Off the Cliff

by Becky Aikman

  Like Ridley, Laddie didn’t see himself as championing women, but he had conducted his life surrounded by them—as the son of a single mother and father of four daughters, not to mention the women he hired for responsible jobs. “I didn’t think of them as women,” he says. “They were just smart people. They could have been men instead.”

  His explanation for making movies with female leads was equally simple. Among the studio pictures he appreciated as a child, he says, “There were women’s pictures, and they were very important, and they did very well.” People could say he was locked in a time warp, oblivious to trends, but Laddie saw the women’s audience as an opportunity he had nearly to himself. He was so old-school, he’d become practically revolutionary.

  —

  BECKY POLLACK CALLED LADDIE and her other Pathé colleagues first thing Saturday morning and told them to drop what they were doing to read Thelma & Louise so they could all form an opinion by Monday. Pathé, the dark horse, knew it had to break fast out of the gate. Laddie, naturally, kept his response brief. He told Becky on the phone Saturday afternoon: “It’s one of the few scripts that I’ve read that I can remember saying it’s a perfect script. Let’s go make the movie.”

  At the Monday-morning meeting on July 24, arguments flared over the screenplay, especially the ending, but that’s what the staff of young iconoclasts at the studio liked about the script—it fired them up. Becky got the go-ahead to bid. She had tied herself into a knot expecting that Pathé wouldn’t be able to keep pace with the richer studios. Her best chance, Becky thought, was to declare an absolute embrace of the story, right down to that ending. It helped that this was something she really meant. The finish felt organic to her, and it gave her an adrenaline rush to think that her studio might be the one to get everyone from the audience to the Hollywood establishment talking.

  “What can I say?” Becky told Diane Cairns on the phone. “Everybody loves it here.”

  Becky backed up her praise with everything Callie wanted: $100,000 up front and $400,000 on commencement of filming, a top-dollar deal for a writer of any gender and a landmark for a woman, especially a beginner. Perhaps even more important for Callie, she got a guarantee that her ending would at least be shot, although everyone recognized that an alternative might slip in there someday, too. Becky and Laddie stepped up with such complete conviction that their business affairs department signed and sealed the deal within a day.

  Over at ICM on Tuesday morning, the strangest thing happened. Orion called to feel it out: Was the movie still available? Other studios were on the line, too, hinting that they couldn’t believe they had passed. It seems the script had scared them too much to commit until they saw someone else do it. But Diane didn’t budge—Callie had got her deal, at a studio that was a true believer. Thelma & Louise needed a home where it could be appreciated for what it was.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE RIGHT MAN FOR THE JOB

  The world would never know whether Tony Scott would have turned Thelma & Louise into Tits and Bullets.

  “I like it,” Tony told his brother, “but it’s not really for me. I’ve got problems with women.”

  “But that’s the whole point, dude!” Ridley said.

  Tracking down a director without such problems, Ridley realized, might prove harder than he thought. Precisely because this material lived so far outside his own area of comfort, he scheduled a meeting with Callie, so he’d be ready to answer the inevitable questions from the directors or actors he tried to recruit.

  At the first encounter, Ridley felt as if he were auditioning for the writer, attempting to convince her that he was worthy of producing her story. From there, they met repeatedly, combing through the script page by page and line by line, Ridley exploring Callie’s intent and point of view, her opinions about the characters, about men and women. “It was like a sponge going into every crevice of my brain,” Callie recalls.

  Ridley’s office consisted of a couple of rooms and a reception area on the Columbia lot, but he preferred to spend his days at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, where he lodged when he was in town. He enjoyed working outside, the staff shouting across the pool to ask what he wanted for lunch, and he held meetings in the bar when the crowds cleared out at two in the afternoon. Callie and Ridley split their conclaves between the office and the hotel.

  Ridley searches for the right word to describe Callie Khouri. Vociferous? Outspoken? He wryly called the sessions “daily lectures,” as she led him through a litany of reasons not to touch this, not to touch that. He questioned whether men really behaved the way the guys in the screenplay did, whether the women’s anger was justified. Had any of this ever happened to her?

  “Are you kidding me?” Callie exclaimed. “I walk down the street and I get all kinds of catcalls. It’s disgusting.”

  Ridley thought to himself, A little humor, dear. He recalled an actress who once told him, “Shit, if I walk by a building site and there are no comments, I figure it’s all over.”

  But he listened respectfully, and Callie hammered her point home. The events in the script hadn’t happened to her, she said, except for the truck driver’s lewd overtures. “That happens to everybody,” she said. “The point is, it doesn’t matter if it happened to me. These things happen all the time, and it could have been me and it could be any of the women you have ever come into contact with.”

  “I took it mainly because she’s right,” Ridley said later. “She’s absolutely right.” They went on to discuss questions of tone. Ridley worried that the story could tilt toward a crusading drama, and he argued for emphasis on the comedy. Movies aren’t a cheap medium, he asserted, and part of the director’s job was to pay for them by putting as many bums in the seats as possible. “If you make this serious, about two hard, tough women in a car, you will rule out fifty percent of your audience,” Ridley said. “Guys are going to get irritated. The funnier it is, the more people it will reach.” He thought the men in the audience should eat some crow, but he wanted them to enjoy the taste.

  Callie was all for it. “If it’s devoid of humor,” she said, “then something has gone terribly wrong.”

  Ridley rarely shared his visual ideas with writers, but Callie, given her ambition to direct, was eager to engage. He asked what films had influenced her, and she said Lonely Are the Brave and Out of the Past—daytime noir in the West. “It should start out looking like a Sears and Roebuck catalog,” she said, “and end up looking like a cross between a Maxfield Parrish painting and some kind of photorealist painting of the West.” As for the two stars, Callie wanted “to see them become more and more natural but more and more beautiful as the movie goes on.”

  Mimi sometimes broke into the meetings to implore: “You’re supposed to be cutting the script.” “We are,” Ridley said, although you wouldn’t know it from the detours they’d taken about, say, the Westerns of John Ford. “Callie really cared about the integrity of the script, that the women were portrayed as real and multilayered,” recalls Mimi. “She didn’t want it to be too glossy or overproduced. Then it wouldn’t have the depth she wanted.”

  A genuine collaboration developed, and a genuine regard. Callie found Ridley reserved but with a droll sense of humor. “I liked him a lot,” she says. “I really did.”

  The feeling was mutual. “I respected the fact that she wrote it,” he says. “I wanted it from a woman’s point of view, and I got it from a woman’s point of view.”

  In the end, they agreed not to change much of anything, just to cut a bit so it wouldn’t feel overly long. The script got a little bit tighter, a little more intensely what it already was. Whatever his initial feelings about the relative outrageousness of men making catcalls and vulgar gestures toward women, Ridley intended to subsume his point of view to Callie’s. A smooth start, except that Ridley still didn’t want to direct the film, and Callie still did.

  —

&nb
sp; RIDLEY SPENT MUCH OF THE SUMMER of 1989 searching for the right man for that job. He headed straight toward what he knew: exciting visual stylists who had made their bones in commercials. Guys like him. He probably shouldn’t have been surprised when some of them weren’t feeling it, either.

  Joe Pytka, for example, was something of a Ridley clone. A former art student, Pytka had directed thousands of commercials, punchy Super Bowl ads for Nike, Budweiser and the public service message “Your Brain on Drugs.” His first feature, Let It Ride, about a gambler at the track, was about to debut to little fanfare. His background touting beer and sports didn’t equip him with much affinity for Callie’s script. “He didn’t really get it,” Ridley says.

  Jeremiah Chechik, another commercial director, did. Ridley visited the cutting room where Chechik was editing his first feature, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. The newbie director admired the portrayal of Thelma and Louise in contrast to other scripts he’d seen, where female characters were cartoonish, shallow and too young to be interesting. But at that point Ridley was having trouble getting the female-centric story past the studio gatekeepers, so Chechik moved on.

  Not all of the candidates were white men who had made commercials, but they were white men all the same, often with résumés that were similar to Ridley’s in other ways. He danced for a while with Chris Menges, a Brit who had worked on Tony’s first student film and started as a cinematographer, going on to make The Mission, about Jesuit priests in South America. And with Kevin Reynolds, who had made Fandango, a male-buddy road comedy with Kevin Costner. A number of the directors Ridley approached expressed interest, but Ridley fretted they wouldn’t capture the humor he saw in the story, or the grandeur. “Tony could deliver an odyssey,” Ridley says, “but I was worried about the others reading the script as too small.”

  Or the tone might not be as balanced as he envisioned. He and Mimi thought that Tim Hunter, who had directed the bleak indie drama River’s Edge, had terrific ideas, but they worried he might go too dark.

  Most of the candidates had made virtually all-male movies, as befit the times. Jonathan Kaplan, an anomaly, was coming off The Accused. But in a conversation with Ridley, Kaplan said he didn’t want to become typecast as the rape director, and he expressed doubts about the final scene. “I was totally behind the relationship of the women,” he remembers. “But it was an ending where they’d placed themselves in a corner.”

  A few other directors lodged more-heated objections to the script. Phillip Noyce, an Australian who’d struck gold with the thriller Dead Calm, “was irritated by it,” Ridley says. Harry Hook, a Brit who had just delivered Lord of the Flies, claimed to have trouble getting the point.

  Becky and Laddie urged Ridley to consider more-renowned directors. He and Mimi met with Bob Rafelson but doubted his feel for the characters. “I’m not sure it would have been as kind or as funny, as amusing, as I saw it,” says Ridley. By now he had grown protective of Thelma and Louise. He balked when other directors wanted to fix them. He didn’t think they needed fixing.

  Becky sent memos listing dozens of possibilities, including Joan Micklin Silver, Susan Seidelman and Amy Heckerling, all masters of character and comedy, but no women made Mimi and Ridley’s short list for meetings. Kathryn Bigelow was known to be on another project, not that she seemed to be in the running anyway. “She would have been a good idea,” Ridley says in retrospect, admitting he hadn’t thought of her back then.

  “Ridley is very fair-minded as far as women making it in the workplace,” says Sue Williams, the development assistant in his office. “But at the same time, he’s got the attitude of ‘I’ll get my buddy to do it.’ He’s three-quarters of the way toward feminism.”

  Later Ridley told a British film magazine that he deliberately shied away from considering women, making it clear he didn’t trust them to be objective about the subject matter. “Because the focus is two women looking at men,” he said, “then the logic is that a man should direct it, if you can find the right guy, because if a woman directs it she might go into overkill and, you know, get into some kind of a vendetta. I think it’s a film that you should come out of and recognize a little bit of yourself in there somewhere, and maybe agree with it. A man can get that perspective.” He didn’t seem to consider that men addressed matters of manhood in movies all the time without anyone fretting about bias.

  “Why not me?” Callie kept asking Mimi. Many of the names she’d heard bandied about ranked well below the Hollywood stratosphere. Mimi escorted the screenwriter to make her case with Laddie, who listened quietly and then assured her, “We’re going to get the biggest A-list director and the biggest stars we can find for this movie. I’m sorry.” He was taking enough risk with this half-million-dollar investment in the script; he wasn’t about to risk more.

  In the fall of 1989, it looked as if a solution might be at hand when Laddie put forward one of his favorite colleagues and friends, Richard Donner. Donner made big, successful movies, teeming with action and humor. His first feature, The Omen, launched him in 1976, and he went on to direct Superman, the first of the major comic book movies, and Lethal Weapon, one of the most influential eighties male-buddy blockbusters. Lethal Weapon was the kind of large-scale, fast-paced but funny entertainment that Ridley had in mind for Thelma & Louise.

  Donner found the script so rare as to be “historic.” “It was a tough time for women in Hollywood,” he says, “but Callie had written such a great piece of material that somewhere somebody was going to say go.” He even approved of the ending, suggesting a way to make it more palatable to the audience. As the car charged toward the edge of the cliff, he told Mimi, the tires might kick up so much dust that it would obscure the scene. The characters would simply disappear in the cloud. “It would be up to the audience how it wanted them to conclude their lives,” he says.

  Ridley backed away, though, when Donner proposed that his wife, Lauren Shuler Donner, produce the film. Ridley didn’t want to share producing tasks. And there were other signs that Ridley wasn’t enthusiastic. He resisted scheduling places and times to meet, and when he did, he didn’t show up. Eventually, Donner stopped hearing back.

  “There was always a reason why so-and-so wasn’t right,” says Laddie. “Ridley kept rejecting everybody who wanted to do it, and they were all top directors. They were not secondary no-talent bums.”

  Turning the project over to another master was proving an anguishing proposition. “If you’re a producer,” Ridley said, “it’s like being a great antique dealer. You’ve got to be prepared to sell your favorite table.” The more he talked to Callie about adjustments and tightening and underlying ideas, and the more he talked to directors about look and feel and tone, the more clearly Ridley saw the movie in his head. The movie playing there was more elevated than two women taking a trip in a car. The trip was their last journey, a meaningful one, and as such it evolved into something more romantic, more majestic, more memorable in his mind. It should make a grand statement as the two figures moved through the American landscape to their inevitable demise. Thelma & Louise had transmogrified into more than a script that had made him laugh. It had become Ridley’s favorite table, and he couldn’t bring himself to sell it.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE CURSE OF KATHERINE

  Stars like Michelle Pfeiffer and Jodie Foster weren’t going to wait forever for Ridley Scott to get off the dime. They had careers to cultivate and other offers to consider. Jonathan Demme, who had directed Michelle in Married to the Mob, was wooing her for the plum part of Clarice Starling in the serial-killer thriller The Silence of the Lambs. Jodie was leaning toward joining Love Field, a melodrama with her Accused director, Jonathan Kaplan, about an interracial relationship. But when Michelle balked at Silence because she thought the violence was too grotesque, the opportunities flipped. Jodie signed on for the Silence part, and Michelle took Love Field. Thelma & Louise had lost its stars.

>   No stars, no director, no mojo—the production seemed stalled before it could begin. But, defying all logic, this latest turn transformed the project into something of a sensation. Not that long ago Callie and Amanda couldn’t get arrested with the script. Now the vacancy at the top of the cast set off a flat-out scramble by some of Hollywood’s biggest names to win the most substantial roles they had seen in years. It seemed as if every agent who represented anyone with a vagina and a pulse besieged Pathé and Ridley’s company for a shot. “Every day, you’d hear different women who were attached to it,” says Kaplan.

  “It was a free-for-all,” says Diane. Once, no top star would have lowered herself to openly pursue a part. She wouldn’t meet for so much as a friendly drink without an offer on the table first. But by 1989 that taboo had yielded to a new reality. If actresses or their agents didn’t jump on the phone to ask for a prime opportunity, they were out of the game. Agents told their clients: “The only way you are going to get this role is to fight for it.” That went double for the two roles in Callie’s once-neglected script.

  Producers and studios might have shied away from it, but actresses were desperate for the meaty, flawed, fully loaded roles it provided, with character arcs that would put the players’ skills to the test. “You would have to be a complete idiot to read that spectacular script and not respond to the material if you’re an actor,” says David Eidenberg, Geena Davis’s agent at the time. “It was overwhelming.” He continued to call Mimi or Becky on behalf of Geena once or twice a week, every week, trying to outflank the competition, but it didn’t look promising. On weekly lists that Pathé drew up of dozens of potential stars, his client appeared only twice, each time misspelled as “Gina.”