by Becky Aikman
“I don’t think I had many problems necessarily because I was a woman,” Susan says. “Maybe there were instances where problems could have been solved more easily if I’d had more clout, which male stars seem to have. Directors are conditioned to see male stars as the power source.” Men were more often invited to watch dailies, consulted on what was coming up next and included in the overall process, man-to-man, while she cooled her heels in her trailer.
Probably her most infuriating experience was on 1987’s The Witches of Eastwick. She was cast above the title with Cher and Michelle Pfeiffer, but the producers kowtowed to Jack Nicholson while lumping the women together as one interchangeable supporting character. At the eleventh hour, Cher got swapped into Susan’s part, which gave her only three days to learn to play a cello. Throughout the tense shoot, the women were referred to as “girls,” which was hardly unusual. Even as feminism made inroads into what to call women in society at large, most movie sets clung to the “girl” moniker, even for the most established stars.
Sarandon pined for better parts and greater meaning in her work. In 1991, she told a magazine, “I’m just trying to find roles to hold on to that are frightening because you’re not sure you’ll do them justice, rather than frightening because they’re so empty you have to fill them up.”
Motherhood gave her satisfaction that was lacking in her career after a daughter was born in 1985. Later, she and the actor Tim Robbins had two sons, in 1989 and 1992. Meanwhile, she doubled down on her commitment to the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion rights, nuclear disarmament and opposition to arming the Nicaraguan Contras, priding herself on doing everything wrong in terms of courting the industry. “The thing about having a career in this business is that you might as well live the way you want,” she says, “because there are no tried-and-true rules that actually work.”
One of her best roles came her way when she broke the rules. All the actresses ahead of her refused to read opposite Kevin Costner for Ron Shelton, the writer-director of Bull Durham, but the part of a brainy baseball fan who was every bit the equal of her lover was so well written that Susan paid her own airfare from Italy to land the role. She appreciated that the character was sexually free and wasn’t punished for it. Shelton included her in planning and brainstorming as much as he did Costner.
Her peers snubbed her for an Oscar nomination, but the role was the kind of mainstream-avoidant portrayal that endeared her to Ridley Scott. “She’s always had a very strong selection of material,” he said. “It nearly always has some kind of strong subtext to it, so it’s not necessarily overtly commercial. Which means she’s a ballsy lady, really.”
If he didn’t understand that before he chose her, he didn’t have long to wait.
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SUSAN SARANDON AND GEENA DAVIS came face-to-face for the first time in a conference room in the spring of 1990. Ridley had summoned the stars to the production’s temporary offices on the second floor of an undistinguished building on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood, where the action was picking up in hopes of shooting starting in June. The meeting was called a rehearsal, but it wasn’t like a rehearsal in the theater, with chalk lines on the floor to block out the action. This was more of an in-depth discussion of what felt right and what didn’t in the script.
Geena bound into the room thoroughly prepared to play the flaky Thelma but still thinking she could have been right for Louise. She thought the script was so first rate that there were only a few adjustments she wanted to suggest, a slight rewording of a sentence here or there, and she had a game plan in her notes for presenting each of them indirectly, so as not to offend. One she decided to postpone and bring up later on the set. Another she would toss off as a kind of throwaway joke. “I had all these girly ways,” she says. “I would disguise each one and make it as nonthreatening as possible.”
Susan blew Geena’s approach out of the water. The New York actress strode into the meeting, sat down at the conference table, opened her copy of the script and said, “On page one, I don’t think I would do that.” Boom . . . no nonsense, just like that. And “Maybe we could take out this line or move it to a later scene.” Pleasantly, but with authority, Susan dissected the entire script and made pointed suggestions while Ridley listened agreeably.
Geena’s jaw was on the ground. She would never forget the way her first female costar handled herself. People can be like her? Geena gaped. God, what a way to be. “There is nothing calculated about the way Susan is in the world,” Geena says now. “She just . . . is. She’s not going to equivocate or be coy. She just says what she wants, and people go . . . oh, okay.”
“Yeah, I have a problem with being very direct, which isn’t necessarily the best way,” Susan admits. “But there’s not much time to resolve these things.” She felt responsible for making sure each scene served a purpose, either in telling the story or developing the characters. If not, she wanted it changed or cut.
The romantic scene between Louise and her feckless boyfriend, Jimmy, for example, still grated. It called for Jimmy to offer Louise an engagement ring at a motel where the couple would perform a mock wedding ceremony while Thelma, in another room, got it on with the hitchhiker they’d picked up. The next morning Louise would lose it when she discovered that the hitchhiker had stolen her life savings. The first draft of the script didn’t explicitly call for a sex scene for Louise and Jimmy, but it did say: “Louise has an engagement ring on her finger. It’s really beautiful. Louise is practically in tears, she’s so happy. They are in bed, having just made love.”
Susan explained why the sequence didn’t fly with her. “Here’s a woman who had a memory of something that led her to pulling a trigger and killing someone,” she explained to Ridley and Geena. “I don’t mind having a sex scene, but I think after everything that’s happened, Louise would come unraveled. She couldn’t surrender to orgasm without falling apart. Which I’m happy to do, but then the problem becomes that she has to unravel again in the morning.”
“I see your point,” Ridley agreed, “but we can’t eliminate this completely. I need something to cut to from Geena’s scene.”
Susan considered for a moment. “It’d be an interesting sex scene to have an orgasm that turned into hysteria or something. It would be different,” she said with just a hint of a playful smile. “If you want, I can give it a try.”
Ridley was on the money about Susan being ballsy. They put off a decision on whether to push the limits of cinema with an orgasm-slash-breakdown scene, but the rehearsal did settle one point.
It hit Geena like the beam of a klieg light from the moment she and Susan met: Are you kidding that I could play Louise? Susan was so self-possessed, so mature and centered. She was Louise and then some.
CHAPTER 14
A FRESH EYE ON AMERICA
The two actresses tackled the prep work with gusto, all the down-and-dirty stuff guys usually got to do. They took stunt driving lessons in the parking lot of the Hollywood Bowl, where they pulled squealing 180s with the emergency brake. Ridley sat in the backseat while they ran lines until driving and talking at the same time became second nature. They got the hang of pistol shooting at a target range, smudging their fingers and faces with gunpowder residue. It was freewheeling fun, certainly more fun than faking proficiency on the cello. A dialogue coach schooled them in an appropriate accent, with a drawl but not too syrupy, so the characters would seem sharp.
Geena realized she became Thelma in Susan’s presence, slavishly admiring her maternal competence. And Susan found Geena funny and loopy in a way that only someone intelligent can pull off. “She was game and brave and smart and certainly more diplomatic than I am,” Susan says. “That’s the basis for a love story, really.”
Ridley turned his attention to what many considered the real star of all his movies: the look of the thing. Callie’s screenplay guaranteed that Thelma & Louise wouldn’t take on the appearance of a typical women
’s picture, all weepy close-ups under flattering key lights. Ridley already had a clear scheme in his head, planted there the morning he first read the script, when his painterly brain elevated the seemingly simple road movie to an odyssey, an epic—a women’s picture by Ridley Scott. He was convinced that in order to sell the ending, the film had to convey the kind of mythic grandeur he had in mind, to make a statement that befit the fate of two main characters flying off the known world to become the stuff of legend.
Whereas some of the directors he vetted had seen the story as visually ordinary, Ridley came at it with the fresh eye of a foreigner. He imagined a romantic vision of Americana, the notion of the old Route 66, the light and space, all of it the greatest possible contrast to his upbringing in the north of England. “European filmmakers get to look at America in a way that Americans can’t, because they are in the eye of the hurricane,” says Hans Zimmer. “We can hold up a mirror and make America look at itself, marvel at itself, be critical of itself or celebrate itself—not take it for granted. There’s the whole thing about guns, for example, the accessibility of guns. It’s culturally specific. There are these things you have in America that we don’t have in Europe, that sense of endlessness, vastness.”
Ridley saw his job as providing a proscenium for the actors that enhanced and multiplied the power of the story. In Thelma & Louise that proscenium would be America, for better and for worse.
The director didn’t have the luxury of constructing a detailed imaginary world on an expensive set, as he had in Alien and Blade Runner. Instead he would rely heavily on landscape, or three different landscapes, to frame what he saw as the three acts of the story. Act I: the green hills and commonplace hominess of the starting point in Arkansas. Act II: the wide-open fields and beat-up roadside stops of Oklahoma. Act III: the huge, impassive majesty of the Southwest desert and Grand Canyon.
Ridley decided to lean on the images he admired in the work of the midcentury realist painter John Register, a Californian who saturated his paintings of deserted coffee shops and bus stations with desolation. His work was often compared to Edward Hopper’s, but the stark light and shadows of Register’s weary interiors had a different feel, suffused by the blazing western sun outside the windows. It was bright but hardly cheerful. As Register himself has said: “I like the patina of things that have been battered by life.”
Thelma & Louise’s visual vocabulary would borrow that mysterious emptiness to foreshadow the ominous end for the heroines, as well as a sweeping, bright magnificence to celebrate the independence of their spirit. Ridley would start at the end and work back. It all depended on finding the right locations, beginning with the lip of that inimitable American landmark, the Grand Canyon.
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WHEN THE LOCATION MANAGER, KEN HABER, arrived at that most crucial destination and plot point, he had been on the road for a month, driving from Little Rock to Arizona, taking photos to send back to Ridley—hundreds of shots of dated diners, sagebrush-lined highways and country-western bars. The woman in charge of public relations for the Grand Canyon, wearing a park ranger uniform complete with a Smokey Bear–style hat, led Haber into her office so he could lay out the case for shooting the climax of Thelma & Louise in the jewel of the National Park Service. For an hour and a half, she nodded absently while he explained that the crew was professional, that it would restore everything to its natural state, that the scene was absolutely essential to the film.
“What do you think?” he asked at length. “Can we do it?”
Not a muscle moved in her stony expression. “No.”
Haber saw his job flash before his eyes. This is the movie, he thought. If we don’t have the Grand Canyon, we don’t have the movie. “Do you mind if I ask why?” he asked, his voice catching.
“I just don’t like the story,” she said. “I don’t like that these girls go off a cliff and commit suicide.”
Join the club, Haber thought. Gingerly, he pointed out that filmmakers enjoyed First Amendment rights, that legally they could say anything they wanted without a stamp of government approval.
She didn’t budge. “This might get a lot of copycats,” she said. “I just don’t like it.”
Haber broke the news to Ridley back in the production office on Melrose. They might try lobbying the Park Service or suing the government for permission, but they didn’t have years to burn for that.
Ridley scanned the pictures Haber had taken of the canyon. “It’s not going to work anyway,” Ridley said. “The scale isn’t right. See”—he pointed to the red rocks of the opposite canyon wall. “If the car goes off here, you’ll lose it in the vastness of the space.” In other words, the Grand Canyon was too big. Its source must start somewhere upstream, Ridley concluded. To find someplace smaller, Haber had to trace the canyon back to that source.
Meanwhile, when he had time, Ridley joined Haber and his production designer on the road to visit other sites Haber had selected. They covered some four thousand miles of southern heartland, listening to a cassette of songs that Callie had recommended to complement various scenes, including “Better Not Look Down” by B. B. King.
The scouting mission was an unlikely road trip—three mismatched outsiders in a car: Ridley, the Englishman of few words; Haber, a native of Brooklyn who’d never before been west; and Norris Spencer, the production designer of the film, well over six feet tall, who wore flowing scarves and smoked Marlboros with the filters cut off. Spencer, in particular, attracted curious stares wherever they went. Son of a Jamaican father and Chinese mother, he registered as a black Asian man with a thick British accent. “In Arkansas, that’s not a good idea,” Ridley says. “The racism was shocking.” A menacing clerk in a village store looked them over and asked, “Where you boys from?” They beat it out of there pronto. Other encounters were more fruitful. They met a woman driving a cement truck with a pack of cigarettes rolled in her sleeve and a perfectly aged trucker hat, a black cap with a faded American flag on the front. Ridley bought it for Thelma to wear once her character had evolved and toughened up. For all the skill of the production crews, Ridley felt, there was no convincing way to properly age a hat.
While Ridley could be uncomfortable with actors, he relaxed with the crew, especially those, like Haber and Spencer, who helped him craft his proscenium, something he could understand and control. All three had been art students who started in commercials, and they had worked on Black Rain together. Yet hours in the car ground them down. “I wanted to show America the way I’d like to see it,” Ridley says. “But Route 66 didn’t exist anymore. It was gone. There were only ghost towns left running parallel to the freeway. The rest was now garages, hideous hotels and parking lots with big stores.” If the West looked the same everywhere, he thought, why drag a whole bloody circus of equipment across four states? Grand Canyon aside, he could film everything within a couple hours of LA.
Armed with Haber’s photos, other scouts sought out look-alike locations for Arkansas around Los Angeles and its suburbs. Ridley fixed on the agricultural San Joaquin Valley near Bakersfield to stand in for Oklahoma. “I love Bakersfield because of the vast, open landscapes of these huge farms where there are no walls, there are no fences,” Ridley said. “It’s almost like the Dust Bowl before it became the Dust Bowl . . . the middle of this great landmass you call the United States of America.”
Laddie, a native Californian, was skeptical. No one admired Bakersfield for its scenery. But Ridley found beauty in what most Americans would consider mundane—fields of bobbing oil pumps, rows of spritzing irrigations pipes, pencil-straight highways lined with telephone poles. Cost was also a decisive factor. Ridley wanted to squeeze as much epic grandeur as he could out of an unimposing budget. Pathé had allocated just under $17 million for Thelma & Louise in an effort to hedge the risks for the female-led property. That was more generous than the allowance for the sort of independent film Callie originally had in mind, but signi
ficantly less than the $24 million average for a studio picture. It helped that Ridley had cast Susan and Geena. At $1 million apiece, their salaries were respectable for the time but less than the demands of top-tier stars. But Ridley calculated that with fifty-four locations needed to capture the women’s journey, he’d have to make do with some cut-rate choices. He’d shoot most everything in southern and central California. Now all he had to do was track down a stand-in for the Grand Canyon.
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ON A LITTLE PRIVATE PLANE over the desert near Las Vegas, Ridley turned to Haber and Spencer in the back and asked, “Have you ever seen Monument Valley?” He directed the pilot to take them down. They hired a Navajo guide to show them around, passing red sandstone buttes up to a thousand feet tall. The landscape offered depth and texture that were absent in a sprawling, flat desert. “It was so spectacular that I couldn’t speak,” Haber says. The men knew that John Ford had filmed legendary Westerns with John Wayne in the area, but not much in the way of filmmaking had happened there since. It could become the grand backdrop for Act III, the driving scenes near the end of the movie, but there was only one hotel in the vicinity—Ford had set up tent villages for his casts and crews. The logistics would be impossible. The three had to keep searching.
Then the Utah Film Commission suggested the area around Moab, Utah, a jumping-off point for Arches National Park. Haber found more red buttes and mesas and, better yet, a canyon in a neighboring state park called Dead Horse Point. The area practically vibrated with intense colors, orange-red monoliths against a sapphire sky. The canyon itself was small and broken up by formations that would provide layers of rock and contrast to highlight the car as it flew off the edge. A narrow strand of the Colorado River sliced through the bottom, well upstream from the Grand Canyon. A local guide led Haber to survey details like access roads and secondary locations, when suddenly, for no reason whatsoever, he broke down and cried on a stretch of highway, to the point where he had to pull the car over and stop.