Off the Cliff

by Becky Aikman

  He got the word the next day. Michael Madsen won the part of Jimmy without even having to read.

  CHAPTER 16

  “THE BLOND ONE!”

  Every twentysomething kid in Hollywood who fell somewhere on the spectrum from cute to handsome to downright pretty descended on the casting office in pursuit of the role of J.D., the sexy hitchhiker who gave Thelma the night of her life. The auditions churned up an abundance of Bon Jovi hair, shrink-wrapped T-shirts with rolled-up sleeves, dreamy eyes and plummy lips.

  In a delicious twist, J.D. filled the customary girl part, the nubile sex object who beds the star and then disappears. Looks were just about everything here. But because J.D. ultimately stole the women’s money, he needed a dark side, too. That was the casting predicament: this character had to radiate enough seductive heat to cajole a woman who had narrowly escaped a rape to hop into bed with a sketchy stranger. Yet he had to signal enough treachery to use her and turn on her once he’d turned her on. “Dangerously sexy” was the mission.

  “It wasn’t as easy as it sounds,” says Ira Belgrade, an assistant casting director who screened the bad-boy candidates with Ridley and Lou. “There had to be a wild, interesting sexuality and charm for the part.”

  Throughout the month of March 1990, Lou set up a little camera on a table in the casting office to record the mixed results as actors delivered some mildly flirtatious dialogue from a scene in the car. Those who made the callback cut returned to deliver the seduction scene in the motel, where J.D. demonstrated how to perform armed robbery by slinging a hair dryer in place of a gun. This being a part with a racy lovemaking sequence in the offing, one would think the men would have been asked to take their shirts off, as actresses routinely did in auditions, but no one remembers any of that with the men.

  Looking back, the applicants, most with few credits at the time, formed a who’s who of future stars. Mark Ruffalo was only twenty-three, with just a single TV pilot under his belt. James Le Gros, thirty-two, had played supporting roles in a couple of cool indies, including Drugstore Cowboy. As if the procession of perfect cheekbones wasn’t confusing enough, one day Dermot Mulroney read at three o’clock while Dylan McDermott took the three-thirty slot. At least McDermott managed to make an impression, if only for the wrong reason. “He made the biggest classic mistake an actor can do,” says Ira Belgrade: he brought along his fiancée, a fairly obscure actress named Catherine Keener, to read the Thelma part, and she outshone him.

  “Not him,” Ridley said crisply as the actor left, “but what can we give her?” Keener wound up with the role of Sarah, the wife of Harvey Keitel’s Hal, although ultimately her scene was cut during the edit.

  The J.D. contenders mostly fell into two camps. Some adopted the spikey, tousled hair and winning charm of star of the moment Tom Cruise, while others went for the more retro effect of a shuffling, mumbling James Dean. Most fell short. The comments they left in their wakes ranged from “not bad-boyish enough” to “not good-looking enough.” For while they represented the epitome of available hunks at the time, as Belgrade puts it, “There’s gorgeous, and then there’s Hollywood gorgeous.” The role called for movie-star dazzle at a supporting-player salary.

  A near beginner named Brad Pitt was twenty-six years old when Lou had seen him on the tube. The blue-eyed blond skewed toward the better-looking end of the scale, but he had managed only guest shots on shows like Dallas and 21 Jump Street, not counting such movie gigs as “guy at beach with drink,” “waiter” and “preppie guy at fight.”

  “I don’t know who besides Lou would have thought of Brad Pitt,” says Brett Goldstein, the other assistant casting director. “He was so good-looking that if he could act, we would have found out by then.”

  Pitt’s reading veered into James Dean territory, with a nicely authentic accent and a certain slinky charm. But Ridley thought he seemed too young. They moved on.

  One of the strangest tapes featured a twenty-eight-year-old with a résumé of supporting roles on TV shows like Roseanne and The Facts of Life. With his square face, heavy eyebrows, thick sideburns and dark, wavy hair that bulged out to the sides and hung down nearly to his shoulders, the overall effect was of a head that measured wider than it was tall. He hunched forward, fidgeted to the point of distraction and for some reason made the choice to chomp on a toothpick throughout the scene in the car, shifting the intrusive prop from side to side with his hand so it obscured his mouth as he spoke. It was impossible to watch the audition tape without wanting to say, “Dude! Sit still!” Or at least “What’s with the toothpick?”

  It was all too much, and certainly not dangerously sexy, although Lou found him faintly interesting. “You would never in a million years look at this guy and think that this was the next big movie star,” says Ira. They thanked him and checked the name off the list: George Clooney.

  Throughout this procession, all Ridley could talk about was William Baldwin. The twenty-seven-year-old’s brother Alec had already played some major roles when Billy made the leap from modeling to playing the preppie murderer Robert Chambers in a television movie and went on to a smoky turn in Internal Affairs, a police thriller with Richard Gere. The rising star’s acting range wasn’t broad, but he was extraordinarily good-looking, with an air of mystery about him. When he nailed an audition at the end of March, Ridley called off the hunt. Billy Baldwin would play J.D.

  —

  MOMENTUM WAS RUNNING IN THE MOVIE’S favor toward a hard start date for shooting of June 11, 1990. Callie sometimes stopped by the production office, which hummed with the tasks of casting smaller parts and locking in locations. The choice of supporting actors pleased her. In fact, she had suggested Michael Madsen after he appeared in an indie movie produced by her boyfriend, David Warfield, with a typical Madsen title, Kill Me Again. “He could play the kind of guy who’s too much of a kid,” Callie says. “He doesn’t even know that he’s not coming through for Louise.”

  Callie felt the frustrating, disjointed moves of her life coalesce. Her agent fielded inquiries from studios curious about the new screenwriting name in town. She angled to school herself in directing by observing the filming of Thelma & Louise. And on June 2, 1990, at the age of thirty-two, the woman some would vilify a year later as the man-hating writer of a man-hating movie threw herself the southern wedding of her dreams, with the big white dress and all the trimmings.

  She and David and 150 guests abandoned all pretense of Hollywood cool at the Belle Meade Plantation in Nashville, with a full southern spread of barbecue and ham biscuits. “It was hotter than the hinges of hell,” Callie remembers. Amanda Temple flew in from London, and Pam Tillis served as maid of honor. By this time, the young musician who’d served as an inspiration for Thelma had recorded her first album and just signed with a new major label. Callie had helped write one of Pam’s early singles about longing and loneliness, “Wish I Was in Love Tonight,” but even the singer’s breakup songs, like “Don’t Tell Me What to Do,” celebrated the hardy spirit the two friends had cultivated in many an all-night talk.

  As they toasted Callie’s wedding that weekend, the old running buddies were flying. They had finessed their way past the sentinels of the entertainment industry and stood poised to fulfill the promise they had seen in each other all along.

  —

  GEENA TOOK AN URGENT CALL. Would she consider pitching in on Saturday, two days before the start of production? It was a casting emergency: Billy Baldwin had dropped out. His first scenes were scheduled within days, and now there was no one to play J.D. It would help if Geena would read with four guys who’d failed to make the cut before, in hopes that one of them could muster some chemistry with the star.

  Billy set this fiasco in motion when he was offered one of the much-coveted parts in Ron Howard’s Backdraft, which, thanks to a final roster of names like Robert De Niro, Kurt Russell, Donald Sutherland and Scott Glenn, was still shaping up as the movie
to beat. Pathé had failed to lock in Billy’s contract, so he had left Thelma & Louise practically at the altar.

  Ridley and Lou hadn’t panicked at first. They turned to a solid backup: Grant Show, a twenty-eight-year-old who played a cop on a TV show called True Blue. But he was committed to twelve days on a Jackie Collins miniseries and couldn’t get out of his contract. Thelma & Louise “was the best script I’ve ever read,” said Show, “the cherriest role I’ve ever read. The worst actor in the world could have taken that role and walked away a movie star.” Years later, long after a stint on Melrose Place and a dry spell of middling television roles, he couldn’t help but second-guess how he’d honored the contract for the miniseries. “If there is one thing I wish I could tell that young actor,” he said, “it would be to walk off that set and say, ‘Sue me.’”

  The casting directors sent out a distress call to all the talent agencies and got an intriguing response. “Hey, Ira,” Lou called out in the office one day, “CAA says Robert Downey Jr. will take it for whatever we have in the budget.”

  Downey was then twenty-five and already a certified star, but Ira had his doubts. “Isn’t he too short? Next to Geena?”

  Ridley scotched the idea over the phone. Now they had to scramble.

  That Saturday they convened in a faceless office for a new movie Lou was working on because he was already supposed to have wrapped Thelma & Louise. Everyone felt the pressure. The actors had to drop straight into J.D.’s pivotal hair dryer scene, where sexual tension crackled under the surface. J.D. had to be cool—but hot. From the beginning, before a hundred male ingenues tried out, Lou had predicted, “Whoever nails the hair dryer scene gets the part.”

  Geena, always the sport, was happy to help out. She and three dark-haired guys proceeded through the reading without a hitch. Honestly, they blurred together for her. Abs. Hair. Slouchy delivery. “They were all handsome,” Geena says. “They all did a great job.”

  When the fourth candidate sidled into the room, he came at the bad-boy thing a little sideways. Almost painfully polite, Brad Pitt presented himself as a perfect southern gentleman, with a few shy, sidelong looks toward the star. The deferential persona came to him naturally. Brad was the son of straitlaced Southern Baptists, born in Oklahoma and raised in Springfield, Missouri, so the accent was spot-on. Weeks before graduating from the University of Missouri, he’d left school when an itch to act propelled him to LA with nothing but gas money in his pocket and a mullet on his head. His approach to J.D. came from within, humble and attentive, a departure from the cocky style that might have been the more obvious choice.

  Ridley noted his trim physique, that he was shorter than Geena—although not as short as Robert Downey Jr. To Ridley, the actor still came across as a kid. “I want to see a real sociopath,” he insisted.

  Brad dipped his head respectfully. Sociopath? “I was fresh out of Missouri,” he later said. “I had to go home and look it up.”

  He had just lost out on one of the many roles in the ubiquitous Backdraft, another defeat in a long four-year slog. This Thelma script was so fine, the part so far out of his league, the presence of an Academy Award–winning actress and legendary director in that close office so pressing, his nerves could have gotten the best of him. He could have lost his cool. But then a strange thing happened. Geena lost hers instead.

  Brad launched into the scene, which, naturally, he had memorized for an audition as crucial as this. I’m just a guy. A guy whose parole officer is probably having a shit fit right about now.

  The room fell silent as Geena gawked at him. “Oh!” she exclaimed. She looked down at her pages, then looked back, simply staring at this knockout of a kid. She tried again, with an awkward stop-start shuffle that spelled disaster for Brad. What!? Parole officer? You mean you’re a criminal? She sputtered, stalled and laughed.

  “I’m so sorry, I’m screwing up your audition,” she said. “There is no rhythm here.”

  “It’s all good,” he assured her. “Let’s just try again.”

  They fumbled ahead, then broke off. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, and he meant it. He found her disarming and playful, which in turn helped him to feel loose. They relaxed into the scene as he wrapped it up.

  I’ve always believed if done right, armed robbery doesn’t have to be a totally unpleasant experience.

  God. You’re a real live outlaw! Geena’s face lit up with giddy, ardent embarrassment.

  Softly, Brad delivered the coup de grâce, looking straight into her eyes. I may be the outlaw, but you’re the one stealing my heart.

  “He had an incredibly calm and comfortable vibe,” Geena recalls now that she’s had a chance to collect herself, but still with visible enthusiasm. “He was so natural. There are people who can make it seem like they’re making up the words as they go, and that was what he was like.”

  After the actor let himself out, Ridley and Lou debated over the various brunets they’d seen. Which one had the right look, which had a rougher quality? No one mentioned Brad Pitt, the one who still seemed young for the role.

  Geena busied herself packing up her things, waiting to be asked to weigh in. What, she thought, would Susan Sarandon have said in this situation? She knew: Why are you not asking me what I thought?

  Finally, she stopped waiting for an invitation. “Would you be interested in what my impression was?” she asked sweetly.

  “Yes, yes, of course.” The men recovered themselves.

  “The blond one! Hello?!”

  Later, Lou explained the thinking behind the call. “Here was this kid who set her sparks off.” Or as Ridley says, “I saw her color up, and that was it.” They wanted chemistry? They got the kind of chemistry you couldn’t cook up in a jet-propulsion laboratory.

  —

  NEARLY TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER, Geena found herself seated next to George Clooney on a plane. They chatted as if they already knew each other, actors who enjoyed being members of their own exclusive club. At one point, he said, “That Brad Pitt, I’m never going to forgive him.”

  “I thought he was your big friend,” Geena responded, genuinely surprised. “Why?”

  “For getting the part instead of me,” Clooney said. “You know, when I read with you.”

  He had been one of the nobody brunets. She’s always wondered who the others were.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE GIRLS IN THE THUNDERBIRD

  The door to Thelma’s garage flipped open first thing Monday morning, June 11, 1990, and the camera rolled as Geena Davis burst out, dragging enough luggage for a reenactment of the Lewis and Clark expedition rather than a weekend fishing trip with Louise.

  The moment marked the official start of principal photography on a movie already freighted with more doubt than your typical multiplex fare. Yet Thelma & Louise had made it this far, and still none of the principals had given much thought to such weighty issues as whether this gender-bender road picture had something sweeping or controversial to say about women, men and the evolving deliberations over what constituted fairness or justice between them. Right now the set functioned pretty much like any workplace in America at the time—men and women bent to their tasks, collaborating, cooperating and bringing their various skills to bear.

  This was a simple scene, but important: they had to get Thelma down the driveway to Louise’s turquoise 1966 Thunderbird on a leafy suburban street in the Los Angeles suburb of Tarzana, ably standing in for Arkansas. It would mark the first time Thelma and Louise shared the screen in the course of the movie, setting the benchmark for their rich but complicated friendship.

  After a 6:30 a.m. call for hair, makeup and costumes, Geena, Susan and Ridley met at 8:30 to roughly block out the action. Afterward, they’d let it fly. They shared the belief that rehearsal killed the adrenaline and the spontaneity they prized.

  Geena, as usual, came prepared. She knew exactly how to play
the moment: she would open the faucet on all her own bottled-up adrenaline, all the emotions on one of the most momentous days in her career, and let them flow into her character. She put to use her full awareness that she had spent nearly a year pursuing this rare and coveted female role, her first as a major lead, her first that wasn’t a kooky girlfriend to a vampire or ghost or bug, a role that she’d spent hours prepping with an acting coach and with Callie, scribbling notes on every available margin of the script, spelling her lines out phonetically to nail the Arkansas accent. “I’ll do whatever it takes,” she said to herself, “not to mess up this brilliant part.”

  She believed that Thelma felt the same way she did. All the beleaguered housewife was doing in this scene was taking off for what most women would consider a commonplace jaunt, a weekend getaway with a friend. But for Thelma, Geena knew, the action carried uncommon significance. Although the scene was the first to be shot, in the film it would follow an earlier setup in which Thelma decided, for the first time in her life, to defy a domineering husband and skip out without his permission.

  “It was a huge deal, a big, giant moment in my life that I was doing this,” Geena says in a comment that applies equally to her character and herself. “It needed to be treated as such.”

  So while the props department had deposited a whole load of stuff by the door—suitcases, lantern, cooler, fishing pole, fishing net—and told her to choose what to bring, Geena opted for everything. She minced down the driveway, all elbows and knees and toothy grin, dragging the awkward jumble of paraphernalia toward the car, investing the character with her own over-the-top preparation, eagerness to please and fear of making a wrong step. She gave the simple scene a sense of momentousness.