Off the Cliff

by Becky Aikman

  Jodie Foster and Michelle Pfeiffer both projected an almost glacial mien, whereas Geena and Susan, with their limpid brown eyes and wavy auburn hair, conveyed a warmth that could help stir audience sympathy for Callie’s antiheroines. Despite the similarity in hair color, says Goldstein, “Geena and Susan are so not interchangeable.”

  Susan’s career up to then signaled other qualities that were right for the self-reliant Louise. In movies ranging from The Rocky Horror Picture Show to Bull Durham, she had chosen such uncompromising roles that it was impossible to imagine her as a robotically supportive girlfriend or wife. She declined to think in terms of commercial appeal, which may explain why her name had been omitted from the studio wish list of box-office favorites. Ridley called her personally and offered to send the script.

  Susan may have been one of the only actresses in America who hadn’t lobbied for one of the parts. She hadn’t even heard of them, most likely because she was based in Hollywood Siberia: New York City. “I’ve always made it a point,” she says with pride, “not to care or watch or be involved with the corporate entity of show business.”

  When she finally got a look at the screenplay, turns out she wasn’t all that impressed. There were some aspects she liked right away. “I thought it would be wonderful to be in a film with a woman,” she says, “because you don’t get more than one woman in a film, and if you do, they hate each other for some assumed reason that’s not even in the script.” Plus it would be a hoot to play bad girls and chuck the rules that governed women in the movies.

  Like others involved in making this one, Susan didn’t perceive it as making a larger statement about women. “I never saw it as a feminist film,” she says. “I saw it in the genre of a cowboy film—except with women and trucks instead of guys and horses.” In that light, Ridley Scott didn’t strike her as such a peculiar choice to direct. They set up a meeting in New York.

  If Ridley thought he’d gotten an earful from Callie, it was useful preparation for his encounter with the woman who’d been labeled “the outspoken Susan Sarandon” so many times that it might be considered her legal name.

  “There are a lot of questions that need to be ironed out,” she told him before he barely had a chance to say hello. It wasn’t completely clear where the characters came from, she said, so she wouldn’t know what accent to use.

  The British director didn’t know what she meant. “Just use the accent you have,” he said.

  Susan laughed and explained that there were serious regional differences. She went on to knock the script for not making it clear how many days passed during the course of the story. It was crucial, she thought, for the time to be compressed so it would be credible for two women to take the emotional plunge toward suicide, or whatever they wanted to call it. The same concern led her to object to a romantic scene between Louise and her boyfriend halfway through the story. It would only serve to defuse the tension.

  “I hear you,” Ridley said. The same issue had bothered Meryl Streep. “These are all things we can work out.”

  Then she really got down to business. “Promise me that I will die,” she insisted. “Promise me we’re not gonna shoot this, then you test it and we end up at Club Med.”

  “Oh, you will die,” he assured her. He wasn’t sure about Thelma, but Louise would make the plunge.

  They spent even more time addressing her concern about the violence in the film. Susan’s progressive politics informed all her important decisions. She recoiled at accepting the role of someone who shot a man, rapist or not. “It’s a huge thing to take another life,” Susan said. “I am not interested in doing a revenge film. I’m not interested in being Charles Bronson or Arnold Schwarzenegger. I’m interested in the fact that taking a life has consequences, that she has to pay for that.” She said it bothered her that the script called for Louise to shoot the rapist “execution style,” a term Callie didn’t actually use. But the draft Susan saw did call for Louise to aim deliberately and shoot the guy in the face.

  Ridley thought they could sort it out in rehearsal. Mostly he was struck by Susan’s innate intelligence and challenging nature, the way she goaded him to sharpen his focus. He knew she had the authority, the competence and the cheek to portray Louise. It wouldn’t be a quiet set; Susan wouldn’t pull punches. She would make sure her voice was heard. That didn’t faze Ridley the way it might have some directors. “For a guy’s guy, Ridley doesn’t think like a dumb-ass chauvinist,” says Goldstein, the assistant casting director. “Most producers, directors or studio heads are scared to death of a strong woman, because, basically, they’re all weak-kneed inside. Ridley wasn’t scared.” He offered Susan the part of Louise Sawyer, pending approval from the studio.

  Unlike many of her peers, Susan relished the intellectual challenge of playing the more buttoned-up Louise rather than Thelma. “Even though Louise is not the flashiest or the most fun,” she says, “it interested me more, the demands of trying to keep the movie together and on track and literally and figuratively driving the movie.”

  Even today, she admits she had no idea she was signing on to a project with any lasting significance or cultural merit. “It fit into my needs as a mom,” she says matter-of-factly. Filming was scheduled for the summer of 1990, a perfect opportunity to take her kids on location after school let out.

  —

  RIDLEY’S CASTING DIDN’T SIT WELL with everyone. Geena and Susan were respected well enough, but respect didn’t sell tickets. The two hadn’t reached the level of celebrity and box-office sway wielded by other candidates. They couldn’t open a film.

  That suited Callie. She was content that these relatively underexposed actresses wouldn’t outshine the story, although she wasn’t exactly wild about Susan being in her forties. In Callie’s backstory, the characters were the same age, friends from high school. This could have been one of the few examples of a Hollywood director casting actresses who were older than written.

  The actresses were even harder for Laddie to accept. “Those were Ridley’s choices, not mine,” he says. “I didn’t feel they were wrong for it, but these were very good parts, and most women in town would want to do it. I felt it lent itself to two well-known people.”

  The studio could have fought the decision, but Laddie was unique in stepping back and allowing offbeat ideas and talent to prevail. His diffident manner was a godsend for directors in that he kept his nose out of their business, and those times when he did stick it in, ever so gently, his instincts were often correct.

  “He tended to have the most successful, groundbreaking movies, movies that were the first of their kind,” says Becky Pollack. “They could also go out with a blaze of glory.” That was the risk.

  A risk he decided to take in this case. You are the director, he told Ridley. “If those are the actresses you want, it’s fine with me.”

  Industry onlookers who’d been following the casting maneuvers buzzed at the news. “Given the star power that people like Meryl and Goldie or Cher would have brought to bear,” says Diane Cairns, “probably no other studio executive would have backed the director on that play.”

  But the play was classic Laddie: Pick the script. Pick the filmmaker. Now let the movie be what it’s supposed to be.

  CHAPTER 13

  “GOOD LUCK, HONEY!”

  Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon—the matchup wasn’t as improbable as everyone thought. Geena, gangly, goofy, a skyscraper next to most leading men, was extraordinary to behold, no one’s image of the girl next door, but always eager to please. Susan, smaller in stature, more than made up for it with her no-bullshit manner. Geena conveyed an innocent quality and was unafraid to stand out. Susan Sarandon was a paragon of mature sexuality, her commonsense style lending a lived-in ease to the women she played. They never saw themselves as the chicks in the background. They played the leads in their own lives.

  —

  GEENA, WHO R
ARELY SAW GENDER as a drawback in the early days of her career, can’t remember being exposed to the idea of a woman as mere appendage until her senior year in high school, when she overheard her uncle counsel her mother, “You don’t send girls to college—it’s a waste of money. They’re just going to get married anyway.” It shocked her, because her father, a civil engineer, and her mother, a teacher’s assistant, treated Geena and her older brother as equals when she was growing up in Wareham, Massachusetts, a small, working-class town on the road approaching Cape Cod.

  Her drive switched on early. She didn’t merely deliver newspapers as a kid, she knocked herself out by handing over each one personally at the customer’s door. Geena didn’t merely study piano, she took up flute, too, and played the organ at the Congregational Protestant Church for the early-morning youth service. “Youth,” she notes drily, “love to get up early.” She bounded over high jumps and hurdles for the track team. She made the honor society and later joined Mensa, the organization for people with lofty IQs.

  She and her best friend, Lucyann, acted out their own versions of television shows like The Rifleman in the backyard. “It never occurred to us that there were no female characters we wanted to perform,” Geena says. “There was Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, where the women had superpowers, but every episode was about them having to sit on their powers so the man in their life wouldn’t get upset or feel emasculated.”

  Up until tenth grade, she was the tallest student, boy or girl, in every class, where kids could be cruel. Rather than stoop over and withdraw, Geena presented herself as a bit of a kook, making her own clothes in crazy patterns and colors. Her dating roster numbered a grand total of one until senior year, which she spent as an exchange student among the blessedly colossal citizens of Sweden.

  In New York after graduating from Boston University, Geena signed on with a modeling agency, hoping it would lead to acting roles. In the meantime, her only performances took place at the Ann Taylor boutique on Fifty-seventh Street, where, working as a sales clerk, she hopped into the window one day and froze while onlookers gathered to figure out whether she was a mannequin or real. Later, willing herself not to blink, she wore a cheesy wig or ran an electrical cord from her foot to look like a robot. She took pleasure in freaking out the ever-shifting audience, waiting until the perfect moment to move, just when she was about to lose them, and then delighting in their gasps. Geena worked her way up: Bendel’s hired her for its Christmas window.

  After one of her first auditions, she could blink all she wanted. The casting people had liked her reading, but it was her body that landed the job. They forgot to ask for the typical strip-down-turn-around to see the bikini she’d worn underneath her outfit, so they perused photos she’d taken for the Victoria’s Secret catalog before making an offer. Member of Mensa or not, she was now in a profession where looks went a long way toward making a career. The small role in Tootsie, the 1982 Sydney Pollack movie, became her very first credit. She hijacked the screen, bending and stretching in a teeny underwire bra and panties while a discombobulated Dustin Hoffman in drag wriggled into the room. The setup treated her cartoony presence as a visual joke.

  She began to develop comic timing, as when she warned Hoffman’s character about a lecherous cast member at the soap opera where they worked. Doctor Brewster kisses all the women on the show, she said with uninhibited cheer. We call him The Tongue. She let the word coil out of her mouth like a snake and got a solid laugh.

  A major part followed in the short-lived sitcom Buffalo Bill, as did roles as a secondary character in Fletch with Chevy Chase and a sultry vampire in Transylvania 6-5000. Watching dailies on that film, she attracted the attention of Jeff Goldblum, whom she married in 1987 after they costarred in The Fly.

  Geena’s was not a classic movie-star face. Her jaw was wide and strong, her eyes rather small, but she had cheekbones out to there, luscious lips and a smile that could light up a billboard. The parts she landed benefited from her uninhibited willingness to appear absurd. Even though none of the films would be mistaken for Masterpiece Theater, she did her best to invest the most wackadoo circumstances in supernatural movies like The Fly and Beetlejuice with straight-ahead feeling. When she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The Accidental Tourist in 1989, it was considered a come-from-behind surprise.

  Quirky and kooky—“I got a little tired of seeing those words all the time,” she sighs, “but I don’t think they limited what I was offered.” There was a clear upside. The labels steered her to an arcane subcategory of roles that kept Geena from having to consider the female characters who stood by while others had the adventures, what she called the “Good luck, honey!” parts. “I didn’t know how to be interesting if I wasn’t doing something unusual,” she says. If directors approached her with boring parts in hopes she would give them that special Geena Davis eccentricity, she balked. “Somebody has to write it that way,” she explained, “and then I do it. I can’t make something out of nothing.”

  The actress knew good roles were scarce, but by setting herself apart with unusual selections, she worked, if not frenetically, at least steadily. The only danger seemed to be of sliding from costar to the lesser slot of red-haired, funny sidekick. Geena was keen for a distinctive lead. Thelma & Louise couldn’t have come at a better time.

  —

  SUSAN SARANDON LEFT HER CAREER more to chance, which is not the same thing as not taking it seriously. She took parts as they came along, but she turned them down, too, if they didn’t satisfy her exacting standards. She declined the female lead in Clint Eastwood’s 1984 Tightrope, for example, because it dressed up the murders of women to make them seem like glamorous turn-ons—the victims were raped and strangled in beds or Jacuzzis. She chose parts with substance over those that positioned her on bankable lists. “Not that I was the go-to gal for those anyway,” she says with a half-proud, half-resentful shrug. “I was never offered The Godfather or any of the big, iconic films.” At times, she was jilted for honors that critics felt she deserved, and she engaged in political activism regardless of its impact on her career.

  Her upbringing instilled in Susan Sarandon a strong moral center, if not the one intended by her parochial school education. The eldest of nine in a devout Catholic family, she grew up in Metuchen, New Jersey, where her parents needed any help she could spare looking after all those younger siblings. She was responsible, sheltered and serious.

  Acting came to her almost by accident. She studied theater at Catholic University, but in a literary more than a practical way. After she entered a twelve-year marriage with a fellow student, the aspiring actor Chris Sarandon, she went along on an audition and landed an agent herself. Five days later, she won her first role, in the 1970 movie Joe, as a hippie whose father murdered her druggie boyfriend. Susan rewrote her lines and took charge of her own costumes and makeup. “I didn’t know actresses weren’t supposed to do that,” she told an interviewer. It established a pattern: Susan Sarandon, troublemaker or a fully committed collaborator, depending on how much her input was welcome.

  For ten years, she took haphazard roles, mostly just to learn and earn. Like Geena Davis, she found her appearance had much to do with her winning parts—Susan had those wide Bette Davis eyes, a good figure and a natural presence. The job itself seemed silly to her. “Acting is a profession where mediocrity is constantly rewarded,” she says. “Anybody can act. It’s surviving as an actor that takes more talent.”

  Among her contemporaries, ingenue after ingenue eventually disappeared, while Susan persevered by holding out for more-intriguing options. The Rocky Horror Picture Show granted her midnight-movie camp immortality as the naive Janet, who got seduced by a transvestite alien from outer space. Working with director Louis Malle as a prostitute in Pretty Baby in 1978 and as a waitress in Atlantic City in 1980, she staked claim to the persona of a sensual but forthright sex symbol, but hardly a pliant one. With the rise of sexua
l explicitness on film, Susan, like every actress, had to take a stance. She struck a balance. She was perfectly willing to be provocative but insisted on rooting scenes within the bounds of the story and character, so her work wouldn’t edge toward exploitation. Susan Sarandon’s characters never just got screwed.

  The approach worked in one of her most iconic scenes, in Atlantic City, when Susan’s clam-bar worker massaged her breasts with the juice of fresh-squeezed lemons. Keeping a straight face should have been challenge enough—“Anyone who would rub lemons on her chest is completely insane,” she says now. But she rescued what could have been trashy by keeping it matter-of-fact. She told Malle, “This scene should be shown as ordinary. It should be done only because she wants to get the smell of fish off her body.” It was the kind of pragmatic thinking that boosted her racy renown without entangling her in the meaningless sex scenes that dumbed down so many other eighties movies.

  Viewers had no difficulty finding the scene erotic. For years, fans sent her lemons in the mail, and Playboy named hers the “Celebrity Breasts of the Summer” for 1981. When the columnist George Will named her as one of the things he’d like to take on a long space voyage, Susan said, “I am very stunned and flattered and glad to learn that the rest of Mr. Will’s body is not as conservative as his brain.”

  Like many actresses whose job was to seduce on-screen, Susan found that people could make the wrong assumptions in reality. A director once dismissed the crew from a costume fitting in a motel room so he could proposition her. “I said something dumb like ‘I really have to get back to my room,’” she says. “The rest of the shoot, he made sure I was very uncomfortable.”

  But for the most part, she devised a way of carrying herself that set boundaries and kept the work on track. Lucinda Jenney, who played a waitress in Thelma & Louise, studied Sarandon’s ability to walk that line. “She’s the kind of person who can laugh about these things,” Jenney says. “She’s got a twinkle in her eye and a lightness to her spirit in the way she handles that stuff, which is liquid gold.”