on the phone about something else with Sue Williams, a development assistant at Ridley Scott’s company. “The writer is looking for an agent,” Williams said. She didn’t mention that Mimi had run it by others who had already passed. “Do you want to read it?”

  For Diane, the answer to that question was always yes. She read ten or twelve scripts every weekend, lying in the sun on the Santa Monica beach. Sometimes she set her alarm for 5 a.m. to bulldoze through a couple more before she headed to the gym and office. Other times she read scripts while she brushed her teeth. Diane’s job was to represent screenwriters, but more important, she sought out material that kept work flowing for the rest of the agency, wading through a slag heap of available scripts and plucking the jewels that might make magic for the directors and stars and studio bosses on high.

  She read Thelma & Louise reclining in bed before sunup in her Westwood condo, her mind fresh but half asleep. It jolted her awake as nothing had in years, although she had enough experience to understand the hurdles. “At the time, everything was all-male, action-driven,” she says. “Even if you had a male-female script, it was the kiss of death.” On the other hand, “I had youthful ignorance on my side,” she says. “I liked it because I liked it.”

  Diane surmised that Mimi had tagged along to the meeting because she wasn’t willing to let her discovery out of her sight. If all went well, this would be Ridley’s first time producing for another director, and Mimi’s first as a coproducer, but Callie needed an agent to sell the script to a studio that was willing to foot the bill.

  Diane opened by praising the writer’s work. Callie let the welcome words wash over her but didn’t allow them to breach her defenses. She quickly laid down her ground rules, and they were cocky for a rank beginner: guarantees that the ending wouldn’t be changed, that she would have the opportunity to direct and that when a studio signed on, it would pay half a million dollars for the screenplay, an aggressive figure during a time when only a few scripts reached such heights. “I remember thinking how distinctive Callie was,” Diane says. “At a time when most women had been conditioned to be more reserved, she had no problem plowing right in there. She didn’t even know how long the odds were. Mimi knew a little bit.”

  Diane said she’d try, but Callie would have to get real about her ambition to direct. Only two women the year before had made top-fifty movies, including Penny Marshall, as the director of Big, and none the year before that. “It was a no-brainer,” Diane recollects. “At that time, women weren’t directing movies. It was stacking the deck too much on top of the two female leads.”

  —

  CALLIE SWALLOWED HARD and gave it a couple days before she signed on. From there the task of getting Thelma & Louise out of the starting gate would fall to Diane and Mimi, two women who had landed jobs on the business side of movies, most of them serving others by vetting stacks of raw material, one of the few Hollywood jobs that gave women a way in.

  “You’re never going to be an agent here,” Diane had been assured in 1980, when she started as a xerox girl at a smaller agency. “I was this cupcake,” she says looking back. “It made sense to me.” Growing up in the sixties and seventies, she hadn’t expected doors to be open to her, despite her business degree from USC. “You could be a teacher, a nurse or a housewife,” she says. “We were still in the shadows of the big revolutions—the drugs, the Pill, Vietnam. I was the only woman in my college business classes. I sound like an old codger, but it didn’t start to change until the mid-eighties.”

  When one of her first bosses told her she was too pretty to be taken seriously, her comeback was to laugh and say, “I’ll scar my face.”

  In 1985, she traded up to the literary department of the industry giant ICM. Female agents there were still fairly rare, prized as nurturers, able to coddle and keep the clients happy, although there were exceptions, like Sue Mengers, a fireball who’d won a preeminent place in the seventies on pure bravado. Diane walked a middle line, rigorously competent, speaking in a kind of business staccato. “Everybody thinks they should be wearing white gloves when they walk into your office,” a colleague told her. She scored some important victories before Thelma & Louise crossed her path, partly by exercising judgment that ran against the grain. Diane had sniffed out the script for the sexual thriller Fatal Attraction for the director Adrian Lyne, an important ICM client. She also played a part in placing the period drama Dangerous Liaisons with a studio and getting the script to Michelle Pfeiffer.

  Diane didn’t wind up on the right side of every call. Back when she was a pup agent at her first job, she read the script for what would become 1983’s multiple-Oscar winner Terms of Endearment. “Honestly,” Diane told her boss, “I don’t know who wants to see a movie with two women bitching at each other for two hours.”

  “It was a complete whiff,” she says. The next time she was handed a script about two fully formed difficult but funny women, she vowed to take off the white gloves.

  —

  FOR MIMI POLK, Callie’s script represented a chance to break into a higher echelon. Mimi had worked primarily as a D-girl, short for development girl, the accepted industry term for the mostly female workforce in the bottom tier of studio or production jobs. Most D-girls had graduated from good colleges, often with literature degrees. If asked, they could probably parse the meager parallels between The Count of Monte Cristo and Rambo, but mostly they read piles of submissions so they could pass the best contenders along to higher-ups. For years, D-girl was by far the most common and, outside of secretarial work, often the only job for women at studios, recognition that they were smart enough to identify good material but not to greenlight pictures or manage their production. A few, including Sherry Lansing and Paula Weinstein, had parlayed the role into more-responsible jobs.

  Mimi, whose father had been president and CEO of MGM in New York briefly in the 1960s, had apprenticed in theater and made in-house corporate films before looking for work in London. In one memorable interview for a D-girl job, a movie executive she already knew asked if she would be interested in auditioning for the mermaid role in Splash.

  “You mean as a topless mermaid?” Mimi answered, masking her incredulity. “I’m not an actress. I want to be a producer.”

  No job was forthcoming, and when she got up and turned her narrow frame toward the door, the executive said, “Have you gained weight?”

  “No,” she replied.

  “Because your ass got really big.”

  It was a relief to meet Ridley, who often put women in charge of his administrative dealings. “I found the best man for the job, and it turned out to be a woman,” he was fond of saying. “I treat women like one of the guys. They treat me like one of the girls. I’ve never had a problem, and I never understand that bullshit.” After five years in Ridley’s employ, Mimi moved to LA in 1988 to run his office there. She hired a D-girl of her own.

 
Fair-haired, with pale blue eyes and fine, close-set features, Mimi invariably looked well turned out in flat shoes, with not a scrap of makeup. She could be secretive around the office to protect her interests, excluding her D-girl from meetings, and deployed a strictly composed personality and clipped way of speaking that made her emotions hard to read. “One of the best ways for a woman to succeed as a producer or anything else,” she says, “is to be a defuser of drama.”

  Mimi calculated that producing the improbable screenplay by Callie Khouri, such a departure from her boss’s usual métier, would show off his range and enhance his career as well as her own. “Not many scripts came his way, because everyone thought of him as a big-action sci-fi director,” says Mimi. “For drama, there were maybe thirty or forty directors in front of him in line. That’s why it was a real gem to find Thelma & Louise.”

  —

  IT HAD TO COMPETE for her boss’s attention with other pressing priorities. By the time Ridley read the script in the spring of 1989, he had taken some punches. His 1985 release, Legend, a dark fantasy with goblins and unicorns, had tanked despite ravishing visuals and the casting of a fledgling Tom Cruise. Someone to Watch Over Me, a 1987 romance about a cop who falls for a woman he is assigned to protect, met a similar fate. In 1989, he was wrapping up Black Rain, a cop melodrama starring Michael Douglas and set primarily in a rain-slicked, neon-lit Japan, but Fox had snubbed him for the sequel to Alien, turning to James Cameron instead. The producer Joel Silver was courting Ridley to make an elaborate special-effects action film called Isobar that Mimi nicknamed Alien on a Train, but it went without saying that another futuristic mayhem-in-transit project would hardly have represented a creative leap forward.