Off the Cliff

by Becky Aikman

  Meanwhile, by some measures Ridley’s younger brother was eclipsing him. Tony had also moved from commercials to movies and shot to the top of the A-list with his second film, 1986’s Top Gun, the Tom Cruise fighter-jet action extravaganza, which earned an astounding $357 million worldwide. He had caught the attention of the movie’s producers, the action impresarios Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, with a fast-cutting commercial that pitted a Saab 900 against a jet, both of them sleek, fast and turbocharged under the camera’s besotted caress. Beverly Hills Cop II, another huge hit for Simpson-Bruckheimer, kept the team soaring into another collaboration, the Tom Cruise NASCAR spectacle, Days of Thunder. In all three, a few sexy women ceded the center of attention to the relationships that really counted among competitive men.

  People in the business started to define the brothers in opposition to each other: Tony, the embodiment of the decade with his flair for high-concept action movies, the critics be damned; Ridley, the master of moody artistry, bent on success but steering clear of obvious commercial choices.

  Coworkers warmed to Tony’s sociability in contrast to Ridley’s restraint. “Ridley is like a wizard—kind of mysterious and a little rough and a little more difficult, a little less accessible in some ways,” says Susan Sarandon, who worked with Tony on his first film, the stylish vampire chiller The Hunger. “Ridley is more solemn, a man of few, very specific words, compared to Tony, who was bubbly, exuberant, very chatty and not particularly mysterious at all.”

  Their opposing personal styles led to very different pictures. While Tony’s appeals to the masses didn’t pretend to aim for gravitas, Ridley’s delved deeper. He always seemed to strive for something more that he might not be able to put into words, at risk of leaving the masses scratching their heads. Ridley often resisted studio pressure for happy endings, while Tony delivered them in slow-motion showers of triumph. Yet Ridley’s wealth and success in the advertising sphere, which continued in tandem with his movies, granted him a kind of superpower strength in insecure Hollywood—he didn’t much care what people thought of him.

  “He’s a bull, and I am, too,” Tony once told the Hollywood Reporter. “Nothing takes him down. We have enormous pain resistance.”

  —

  HOWEVER MUCH HE NEEDED A CHANGE, Ridley still couldn’t see himself directing Callie’s story. “It was very much not my thing,” he admits. “I tend to do action-driven things. I love period. This was about women talking about guys and what assholes guys can be.”

  Fortunately, he did know the perfect man for the job, someone with box-office clout and a flair for action tempered with comedy. “He was very good with women,” Ridley says. “He could make them really sexy, because he had that kind of rapport with them. And he was hot then, so it would have been made easily.”

  Ridley hadn’t yet met with Callie, who so abhorred the treatment of women in eighties blockbusters, but when he did, he planned to tell her that he would offer the job of directing Thelma & Louise to the man responsible for one of the films that offended her most, Beverly Hills Cop II. His hotshot brother Tony Scott.

  CHAPTER 9

  PLAYING A DIFFERENT GAME

  Geena Davis was a star on the rise who had just collected a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The Accidental Tourist, but she wasn’t about to wait around for the rare good role to amble her way. There were three or four meaty, three-dimensional parts for women up for grabs in any given year. The competition was way too fierce for proud passivity.

  Then she heard about not one, but—could it be?—two such elusive roles in a script that was beginning to float around in the summer of 1989. Someone slipped Geena an early copy of Thelma & Louise. “I was just mad for it,” she’d decided. “Absolutely obsessed in love with it.”

  “These were two completely filled-out characters who were absolutely equal, who had so many colors and moments,” she says. “And they had to transform themselves in four days into killing themselves, and it had to make sense!” So desperately did she want in that she cold-called Callie and went over to her house to comb through the script together, the better to make a case.

  Geena wasn’t an obvious choice for a female-driven action movie. Even though she landed sizable parts with enviable regularity, the word quirky had become attached to her, trailing her like a devoted mutt, which was strange, because with her lanky, dynamic six-foot frame and unconventional beauty, she radiated dazzling star power. She wasn’t the obvious choice for typical docile-girlfriend roles, either, nor did she want to play them. Geena knew she was capable of more, if only the opportunity presented itself.

  Her agent, David Eidenberg, who shared her fervor for Thelma & Louise, phoned Ridley to make the case. It was too late, Ridley said. ICM’s marquee names, Jodie Foster and Michelle Pfeiffer, had already snapped up the roles.

  In case someone fell out, Eidenberg called to badger Mimi Polk every week. “Has anything changed? Because Geena’s still interested.” But with parts that rare and that good, an unconventional midlevel star like Geena Davis didn’t stand a chance.

  —

  LANDING JODIE AND MICHELLE WAS A COUP. It happened right away once Diane and Mimi locked in a deal for Ridley to produce Callie’s script. Diane zigzagged through the halls of the agency to put the script in the hands of the actresses’ reps, Mimi double-teamed with phone calls and the two blond superstars had enlisted by June of 1989. The only question left was who should play which role.

  In terms of star power, those two were no Tom Cruises or Harrison Fords—no women were—yet both were critically respected and popular with audiences. Jodie was only twenty-six years old, but she had started earning her place as an industry fixture as far back as she could remember. Cast in her first commercial—wearing a swimsuit bottom in a Coppertone ad—at the age of three, she was firmly established as a working actor by the time she turned ten. Even then, she was self-possessed and precocious, with a firm handshake and a firm point of view. At twelve, she kicked off a series of provocative choices by playing, yes, a prostitute, one her own age, in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. When the film played at Cannes in 1977, Jodie wowed a press conference when she translated her cast mates’ comments into perfect French.

  A Best Actress Oscar for The Accused a couple months before she saw the script for Thelma & Louise capped a slate of eighties films that met with mixed success but generally positive reviews for Jodie’s performances. Her role as the victim of a gang rape in that film perfectly showcased her talent. With watchful, piercing blue eyes, delicate features, a husky voice and obvious intelligence, she often portrayed young women who were worldly beyond their years, their taut reserve masking barely visible insecurities.

  But even with her notable gifts, Jodie found it difficult to land meaningful roles. Before The Accused, she considered quitting the profession. “I couldn’t see spending my life working with bad material,” she said. The director Jonathan Kaplan had to lobby to cast her in the movie over objections from studio executives who called her “not rapeable enough,” he says. They worried that she was too “chubby” and “tough.” Jodie won the role only after Kaplan asked her to film a second audition where she dressed and acted softer than he knew was right for the character. Once she got the part, she did it her way. With $32 million at the box office, the movie became one of those female-driven surprise hits.

  Michelle Pfeiffer had followed a more conventional path, eased by a stunning Southern California beauty that left the entertainment media groveling with superlatives. BEING DROP-DEAD GORGEOUS NEARLY DOOMED MICHELLE PFEIFFER TO BIMBO LIMBO, said a headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The story went on to chronicle People’s description of her “turquoise eyes in a flawless blond setting” and “fragile, yet all-American voluptuousness” and to repeat the St. Petersburg Times’s paean to her “hair finer than corn silk, eyes clearer than the sky and skin smooth as porcelain.” She broke records for winning slots on “Most Bea
utiful” lists.

  It’s true that the former Miss Orange County 1978 did land mostly bimbo roles at first, including a recurring character named only “the Bombshell” on a TV show called Delta House. She won praise mostly for her icy looks in her breakthrough film, Scarface, in 1983. But she proved to have real acting range when she played a Long Island mob wife in Jonathan Demme’s comic Married to the Mob. She topped that with an Oscar nomination for her period turn as a French aristocrat in Dangerous Liaisons in 1988.

  If any actress was hotter than Jodie Foster just then, it was Michelle Pfeiffer, and vice versa. ICM couldn’t believe its luck at finding a vehicle to showcase them. “It was lightning in a bottle,” says Diane Cairns. “That we got one to commit, much less both, much less in a nanosecond— I loved both of those actresses and thought, I really want to see this movie.”

  The only problem was, they both wanted to play Thelma, the one who set the plot in motion by stumbling into trouble, and the one who followed the more exaggerated arc from flighty housewife to convenience-store bandit and hard-core desperado. Both were professional enough to get on the phone and work it out between themselves: Jodie would be Thelma. Michelle would be Louise. And the starriest female package since Julia in 1977 would test its luck with the studio bosses who could greenlight Thelma & Louise.

  Only Callie was less than thrilled. She envisioned her characters as women you wouldn’t notice if you spotted them in the grocery store. If Michelle Pfeiffer returned to the Vons supermarket where she had worked as a teenage checkout girl, she would set off a run in aisle 3.

  —

  DESPITE SUCH A POTENT COMBO, the package did not trigger a stampede at the studios. Columbia Pictures and Paramount both passed as soon as Mimi and Ridley approached. “Two girls commit murder and then suicide” was the consensus in the coverage. “For guys—no problem!” Mimi says. “But with chicks doing it, it was not so acceptable.”

  She got a better reception at Warner Bros. “It was brilliantly written,” says Bill Gerber, Warner’s vice president of development. “It was a great relationship movie, and just the conceit that there were two women in 1989 was original in and of itself.” But other executives there expressed doubts about the ending. Gerber thought Warner would have insisted on filming two options and preferred a cast from its roster of in-house stars, with Goldie Hawn almost certainly one of the principals. And besides, Warner wasn’t prepared to fork over Callie’s asking price.

  After hearing what was going on, Callie called her new agent in a panic: “You’ve got to get in there.” All that work—it was slipping away. Diane got cracking before the stigma of rejection spread, calling the contacts that she, Jeff Berg and the agents for Jodie and Michelle considered most receptive. Two days later, on Friday, July 21, the messengers from the ICM mailroom fanned out across town bearing packets with a cover letter and Callie’s script in hand.

  —

  BECKY POLLACK NEVER FORGOT that Friday night, July 21, 1989, even though she spent it exactly the way she spent every Friday night, in bed in her condo in Westwood, reading through a pile of scripts. She had read so many screenplays, treatments, books, articles and other possible source materials for movies since she’d started as a D-girl at Pathé Entertainment that her eyesight had degenerated from needing only distance glasses for driving at night to blind as a bat up close.

  That particular evening fixed in her memory, though, because once she climbed into bed and perched her glasses on her nose, she never settled in. She never even leaned back. She read Thelma & Louise from beginning to end, all the while sitting straight up. She saw the same problems everyone else did, but she didn’t think about the business end of the equation. She was purely entertained. “Thelma & Louise was a magical confluence of events,” she says. “It was like the Big Bang. The right things happened, all at the right time.” All the things that weren’t supposed to happen.

  One of which was Becky’s employer, Pathé, with its sketchy recent history, getting a chance at a hot property. Owned by a mysterious Italian financier, Giancarlo Parretti, who also bought the more storied MGM, Pathé was seen as being perpetually on the verge of going bankrupt or being sold, so few would entrust it with a pet project. The company, housed in a rental office building on San Vincente, often couldn’t afford blue-chip scripts or top-tier talent, couldn’t pay for special effects or exotic locations. Once, Pathé took a meeting with the people from Marvel Comics, which was absurd—absent the existence of actual superheroes, Pathé didn’t have the budget to make anybody fly. It could barely afford the spandex suit.

  “Some days we had money to buy scripts, some days we didn’t,” says Becky. “Some days we had money to finance movies, some days we didn’t.”

  The company’s only chance at survival was to play a different game. “The other studios were the Yankees, and we were the Tampa Bay Rays,” says Greg Foster, a young employee—most of Pathé’s workers were young—in the marketing department.

  At most studios, says Becky, “the goal was to make execution-proof movies,” presold, with simple premises backed by proven stars—Tom Cruise drives a racecar, Eddie Murphy busts the bad guys. Character-driven, script-driven movies that required explanations and trafficked in nuance broke the rules. Female-driven stories broke the rules. Downer endings broke the rules.

  Pathé’s game, on the other hand, was ludicrously old-fashioned. Because they couldn’t afford to play in the high-concept league, Pathé people had to fall back on the ancient ritual of unearthing great material and trusting their instincts to carry it through, rules or no. Material, company executives liked to say, was the great equalizer.

  Becky herself played a different game, too, which suited her fine. She wanted nothing to do with the business of business as usual. It didn’t suit her personality, which was reflective, studious, introspective. “Some people are great movers and shakers,” she says. “They can go to lunch and breakfast and wheel and deal with agents. Some people do it by having a real imprimatur of their own, like ‘this is the guy who does all the Marvel movies.’ I was more comfortable doing it a much slower way. I loved to read. Reading was not only what I liked but what worked for me.”

  Despite her connections, Becky hadn’t aspired to working in the industry. She’d planned to go to graduate school after earning a degree in history at UCLA but had some months to fill first. No one wanted to hire such a self-effacing intellectual until Paula Weinstein, who knew Becky’s father, Sydney, advised her to talk to Alan Ladd Jr. At the time, in the mid-eighties, women executives were so unusual that there were few templates for them to follow. One of them was to work for Laddie. He hired women, Weinstein said, and he listened to their advice.

  He placed Becky on the D-girl track to read material for him personally. After a couple years, he promoted her to director of creative affairs, then, by her late twenties, to executive vice president of production. “He cut me loose and let me start finding scripts and put together projects on my own,” she says. “Laddie would really let you fly.”

  Becky had seen enough arrogant behavior in Hollywood that she was careful to conduct herself respectfully. Understated, with a round face and blond hair often tied back in a ponytail, she didn’t want to be associated with the baby moguls who were common at the time: guys in their twenties who alienated the creative community with their power games and vainglorious poses. She had seen how they made her father cringe. Her pleasure was to nurture writers, like Randall Wallace, with whom she spent years working one-on-one while he wrestled with the script for Braveheart. “The next thing I knew, I was having breakfast at the Four Seasons with Mel Gibson, and I thought, Okay, message to self, just work on the script. Just create the material and let that be your calling card.”

  Becky didn’t see herself in the other women who had broken through as executives, either. “When I watched the women who had blazed a trail, they had a real mettle to them that I’m n
ot sure I had,” Becky says. “I didn’t have the hunger to swim upstream like that. The thing that drove me was being able to work on writer-driven material that attracted really interesting filmmakers. I could hide behind that.”

  Becky’s sympathetic style meshed with her boss’s unassuming personality. Laddie, who shared his father’s small stature and all-American features, was so intensely reserved that it was the first thing most people said about him, or at least the second. “Laddie is very, very astute,” says Ridley. “I did five films with him. It took four for him to even speak to me.”

  Laddie’s reticence, in fact, was legendary in the business—his junior executives mainlined coffee before joining him for lunch so they’d get a jolt of energy to keep up the one-sided conversation. They often called him on the phone, even though his office was steps away, to avoid the awkward silences in person.

  But he had earned a right to swagger with a string of unusual hits. At 20th Century Fox, where he rose to president in the seventies, he risked ridicule by greenlighting the nutty, out-of-the-mainstream Star Wars. Between stints at Fox, his own production company and later as chairman of MGM/UA, he had a hand in films like Ridley’s Alien and Blade Runner, as well as Chariots of Fire and The Omen. He was also willing to gamble on movies about women when no one else would: The Turning Point (1977), Julia (1977), An Unmarried Woman (1978), Norma Rae (1979), 9 to 5 (1980) and Moonstruck (1987). Time after time, Laddie trumped the conventional wisdom all the way to the bank—and the Oscar podium—as the women’s films others eschewed scooped up ticket sales, acclaim and awards.