by Becky Aikman
We don’t need the lantern, said Louise, jumping out of the car to help. The place HAS electricity.
Thelma took the lamp anyway, just in case. What if there was a psycho killer on the loose?
The final effect was perfectly comic. Done up with flouncing, curled hair, a ruffled white dress and a baby-blue jean jacket embellished with absurdly dangling strings of pearls, Geena looked like Big Bird dressed as Dolly Parton. But like any natural comedian, she didn’t play it for laughs. “Thelma’s not silly,” she insists. “I’m serious about what needs to be done here. We need to be supplied, because who knows what we might do? It’s new rules.”
Susan’s Louise met this spectacle with a fond, indulgent chuckle, but her getup indicated a very different character from her friend’s. A scarf was wound tightly over her hair and tied snug at the neck. Sunglasses shielded her eyes, and a long-sleeved white blouse, buttoned to the top, masked the famous Susan Sarandon décolletage. Red lipstick turned her sensuous mouth into a strict line. As Geena heaped her bursting luggage into Louise’s pristine trunk, Susan’s brow creased with momentary worry. Careful, careful, she ad-libbed. In contrast to Geena’s sweet, childlike Thelma, Louise already came across as bottled up and cautious.
Unlike Geena, Susan hadn’t consulted Callie about her character’s backstory. Much of the actress’s preparation for the role had arisen from her own initial concern about steering clear of a Charles Bronson revenge fantasy. She thought Louise should be driven not by anger or vengeance, but by a will to understand what had happened to her in Texas, and an effort to regain control of her life, to get a grip. The actress had asked the set decorators to supply Louise’s house with photo albums filled with images from the past, artifacts that Louise could study and decipher, even though the movie audience would likely never see them.
In keeping with that idea, Susan suggested that she and Geena take a picture together as their journey began, to document the moment. Before they hopped into the car, Louise whipped out a Polaroid camera, held it at arm’s length, and the two flashed wide, winning smiles, heads together in casual intimacy. The shot came to be regarded by many as the first selfie. It certainly became one of the most famous. One scene in, and the movie was breaking ground.
Susan still intimidated Geena, a parent-child dynamic that Geena used in her performance. But Susan already felt during the coziness of taking that selfie that the two had the capacity to form a potent combo. “You know when somebody is going to be your equal, if not better,” she says. “You don’t have to take responsibility for them, because they’re always going to be on time and prepared and have their own ideas, and they’re strong and smart and sassy. It opens your heart. You’re free to go full force.”
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RIDLEY COULD SEE THAT THE CASTING was working as he intended, which freed him to go full force on his end. “It was a good mix,” he says. “Susan as the mother figure or older sister. And Geena as the child who makes all the mistakes.” The contrast would be all the more striking when the roles reversed later in the film. He relaxed. With the actors taking care of their business, he could take care of his, finding the visual statement that would amplify the story.
He had twelve weeks to get everything in the can—a little over a month in Los Angeles to film the Arkansas scenes, a few weeks around Bakersfield for the road trip across the plains and a month in Utah for the stark endgame in the desert Southwest. To stick to the schedule, the cast and crew had to keep moving, keep it loose, catch each moment and move on. Not the ideal environment for a stickler like Ridley.
Nor was the everyday world of middle-of-the-road Middle America. Most of the settings for Thelma & Louise were planted squarely in the realm of the ordinary, and there could be nothing ordinary about a film by Ridley Scott. He and Norris Spencer had developed a shared mania for showy visual pyrotechnics on their other projects. “The fact that Ridley and Norris had television-commercial backgrounds gave them a visual style that was full of impact,” says Michael Hirabayashi, the assistant art director on Thelma & Louise, who came from the same ad background as many on the crew. “They knew how to make an image punchy, make it pop.”
Ridley invariably packed dimension and movement into every shot, filling the frame with layers of shiny objects, surfaces that reflected light and things that moved, like rows of ceiling fans. Even the very air took on texture in a typical Ridley Scott film, as he routinely puffed a cigar near the camera lens to saturate the shots with smoggy atmosphere. On The Duellists, says Harvey Keitel, he once had to say, “Get rid of the damn smoke!” He couldn’t see Keith Carradine, who was trying to act with him on the other side of the room.
The director couldn’t bear flat, frontal lighting, the TV-sitcom look that resulted from pounding light directly onto a set. Backlighting, which he preferred, lent more depth to an image, alternating darker and lighter areas within the frame and leaving more unsaid. The technique allowed him to create a rim effect, in which light from an obtuse angle outlines a body with a shimmery glow and separates it from the background. Ridley employed backlighting so often that Norris Spencer called him the Prince of Darkness.
That was all well and good in the murky atmospheres of Blade Runner and Alien, but how to achieve such effects in everyday settings, under relatively broad daylight, in Thelma & Louise? The budget wouldn’t allow Ridley to wait for sunset every day in search of burnished light. And how to make a working-class home in Arkansas gleam? Or a flat road in Oklahoma?
The challenge was to raise ordinary settings and costumes to a more elevated plane while maintaining a grip on reality. “It’s hard to find somebody who can dress ordinary,” says Ridley, speaking of the art and costume designers who created the movie’s look. “Grand is fairly easy. But to dress normal is the most difficult thing to do. What are ordinary people like?”
He and Norris plucked the relatively young Anne Ahrens for the key job of set decorator. At thirty-three, she thought Ridley might have chosen her for a film like Thelma & Louise because she was a rare woman in the field. Ridley demurs, saying he admired her for bringing flair to a conventional milieu in her previous work on The Fabulous Baker Boys.
Anne had entered USC film school, one of six women in a class of sixty, hoping to become a cinematographer, but her classmates wouldn’t sit with her or invite her to join them on their projects, so she settled on more-solitary screenwriting instead. Even then she was criticized for material that was labeled as overly female. “We don’t do anything about women and growth and that kind of stuff,” she was told. After graduation, a friend got her a job set decorating for music videos, and from there, a stint on Hardbodies, a beach-bunnies exploitation picture. Working with director Wes Craven on A Nightmare on Elm Street boosted her into more-mainstream projects.
Still, her heart jumped when she took a call from Norris Spencer, on behalf of Ridley Scott. From Norris’s voice, she pictured an older British gentleman with a top hat and cane, asking her if she wanted to set decorate a small film about two women on a journey. Ridley wanted a lot of layers, Norris explained, because the women had a lot of layers. “The denser the look of an image, the more interested we are in it,” he said. She quit a TV job as soon as she hung up.
Set decoration is a crucial element in a film’s overall design, both indoors and out. Anne prepared by assembling a truckful of fake tumbleweeds and road signs for locations on the road, and she wrote her own backstory for the characters so she could furnish their homes in character—Louise meticulous and even a little paranoid, Thelma disorganized and artless. Ahrens’s screenwriting background drove her to invest the physical with the intent of the story. Her understanding of Ridley’s aesthetic informed her shopping at swap meets and junk shops—she loaded up on lots of shiny things, the better to glisten in Ridley’s backlight.
Her handiwork showed in the first shot outside Thelma’s home, where lawn sprinklers twirled and spritzed, catching and
refracting the sun. A jumble of odds and ends cluttered the driveway and yard—piles of wood and a cement mixer from a half-finished construction project, a garden hose, trash cans, lawn ornaments—making for a dense image. The disarray also illustrated the state of Thelma’s marriage. “We wanted to show chaos in her life,” said Ahrens. “She’s trying to hold it together, but Darryl doesn’t really care about the house. He doesn’t provide for her.” Thelma’s car in the garage was a beat-up Honda, whereas an earlier sequence would show her husband leaving for work in a red Corvette.
The costumes hit the mark from the first scene, just as the decoration did. They were designed by Elizabeth McBride, a thirty-five-year-old who answered to the same heightened-ordinary imperative as Ahrens. Ridley had selected a woman for this job, too, but again based on past work rather than gender. He’d seen McBride master the art of dressing ordinary people, southern style, on Tender Mercies and Driving Miss Daisy. Like Callie, she was known for wearing cowboy boots and showing a bit of swagger. McBride’s job would be to bring texture and interest to commonplace clothes, adding the pearls to Geena’s jacket, for example, or later sewing rhinestones around the pockets of her jeans, and then evolving to a tougher style as the story progressed.
With those details in place, Ridley could turn his attention to the quality of the light. He had decided that each of the three acts in the film would have its own lighting signature. The Arkansas scenes would feature soft, gray tones, with a lot of rain and greenery, to distinguish them from the golden radiance of the plains and the blazing red sun of the desert. Ridley drew artistically accomplished storyboards for each shot, often on the fly on the set, to show the crew what he had in mind. The drawings captured the personalities of the actors and always indicated, through shading, the source of the light in any given shot. His director of photography, Adrian Biddle, a big, burly, amiable guy who had worked with Ridley before, knew how to create the lighting effects he wanted but also when to step aside, because Ridley preferred to operate the camera himself, starting on day one. “The magic goes through the viewfinder,” Ridley liked to say. He needed to see for himself.
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THELMA AND LOUISE PULLED AWAY from home as the last shots of the first day’s filming wrapped up. Sun winked off the chrome of Louise’s Thunderbird, gleaming like her pride and joy. Ridley thought of it as her dream vehicle. “She probably goes over it with a Kleenex and a toothpick after she’s cleaned it,” he explained.
Green trees waved overhead, reinforcing the verdant signature of the Arkansas scenes. More lawn sprinklers sprayed the street. A truck followed close behind, adding movement. Ridley squinted through the camera, riding on a platform mounted to the side of the car, capturing a close-up of Geena’s face, the sunshine behind her creating a golden corona around her hair. Thelma explained that she hadn’t told Darryl about the trip.
I left him a note. I left him stuff to microwave.
Susan let out a whoop of laughter and hit the accelerator. Ridley grinned on the other side of the lens. They were off.
CHAPTER 18
HOT AS A PISTOL
Day two was a whole other story. Two hundred fifty extras, a four-member rockabilly band, a fully festooned country-western bar with pools of shadow and colored lights and, not to be forgotten, Ridley’s beloved smoke machines to thicken up the atmosphere. The heroines’ fateful stopover at the joint where they met Thelma’s rapist would amount to a full-out demonstration of Ridley’s abilities to corral the elements of a big production—and a test of whether he could keep the focus on the characters at the heart of it.
At the beginning, before the story line turned dangerous and dark, the week of shooting at the Silver Bullet in Long Beach felt like a party. The location guys had managed to find an actual country-themed saloon and dance hall in the vicinity of LA. When they made a deal with the owner to use the bar’s real name, it never crossed their minds that someday the Silver Bullet might raise the hackles of critics convinced they had sniffed out phallic symbolism.
The stars prepared by focusing on the finer points of drinking and cutting loose. Ridley gave them earphones that played loud music, freeing them up to shout the dialogue across a table even when the set was quiet. Geena adopted a tip from Susan—feign drunkenness by spinning until it made her dizzy. And the two of them conspired to steep their performances in tipsy realism by persuading the prop guy to sneak real tequila into their drinks. “Just so we’d get the taste and kick in some sense memory,” Geena says. “So we were doing all these shots and takes, and we started to feel drunk, laughing that people didn’t know we actually were. When it was done, we were just rip-roaring. We asked the prop guy, ‘How much do you think we drank?” And he said, ‘Probably like a third of a shot.’”
What Ridley saw through the viewfinder looked pretty freewheeling. I’ve had it up to my ass with sedate! Thelma exclaimed over the supposed noise and the band, her eyes shining like headlights. You said you and me was gonna get outta town and, for once, just really let our hair down. Well, darlin’, look out, ’cause my hair is comin’ down!
No one was more dazzled by the extravaganza than Callie. She blended into the crowd as unobtrusively as possible—no one was eager to engage with the writer in the midst of this crush, she knew—but stopped short when she saw Susan and Geena together at the table.
There they are, Callie thought.
The feeling was exhilarating, thrilling. “It was also so weird, because something lives in your head, and then suddenly it’s outside of your head and all around you,” Callie says. But she also felt a profound intimation of no longer being especially necessary. “The train was leaving the station, fast and furious.”
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NORRIS, ANNE AND THE WHOLE art department crew had knocked themselves out to heighten the reality of the dance hall, which looked like a large, empty, beer-stained box before they got to work. They’d turned it into a Ridley Scott playground: crate loads full of clear glassware, neon beer signs on the walls, pool tables with blue billiard lamps suspended overhead and a dance floor beckoning under red and blue lights that spun from the ceiling. Dancers and drinkers animated the foreground, middle ground and background with constant motion. “We had a lot of opportunities to backlight them,” says Michael Hirabayashi. “It allowed us to make more silhouettes to give depth to the image.”
Over the bar in the center of the room, the decorators had dangled rows of glasses under red, white and blue neon, to give off an effect like an American flag. “We were going for super Americana,” Ahrens said, “but not in a cutesy way. Just a real bar, gritty and dirty, like it had been there for forty years.” The beer stains stayed. The scene would come across as authentic, right down to the waitress, Lena, played by Lucinda Jenney, a thirty-six-year-old who had won a number of supporting roles in movies like Rain Man and Born on the Fourth of July. She weaved expertly among the tables, picking up the light in a blouse embellished with a Native American design of fringe and polished paillettes.
Because this was a waitress in a screenplay written by a former waitress, Jenney wasn’t expected to play some movie bimbo in a tight uniform. The part was small but had personality, including some of Callie’s own qualities. She’d written Lena as a bit jaded, and smart about sizing people up. It’s a good thing they’re not all as friendly as you, she said to Harlan, signaling to the audience that the charm of the man who was hitting on Thelma had its limits.
Ridley recognized these straight-shooter qualities in Jenney at her audition and hired her without looking much further. She knew others had declined to read because the role occupied too few pages, but when Lou sent her the script, it was the best one she’d read in ten years, with a part, finally, that wasn’t just “the girl.” An accomplished theater actress in New York, Jenney had run up against a whole different environment when she moved to Hollywood. “The opportunities were entirely based on my looks; it’s that simple,” she says. �
��I just stuffed my bra and prayed to God my ass didn’t look too big.”
Jenney projected a fresh, pretty, girl-next-door quality, but agents peppered her with suggestions, few of them about acting. “They told me to dress a little hotter and make my boobs look bigger,” she says. “Understood: get a boob job. I never did.” But she appreciated the reasoning. Once, when she played a “very booby” character in a tight costume, she was amazed at the attention she received on the set. “It’s a visual art, so to cry boohoo is foolish,” she says. “I like to look at lovely people, too. I just wish there were more stories that had parts for women, any parts for women, whatever they looked like.”
While Thelma & Louise became known as a quintessential women’s film, Lucinda Jenney’s Lena was the only other female character in the cast, besides the leads, after Catherine Keener got cut during the edit. Jenney appreciated that Susan, a female role model in the flesh, hung out with her between takes, an unaccustomed opportunity for an actress on a movie set. And Geena lived up to the name Thelma, Jenney felt. “It’s a tough name to pull off. She’s childlike yet bright. That’s a lucky thing for an actress.”
Looking back later, she says, she viewed Thelma & Louise as a little spaceship that made it through a wormhole. “At the time, I didn’t have enough perspective to realize: this is a magic carpet ride.”
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THE ACTOR WHO FINALLY WON the steeplechase for the thankless job of Harlan the rapist was Timothy Carhart. The long list of potential heavies had included Viggo Mortensen and various action-movie veterans. Carhart specialized in making a vivid impression in small parts, like a paranoid corporate executive in Working Girl. Tall, thin, handsome, with cold blue eyes, he was “a Janus-faced guy,” says the casting assistant Brett Goldstein. “He looked likable, but then he could also look psychotic and evil, like one of those holographic pictures where you turn it and go, ‘Whoa—what is that!’ Like you see the skull under the skin.”