Off the Cliff

by Becky Aikman

  Script aside, you’d also have to be an idiot not to see another reason for the stampede. Good actresses wanted to work, in the broadest sense of pushing themselves to the limits of their abilities and being well paid to do it. But women captured only 29 percent of movie roles in 1989, and male actors were paid 60 percent more on average. Speaking at a Screen Actors Guild conference in 1990, Meryl Streep drily noted, “If the trend continues, by the year 2000 women will represent thirteen percent of all roles. And in twenty years, we will have been eliminated from movies entirely.” Her prediction proved overly grim: twenty-five years later, the percentage of roles for female actors remained exactly where it was in 1989.

  With the ongoing rise of action movies and the fading of seventies icons like Fonda and Streisand, the new generation of actresses could barely crack the annual top-ten lists of movie stars in the mid- to late eighties, and none could sustain that stature as Tom Cruise, Eddie Murphy and Michael Douglas did year after year. Meryl Streep managed to make it in 1984 and 1985, Bette Midler in 1986 and 1988 and Kathleen Turner in 1986 and 1989, but Cher, Whoopi Goldberg and Glenn Close each secured a spot just once and then disappeared. No one else made the cut. Susan Sarandon, who first broke into movies as a seventies ingenue, says, “There were very few women who started with me who survived.”

  Many men couldn’t get a break in action blockbusters, either, if they weren’t physically imposing enough, and those who did found their conservatory training wasted on the tasks of running, jumping, ducking and grunting. But at least there were plenty of minor roles and character parts for men—the guy who ran the deli, the boss at the office, the cop caught in the shootout, the third soldier from the left.

  An actress often found herself the only woman on the set, a young, inexperienced girl whose only job was to be seductive. “By the time an actor was being given an opportunity to helm a project, he may have had fifteen to twenty little roles—the best-friend roles,” says Carrie Frazier, a prominent casting director in the eighties. “He kind of knew how things worked. The actresses at seventeen or eighteen were being given leads and told to get naked. Oh my God, how did they survive? How did they manage the craftsmanship of it, the comfort level of it?”

  While actors could explore a wide variety of human shadings, the female lead was so similar in every movie that Frazier had a name for her: Katherine. As in “Oh, here comes Katherine again.” Katherine was attractive, of course, or “fuckable,” as she was so often labeled behind the scenes. But the leading lady in an eighties movie had to be classy, too, to be a worthy girlfriend of the star. “Katherine is sexy, but not a slut,” says Frazier. “She is smart, because the guy has to have an interesting woman, but not one that would surmount him in any way. She works in an art gallery—an art gallery is perfect. She can be a veterinarian but not a surgeon, a photographer but not an editor. She’s a little more refined than the girl with the orange hair who is her best friend. The best friend is funny, and she gets the funny lines, because it shows that our girl has a sense of humor, but not too much, because that’s not really feminine. Katherine can’t be even a little crass or laugh too much.”

  It fell to men to shout orders and save the world from terrorists and maniacs. Actresses found their hopes for rounded and fulfilling careers stifled. The funny best friend offered an opening for someone like Bette Midler, who carried a couple movies as a lead but then later appeared in ensemble pieces. That left just about everyone else in the straitjacket of the Katherine role. Unless they landed Thelma or Louise.

  —

  ONCE JODIE AND MICHELLE DROPPED OUT, Becky Pollack could have made a full-time job out of fielding calls from actresses’ agents. They told her Cybill Shepherd was interested. So were Daryl Hannah, Kelly Lynch, Rebecca De Mornay, Ellen Barkin, Theresa Russell, Nancy Travis and Madeline Stowe. Michelle Pfeiffer would become available again if the production could wait until the following July. Meg Ryan would do it in June. Kim Basinger, Kathleen Turner and Andie MacDowell would open up in August. So would Julia Roberts, who would outshine them all the next year as the lead in the enormous hit Pretty Woman, inhabiting Hollywood’s favorite female character, once again a prostitute. Most of the actresses coveted the arguably showier Thelma role. Oh . . . and “Gina Davis.” Files from Pathé note that her agent insisted she would play either part whenever, wherever. If all this happened in a movie, it would be called a catfight.

  “Instead, it created a firestorm,” Becky Pollack says. And it generated a lot of drama around town as agents tried to poach clients from other agencies by slipping them the script, as in “He didn’t get you a hearing on Thelma & Louise, but I did.”

  Laddie yearned for Ridley to cast Cher, who was also interested. She had scored an Oscar and box-office success by playing a shy bookkeeper who found love in Moonstruck. “Cher could have been quite good, I think,” Laddie says. “She could have played either part.” But Ridley didn’t think she would bring the humor he saw in the script. He kept dragging his feet, just as he did with choosing directors.

  Then Laddie got a call that trumped them all. Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn invited themselves to Pathé, together, to pitch themselves for Thelma and Louise. They didn’t have their agents make the call; they did it themselves. No one would have expected the two friends, box-office champs and Oscar winners, to campaign for parts, but they showed up prepared to kill. “To sit in a meeting with Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn was spectacular,” says Becky. “They were enthusiastic and adorable and smart.”

  The discussion was vigorous, especially when it came to the ending, which gave the stars some trepidation. They didn’t lobby to change it, necessarily, but they toyed with alternatives, like an escape to Mexico, for instance. Streep suggested it might work if her character, Louise, pushed Thelma out of the car at the last moment, saving at least the life of the one friend who hadn’t committed murder.

  Laddie was smitten, eager to capitalize on the oomph of such A-plus-plus-list stars. “I think that Meryl could do anything,” he says. As for Goldie, “it would have been more of a comedic turn. When you think about it, it’s a very dark movie, it’s not a happy piece of fluff, which was how Goldie was thought of at the time. But I had worked with her on a number of pictures, and I did dramas with her, too.” He was concerned that with Goldie as a lead, the audience would come in with false expectations of lighter material, but still he suggested that Ridley set up meetings with them both.

  That two such prominent stars were willing to get out there and hustle for the parts spoke volumes about the state of their careers. Meryl had dazzled Hollywood with her technical mastery since she’d made the leap from Shakespearean roles on the stage to Oscar wins for Kramer vs. Kramer in 1980 and Sophie’s Choice in 1983. She had the classy Katherine thing down, although some directors groused that her off-center beauty and all those proficient accents in her early roles limited her sex appeal. (Remember, Katherine can’t surmount the man in any way.) Silkwood (1983) and Out of Africa (1985) burnished her sterling reputation, but by age forty in 1989, she was reaching a difficult phase. She’d taken on some middling comedies like She-Devil, and she said, “Every actress will tell you they have maybe two things per year that they can possibly stand to put themselves into.”

  Goldie had pulled off a loopier but still stellar course. She’d won a supporting Oscar in 1970 for her first movie role as a giggly girlfriend in Cactus Flower. In 1981, she made the list of top-ten box-office stars on the strength of the lead in Private Benjamin and went on to headline other popular comedies with infectious, giddy charm. At age forty-four, though, she could no longer count on ingenue roles, and what else was there? Thelma & Louise represented a career-making (or career-saving) opportunity for any actress at the time, from beginner to the most acclaimed.

  —

  WITH THIS EMBARRASSMENT OF RICHES and high-profile stars awaiting answers, the movie needed a director more than ever. After Ridley left R
ichard Donner hanging, Laddie called. “You just keep rejecting people,” he said to Ridley. “You keep finding reasons why everybody is wrong. Why don’t you do it yourself?”

  Mimi kept up the pressure, too. The script for Isobar wasn’t coming together as Ridley had hoped. Black Rain had hit theaters with underwhelming force that September, generating another so-so reception for one of Ridley’s films. The critic Roger Ebert accused the crime thriller of being “all look and no heart,” and wrote, “the screenplay seems to have been manufactured out of those Xeroxed outlines they pass out in film school.”

  “I needed to step off, step out of the perception of what I was as a director,” Ridley said, “because I was really becoming pigeonholed. I felt I needed to emphasize that I could do a film really about people.”

  Ridley was pleased when Michelle Pfeiffer asked to sit down to talk about Thelma & Louise again at the Four Seasons. “I’m busy and can’t do it now,” she told him. “But I thought it was so good, I have to ask: Why don’t you come to your senses and do it yourself?”

  She’s bloody right, Ridley thought. I’m going to do it. This is ridiculous.

  At that moment, the best script in his quiver was the one that made him the most uncomfortable, the one that most got under his skin—but the one he couldn’t let go.

  Thelma & Louise was going to be a Ridley Scott film after all. With his usual workaholic precision, he threw himself into finding its stars.

  CHAPTER 12

  WHO’S PLAYING WHOM?

  The wider community was puzzled by this odd choice of subject matter for the persnickety action director. Even Jeff Berg admits, “Ridley’s not known for humor. Then again, Sydney Pollack was a very powerful director who was never known for humor, and he wound up directing Tootsie. The great directors—Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks—knew how to master three or four different idioms.”

  “I knew with Ridley that it was a deal with the devil,” says Callie. “I figured it was going to have some grandeur to it, if nothing else.”

  The director’s first order of business was to sit down with Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep one at a time. Goldie cracked Ridley up when she sashayed into the Four Seasons insisting she wanted a part so badly she would buy him breakfast. She was effervescent—and funny as hell. “But she was maybe a tad old at the time,” Ridley says. “I wanted to keep it below a certain age.” With Goldie, rewrites would have been necessary. He decided to move on.

  Meryl Streep was slighter in person than he expected, and she bombarded him with thoughtful queries over the course of two meetings. Why would a man want to make a film like this? she pushed. Was the role right for her? All good questions. The character had to be working-class, he thought, whereas Meryl had a different air, a different pedigree about her. “Not that she was posh,” he says, “but the character needed to be tough.” He wasn’t sure that was the quality she conveyed. Besides, she hoped to spend the summer at home with her children while they were off from school, and Ridley wanted to get filming by then. Someday, he thought, he’d love to work with her, but with regret he let her slip away this time.

  He also considered the double-edged bargain with the dominion of stars. Laddie was eager to harness it to sell the picture, but for Ridley, stars held less allure. To him, the power of stars—their CinemaScope dimensions, the vapor of well-known characters that wafted behind them from previous roles—was the very quality that worked against the most prominent candidates. He had plucked stars out of obscurity in the course of his work, helped to launch their careers, but once they were launched, he was leery of the reality-distortion effect they imposed on a film. With Ridley Scott, the film was the star, the look was the star. He cast his pictures with painstaking care; the actors had to fit within the scheme. He and Callie envisioned Thelma and Louise as regular gals. The sheen of stardom would muddle their function in the story.

  Geena Davis’s agent had kept working the phone for months, despite rumors that megawatt stars had already sewn up the roles. “She’s still here,” David Eidenberg parroted, day in, day out. “Can she meet you?”

  Ridley had heard about those incessant pleas. He made a point of screening The Accidental Tourist to see what the fuss was about. “I was attracted to Geena because she was ditzy, or seemed to be ditzy, but she wasn’t. She was very intelligent,” Ridley says. “I thought there was something in there that was Thelma.”

  He saw Louise as what he called “the mum character,” the older, wiser, maternal figure. Thelma, on the other hand, had to appear childlike at first but also possess a hint of steel, allowing the story to twist partway through to let her take charge. Ditziness alone wouldn’t be enough. He wasn’t sure whether Geena could flesh out the other side of the role, but he was curious. Ridley skipped over many of the bigger names on the studio list and invited her to tea at the Four Seasons.

  He hadn’t anticipated her . . . scale, for want of a better word, when she loped into the Windows Lounge. Towering, a magnificent creature, with legs and presence that went on from here to there. And that vivacious, demonstrative face—it was a director’s dream.

  He knew she’d be gunning hard for a role when she slid in opposite him at the table, and she didn’t disappoint. Geena was an instinctive actress, loose on the set and averse to overrehearsing, but she plotted her career with the drive of an A student cramming for finals. By the time she met with Ridley, after spending the better part of a year begging, she was up to the test. “I had read the script one million times,” she says with typical enthusiasm, the italics audible in her voice. She had strategized with an acting coach over why playing Louise would be the better tactic for her as she closed in on the age of thirty-four. The more mature, responsible character, she concluded, would shift her career in a much-needed direction. She faced Ridley with a clutch of notes that spelled out the reasons why she was right for Louise.

  Geena pitched her heart out for a good twenty minutes, bringing all her outré gifts to the effort—animated expressions, high-beam eyes, a voice that swooped two octaves with operatic zeal. “I need you to understand how passionate I am about this,” she insisted.

  Ridley let her go on, taking in her gooney-bird glamour, her robust physicality, all the while envisioning her not as Louise, but Thelma. “Geena’s a tall girl, and I’d never seen that character as being that tall, but there it is, six feet,” Ridley says. “Very attractive. I thought her quirkiness was great, enough that I wanted it for the film. In talking with her, I realized she was it.”

  Geena stopped long enough to take a breath.

  “Soooo,” Ridley said quietly, “in other words, you wouldn’t play Thelma?”

  To Geena’s credit, she blinked only for an instant, recalibrating the entire spiel: “You know, I’ve been listening to myself talk, giving you all these reasons why I should be Louise, and I’m thinking . . . it’s not a very convincing argument,” she backpedaled. “Now that I think of it . . . I should play Thelma.”

  After a couple hours of frantic ad-libbing on her part, as far as Ridley was concerned, Geena Davis was Thelma Dickinson. From that moment on, he never considered anyone else. The next day her agent got the call: Ridley wanted Geena in the movie, depending on whether the actress he found for the other lead seemed compatible.

  Weeks passed as she waited in agony for word. “We will both die if you end up not being in this movie,” her agent said. “But there is only so long you can wait and not get on with your life.” They delivered an ultimatum. Ridley had until five o’clock that Friday afternoon to commit to Geena, or she’d be forced to walk.

  An unorthodox offer arrived as the final minutes ticked down. Geena would play one of the leads—or the other. It all depended who else signed on. “Getting Thelma & Louise was such an ordeal and such a long, drawn-out process that when I finally actually got it,” Geena says, “it was just a miracle.” Geena Davis was the first name up on the board. She would b
e Thelma. Or maybe Louise.

  —

  RIDLEY EXTENDED THE SEARCH FOR LOUISE, once again blithely bypassing the long list of stars the studio had dutifully compiled over the previous months. He had a certain ideal in mind, one that stood in contrast to the sugarcoated femininity embodied in the long line of Katherines gracing most of the movies at the time. In running his company and directing his films, Ridley had always viewed women without sentimentality or condescension, and he wasn’t about to start now that he was directing a bona fide women’s film.

  He sought guidance from an unlikely source, Lou DiGiaimo, a New York–based casting director known for dead-on, deglamorized movies like The Godfather and The French Connection, populated with real-looking working stiffs and thugs, guys with scars. Lou brought up an actress no one had thought to mention before: the take-no-prisoners Susan Sarandon.

  Bulbs lit up for Ridley when Lou suggested the name. They had met briefly when she worked with Tony on his first feature, the sexy vampire movie The Hunger. “Susan has always been a great actress,” Ridley says. “She would be the mum figure of the two, so it was good that she was older”—forty-four, almost ten years older than Geena. And Susan could nail the working-class persona, as she did playing a casino worker in Atlantic City. Stunning on-screen but without vanity, she invariably grounded her characters in reality.

  Visually, which was how Ridley guided most decisions, he was intrigued by how the appearance of the two actresses might evoke the differences in the characters. Susan’s faint traces of crow’s-feet and cool, assessing eyes would distinguish her from Geena’s wide-open expression and butter-smooth skin. “The contrast in what their faces say to the camera—that visual image—would do so much of the work,” says Brett Goldstein, an assistant casting agent who worked with Ridley and Lou. “Their features and the quality of their skin showed who they were and where they each were in life.”