Off the Cliff

by Becky Aikman

  “Don’t be embarrassed,” the guide assured him. “It happens all the time.” Grown men often bawled like babies in the desert, she said. “Everyone here knows the strength of this place.” Haber developed a theory that the fierce color contrasts in the brilliant light—he called it color vibration—stirred up uncontrolled emotions. Whatever the reason, he was the first of many working on Thelma & Louise who would weep when confronted with the intensity of the setting. He and Ridley had found the place that would hold its own with his epic vision.

  CHAPTER 15

  REAL CHARACTERS

  James Caan toyed for a while with playing Hal Slocumb, the Arkansas cop who pursued Thelma and Louise despite an undertow of sympathy for their plight. The actor negotiated for script revisions that would add more detective work and other heft to the part.

  Caan was a veteran of tough-guy movies whose battered face and vaguely sinister aura resonated from a history of seventies roles like Sonny Corleone in The Godfather. Caan as Hal Slocumb was the kind of unpredictable choice Ridley was looking for when he hired Lou DiGiaimo as casting director after admiring his work on Tin Men, another guys’ movie populated with strong but unpretty faces.

  Tall, with a scruffy beard and balding on top, Lou worked up a flight of rickety steps in a ramshackle old New York building on West Fifty-fourth Street, later home to The Daily Show. He hung out with ex-cops, not theater people. No one would think to hire Lou to cast Amadeus or A Room with a View, but he developed a niche. “His friends were a certain kind of guys’ director—Barry Levinson, William Friedkin, Ridley—guys who smoked cigars and talked about girls and weren’t going to musical theater,” says his assistant Brett Goldstein. Lou favored New York–trained theater actors and even nonprofessionals, so long as they sported interesting mugs. “Realies,” Lou called them.

  Hiring Lou to cast a women’s picture seemed like a head-scratching move, but aside from the two leads, the rest of the characters were almost all men. Ridley liked to think that, flawed as they were, each represented a different aspect of maleness. All of them could be rolled together to form a complete man, but the risk was that each one alone could skirt close to caricature. Lou’s realies would keep them grounded.

  Ridley also wanted to work with Lou because, coming from the instant-impression world of commercials, Ridley preferred actors who could quickly telegraph visually who they were, as Lou’s picks usually did. And Ridley and Lou shared another point of view, says Goldstein: “They didn’t give a crap about who was hot or famous.”

  But Ridley did choose actors with great care. “I am a very niggling caster,” he says. “I believe if I do it right, half the work is done. In fact, more, because once the actors walk out on the floor, they’ve done all the work, you’ve discussed it and they are red-hot to do it. That leaves me room to do all my other things.”

  He met with James Caan, but by the end of their talk, Ridley backed away. Caan’s demands would have turned the movie into Thelma, Louise & Hal.

  In March 1990, Lou began to hunt in earnest for the roles beyond the leads. “Surprise me,” Ridley said to Lou. “Bring me people I haven’t seen before.” It was possible that actors would hang back from signing on to an unfashionable, modestly budgeted chick flick when action-movie riches beckoned from every other production in town. Ron Howard, for example, was casting Backdraft, a firefighter action film studded with beefy male parts.

  But it seemed that good actors were sick of running, jumping and grunting, and Callie’s rogue’s gallery of semi-dysfunctional males tantalized with the chance to explore something different. While not inciting quite the frenzy the search for the female headliners did, the male casting calls still attracted a who’s who of performers who were up-and-coming, if not quite there.

  As written, Detective Hal Slocumb served up a plum part, a good detective who performed his duty by tracking Thelma and Louise even as he became convinced that they were honorable women blown off course by circumstance. His growing protectiveness toward them made him the moral center of the movie. Lou and Ridley considered approaching the stalwart Sam Elliott for the role, and they made an offer to Scott Glenn, who took a part in Backdraft instead. But most of those Lou brought in to read were rugged-looking, lesser-known character actors with theater experience: Hector Elizondo, Robert Forster and Clarence Williams III, familiar as Linc on TV’s The Mod Squad.

  Ridley short-circuited the process when he got a call from the agent for Harvey Keitel. The intense New York method actor with a soulful, gnarled face specialized playing scary thugs in movies like Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. His most improbable role up until then had been in Ridley’s first film, The Duellists, as a nineteenth-century French general, albeit a scary, thuggish one. It was regarded as nutty casting at the time, but it worked.

  In the eighties Harvey had settled into supporting roles in lesser movies. He’d seen the script for Thelma & Louise when a friend up for one of the parts shared a copy, and its uniqueness spoke to him. “It was about women, in a real way,” he says. “Their difficulties, our difficulties as men, what we have to confront with each other and within ourselves. There weren’t a lot of movies about women, and there were a lot of problems that needed to be discussed. Callie was discussing it.”

  When his agent threw his name in the hopper, Ridley and Lou didn’t focus on the obvious mismatch. Lou thought of everyone as a New Yorker, and Ridley didn’t see the difference. Given Harvey’s history of villainous roles, Ridley liked the idea of playing with that expectation. “The perception of Harvey was the antithesis of what I wanted him for,” says Ridley, “which I thought was the right reason to go for him.” Audiences wouldn’t expect Harvey Keitel, of all people, to sympathize with the heroines. In real life, Ridley found Harvey touching. “He’s a very sensitive man, even though he’s nearly always playing against what he seems to be.” They’d enjoyed a manly rapport when they worked together before, dining well on French food and sharing Cuban cigars at the end of the day.

  “Why don’t you ever cast me, you jerk?” Harvey began when they spoke about the part.

  “You’re going to have to play a good guy,” Ridley warned. “It’s a departure.”

  “That’s cool,” said Harvey. “But Goddamn, this guy is really sympathetic. Do you think it’s a good idea?”

  “Stop fucking about it,” Ridley said. “Do it.”

  —

  MEANWHILE, AN AWKWARD MIX OF knowns and unknowns avoided eye contact in the waiting room at the bare-bones Melrose Avenue production office where Lou, and often Ridley, too, heard readings for the other roles. Thelma’s piggish husband, Darryl Dickinson, was one of the least evolved characters, a self-absorbed slob oblivious to his wife’s happiness, so Ridley felt it was doubly important to find an actor with the comic versatility to make the character relatable. In an interview after the movie’s release, Ridley admitted that Darryl was probably the character closest to himself, a guy too consumed with his own needs to listen to his wife. “We need to accept that these men are out there,” he said after a nervous laugh. “On different levels, of course. These men are us.”

  Dan Aykroyd wouldn’t be available until the fall, Lou found out, but Bill Pullman, who’d made a strong impression in comedies like Ruthless People and Spaceballs, took a meeting. He was prominent enough not to have to read from the script, but others did: Paul Le Mat, Matt Frewer, John C. McGinley and Chris Cooper, still early in their careers. J. T. Walsh took an interest before he joined the Backdraft juggernaut, and Tim Robbins landed on the wish list until he refused to audition. Judge Reinhold didn’t object. The fresh-faced comic actor, hot off parts in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Ruthless People and Beverly Hills Cop I and II, showed up to read in a Darryl-appropriate polyester suit from Sears. “Do you know how hard it is to find a suit like this?” he said.

  Geena had someone else in mind: an old boyfriend, she said, Chris McDonald, who had a theater ba
ckground and top-shelf training—Stella Adler and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London—and an acting toolbox stocked with hilarious comic shtick. It had yet to be fully tapped in roles like a guest shot on Cheers or a singing, dancing greaser with a pompadour and a flipped-up collar in Grease 2. “He is the funniest guy in the world,” Geena promised Ridley. Her message got garbled, or else Lou was on a different track, because when Chris’s agent called him, the invitation was to read for Harlan, the role of the rapist who attacked Geena and got himself shot.

  Chris couldn’t believe it. He thought, I’d have to take whatever the money is and put it right into therapy. Because while Geena had copped to a relationship with him in her conversation with Ridley, she hadn’t hinted at its extent: the couple had bought a house together near Griffith Park and become engaged, with a ring on her finger and the dress already picked out, before she met Jeff Goldblum on location and broke Chris’s heart. There was no way he was going to take on the thankless role of Geena Davis’s rapist.

  Heart sunk, he read the script anyway. He could see why his name might pop up. Chris could summon a manic intensity in his icy blue eyes and was tall enough to match up well with Geena, as he well knew. The dialogue grabbed him, and the people felt authentic, especially Thelma and Darryl. “I knew this woman was stuck in this relationship with maybe her high school sweetheart, who was a pretty big deal on campus and basically peaked there,” Chris observes. “Now he’s just trying to keep that going. He’s a regional manager, a big deal! Just ask him, he’ll tell you!” Chris agreed to the audition, but he showed up at the Melrose Avenue production office tricked out as Darryl and asked if he could please, please read for that part.

  Ridley usually remained sphinxlike in auditions, saving a cryptic comment or two until the actor left the featureless conference room designated for casting sessions, but he couldn’t hold in the laughter when Chris McDonald unleashed a wild mix-up of dimwitted deadpan and ridiculous comic tics. He appeared as the very vision of Callie’s chauvinist carpet salesman in the requisite polyester leisure suit, absurdly sculpted bouffant hair and a gold necklace dangling a roman numeral number one that a friend had given him as a joke. Lou read the Thelma part in his gravelly Goodfellas voice for a scene where Darryl told her not to bother waiting for him for dinner. Then they read a scene where Darryl faked enthusiasm to hear from her on the phone with a patently insincere “Hello!” That’s when Ridley lost it completely. He hadn’t been sure, but there Darryl was. The character could be seen as creepy and vicious, yet Chris found the goofiness in him, maybe even a touch of desperate pathos, the preening of an empty-headed egotist.

  —

  CALLIE HAD SERVED UP ANOTHER IMPERFECT, multilayered character in Jimmy, Louise’s musician boyfriend, who, as written, demonstrated a rather sweet devotion that finally, sadly, too late, overrode his chronic failure to commit. It was important to Callie that Jimmy come across as a vaguely inappropriate love interest for an uptight waitress like Louise. Her choice of a safe but unavailable man would reinforce the impression that the rape in Texas had hardened her to romance.

  Ridley and Lou aimed to knock some of the sweetness off the Jimmy character by casting a rough-edged guy with enigmatic sex appeal. “I wanted somebody who on the surface appeared to be very much a man’s man,” Ridley said. “A bit of a shitkicker. Drinker, likes his cigarettes, has a band. But he’s not high-end rock ’n’ roll; he actually plays in lounges.” Loser was too strong a word for what Ridley had in mind. Jimmy was more a man with a certain amount of talent who’d been disappointed with where it had taken him. “A lot of those frustrations probably come out and backfire in Louise’s face,” Ridley said.

  Lou rounded up some actual musicians to read. The country singer Dwight Yoakam came in, and the rock ’n’ roller Huey Lewis. Both were interested in pursuing acting, and later did, but this would have been a first credit for either one. Rubén Blades, the Latin music star who’d already won some movie parts, made the list, too. Lou also wrangled some rising, more typically handsome leading men from the era: John Shea, who’d made an impression in 1982’s Missing, Michael Ontkean, who had secured a number of mostly romantic roles, and Jamey Sheridan, who was still working in smaller parts. One of the most out-of-left-field candidates was Joe Bob Briggs, a Texas writer-comedian who hosted a cable B movie show called Joe Bob’s Drive-in Theater.

  These actors mingled in the waiting room with the Darryl, Hal and other wannabes, including an array of sinister sorts up for the rapist role of Harlan. That crew was uniformly tall, with forbidding eyes. One of them, Michael Madsen, shambled into his meeting with an air of menace so masterful it would make Vito Corleone look like Mister Rogers.

  Ridley saw right away that this actor had the tools, the résumé and the physical presence to both attract Geena’s character and then try to rape her. In the last eight years, Michael had deployed hooded eyes, a looming physical presence and the raspy voice of someone who had spent too many nights in smoky bars to portray a series of dark characters in less than top-tier movies. He knew how the industry saw him: “Give Madsen a gun and a cigarette and roll the camera.”

  Michael slouched in a seat opposite Ridley and Lou, knowing what was expected of him at this audition, the psycho-killer persona that he’d raised to an art form, but he balked. “I don’t want to play Harlan,” he said, speaking softly as he fixed them with a sullen stare.

  “Why not?” asked Ridley, taken aback, but intrigued.

  “I know the routine, okay? We’re going to square dance together, then I’m going to rape her in the parking lot and then Susan Sarandon is going to shoot me.” He shrugged. “Where’s that going to get me? I could do it,” he stated with utter confidence. “And you’d believe it.” The words hung in the charged and suddenly chilly air. “But I’m not going to do it.”

  “Well, who do you see yourself as?” Lou asked.

  “Jimmy.”

  Ridley burst out laughing. He shook his head. He thought of the candidates they’d been seeing, with their dance cards full of amorous roles. “You really think you could do that?”

  “Yeah,” said Michael. He held the gaze of his interrogators without flinching. “Yeah, I do.”

  They asked him to step out of the room.

  “There’s a touch of Elvis Presley in there, isn’t there?” Ridley noted. An Elvis, maybe, who never made it out of Tupelo. Sometimes, on instinct, Ridley liked to cast based on physicality in hopes that the person could pull off the acting. But here he also saw a natural, realistic talent and, behind the snarl, a vulnerability that hadn’t found an outlet yet in pedestrian tough-guy roles. Maybe the ardent Jimmy would play better as a gruff, uninvolved guy with just enough softness to care about Louise.

  They called Michael back in and posed a question: Would he mind taking Susan Sarandon to lunch? If the chemistry worked, they’d consider him for the part.

  The odds seemed slim that Michael would strike a spark with the former Catholic school grad with a history of lofty moral stands. The actor’s juvenile rap sheet—stealing cars, breaking and entering, gun possession—had put an end to his family’s hopes that he’d become a cop in Chicago. He’d been working as an auto mechanic when he accompanied an actor friend to an audition there. The director Martin Brest spotted Michael, and he wound up with a brief part at the opening of WarGames—in a missile silo his character pulled a gun on another soldier who couldn’t bring himself to turn a launch key. Utterly cold. The production got him a SAG card and put him up at the Sunset Marquis. He worked pumping gas and changing tires at a Union 76 station in Beverly Hills until other character parts came along, all the while running with notorious Hollywood wild men like Dennis Hopper and David Carradine.

  Michael Madsen’s biggest struggle was finding the humanity in the people he was asked to play. “If I had known how many times a gun was going to be put in my hand after that first movie, I don’t know if I wou
ld’ve,” he says. “I guess it’s good to have something to fall back on, but that’s why I wanted to do Thelma & Louise so bad, because I wouldn’t have a gun.” Jimmy was the closest to a romantic lead he’d ever had a shot at, an opportunity to break the typecasting. “You could sit there and focus on my being intimidating and dangerous,” he says, “but you could also focus on the fact that I’m a sweet man, a good man, an honest man. I’m a father.” He was a man who wrote poetry! The kind of person who was largely absent from the assembly line of crime movies that sought him out.

  He picked up Susan from a house where she and Tim Robbins were staying in Santa Monica to take her to a nearby red-sauce pasta place, coincidentally called Louise’s Trattoria. They talked about family, the world at large, not much about the movie. Michael admired that she was a woman with political opinions, but he tuned out the details. “A lot of what she went on about I wasn’t keen on discussing,” he says. “But I liked her very much, and we were fond of each other pretty quickly.”

  Susan agreed that he would make for good casting, as much for his singular code of masculinity as his presence. “He certainly was that character,” Susan says. “He said he couldn’t be with Louise if he knew she’d been raped.”

  His many contradictions made him right for the part, while also promising some interesting moments on the set, for while Michael liked and respected female coworkers, his approach to gender in the workplace wouldn’t pass muster with the human resources department at the Acme Corporation. “Susan’s the kind of girl you could give a swat on the butt and she’d probably laugh,” he says. “In fact, I think I did that. To me, doing something like that to a woman in a situation where you’re working is a sort of a test. It says a lot about a girl. I like women who are playful. I like women who are smart. If you put those two things together, that’s Susan, for sure.”