by Becky Aikman
“I’m not sure you’re threatening enough,” Ridley had told Carhart during the audition. The actor figured he’d lost out. I can’t turn into Snidely Whiplash, he thought. But the director decided Carhart did possess an unexpected elegance that would appeal to Thelma at first.
He could appear pleasant or predatory at will, but in real life Carhart was a tender-hearted guy. Playing this role would exact a price. Nevertheless, he didn’t hesitate to accept the offer. “It’s a Ridley Scott movie,” he says. “I said I’d do anything.”
He kept himself apart from the others during breaks at the Silver Bullet and tried to play his first encounter with the two women as if convinced his winning ways would bowl them over. When Susan, recognizing the creep beneath, blew smoke in his face, unrehearsed, he was genuinely surprised.
Music and dancing dominated the scenes, which Ridley pulled together like clockwork. Patsy Swayze, a dance teacher and choreographer, the mother of Patrick Swayze, corralled the extras on the floor while Charlie Sexton, a rising young guitar player, performed with a popular local bar band called the Broken Homes. As they bashed away during a break, the extras, many of them regulars at the club, taught Geena and Susan how to perform a line dance called the tush push. Ridley had them repeat it, unrehearsed, so it would look ragged, while he sent handheld cameras up and down the rows.
Through the four days of interiors at the Silver Bullet, the mood for cast and crew was rollicking. The visuals popped, but the center of the story held. Ridley had learned that lesson on previous films. “It’s very easy to drop the ball or just get lazy or get swamped on the process of how that film looks,” he said. As the revelers stomped and twirled, Louise edged toward chucking some inhibitions, dancing with a stiff, fuzzy-haired stranger Ridley had plucked from the band. Thelma relished her momentary freedom, oblivious to Harlan’s controlling grasp. They finished the week on budget and on point.
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THE FOLLOWING MONDAY and Tuesday nights marked one of the most precipitous curves in movies, the attempted rape in the parking lot. As darkness fell on the exterior of the Silver Bullet, the first order of business was to shoot an earlier scene that depicted Thelma and Louise pulling in from the road out front. The crew added extraordinary interest to such a seemingly basic shot, wetting down the street for shine and lining up tractor trailers with their lights on, illuminating airborne pockets of exhaust. In the lot itself, where the attempted rape would go down, Norris ordered stacks of fifty-five green oil drums to block an ugly fence, then switched them out for black ones. Right before the cameras rolled, he changed his mind again and asked for black plastic sheeting to cover the whole pile, just enough to kick off reflective glints. Ridley approved tungsten movie lamps mounted on stands in the background. Even though they’d be visible on-screen, they would emit a stronger glow than streetlights to backlight the parked pickups and cars. Ridley cared more for the effect than for realism. He thought if anyone noticed the mechanics, the scene wasn’t doing its job.
It wasn’t until almost four in the morning on the second night that setups were complete and the rape scene itself was called. “We need to go quite a way down the road to make it understood what’s going on,” Ridley cautioned Geena and Carhart before they began. “We can’t just cut away.”
They blocked out the action and got down to it. Thelma, spinning from drink, Harlan groping her, Thelma pushing him away, Harlan smacking her sharp across the face and throwing her down against the trunk of a car. At first, Carhart felt invigorated to be playing a scene with an Oscar-winning actress. “Geena has the most insane talent in the sense of her belief that what is happening is actually happening,” he says. “As an actor, it becomes real for you because it’s so real for her. Which is why you want to do things with Academy Award–quality people. It was wonderful—maybe the first couple of times.”
Then the ugliness began to sink in. It got physical. It got rough. “Grueling, just grueling,” he says. When they finished, Carhart went straight home with a massive headache.
Geena tried to keep it professional, although the assault left her with bruises and cuts on her knees that were visible throughout the rest of the film. “Doing it was upsetting,” she says. “But I’m not one of those people who takes stuff home, or has big hangovers from things. It’s whatever it is at that moment. I’m always able to let it go.” Until the next time. Toward the end of the entire production Ridley would decide the scene needed a greater boost of violence to justify the rest of the women’s actions. They would have to go at it again, in a fashion that would be even more harrowing.
Before closing out the Silver Bullet shoot that night, the unit still had to tackle the scenario that most disturbed Susan—Louise’s shooting of Harlan, clearly unjustified because she had already stopped the rape by holding a pistol to his head. In rehearsals two weeks before, she had repeated her objections to performing a revenge killing. “What bothers me is, it’s not a necessary death,” Susan had insisted. “We don’t want this to be a genre where taking a life is superficial and flip.” She wanted the moral price to be evident, for Louise to recognize that she would have to pay.
Susan and Ridley negotiated how Louise would fire the gun, as if she weren’t fully aware of what she was doing. “She points her finger, but the finger has a gun in it,” Ridley explained. “It goes off—bang—which is why she startles and then realizes what she’s done.”
Moments later, Louise spits out at Harlan’s inanimate body: You watch your mouth, buddy.
Susan approved the approach, especially that line. “She’s just trying to shut him up, and because she speaks to him afterward it shows she almost doesn’t understand what’s happened,” Susan says. The way she played it, it was all on her face, the trauma that drove her to shoot, the shock that she had really done it, the horror at the realization that she’d made an irrevocable mistake.
The night ended with Thelma and Louise tearing out of the parking lot, Geena at the wheel, hysterical, her clothes torn, fake blood pouring out of her nose. “I have to run to the car, squeal back to pick her up, peel out, then slam on the brakes and hit the mark exactly next to the camera,” Geena said. “I have no recollection of how I was acting. I was just driving—it was all I could think about.”
CHAPTER 19
BAD BOYS
Chris McDonald strutted out the front door to the smokin’ red Corvette emblematic of his character, Darryl Dickinson, buffoonish husband of Thelma, regional manager of Carpeteria and all around Big Swinging Dick. The actor was white-hot to make an impression in the first take of his first scene, and all signs pointed to the positive. He looked snappy in a peacock-blue polyester jacket and slick new shoes from the costume department, and he congratulated himself that Ridley had adapted “The 1” idea from Chris’s audition necklace and embossed it on the license plate of the car.
Next thing he knew, those new shoes slipped on some lumber from the household’s lackadaisical home-improvement project. Chris fell smack on his ass, his head ringing like a gong on a metal tank amid the mess on the driveway.
Ridley saw that the actor was hurting but didn’t yell cut. Chris rallied, threw his briefcase into the car and ad-libbed a tirade at the construction workers. I want you out of here by five! he hollered. No, three, get outta here by three today!
He winced and shot a chagrined look at the director. Ridley was laughing his head off, along with most of the crew. “That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen,” Ridley said. “We could do it again, but that’s in the movie.”
After the ordeal of the rape scene, the mishap was a gift. The production badly needed some comic relief as it backtracked to pick up the earlier threads of the story. For the next couple weeks, Thelma & Louise settled back in the comedy groove.
Some early scenes set before Thelma and Louise took off on their odyssey served up a showcase for the art department to define the characters through decor. A brisk
montage of Louise packing for the weekend, sealing everything in Ziploc bags, highlighted her spotless apartment. There was a photo of Jimmy in a silver frame, and one of Louise as a child, twirling a baton, an actual picture of a young Susan Sarandon. In the immaculate kitchen, she rubbed a drinking glass dry and set it upside down on a neatly folded dishtowel, because leaving a wet glass in a dish drainer just wouldn’t do. Ridley’s camera lingered for a moment as sunlight filtered through the blue glass.
The designers went to town on Thelma’s place. Thanks to her taste for frilly, ill-considered kitsch, the home exploded with texture and color, mostly pastels. Clear plastic sheeting had emerged as Norris Spencer’s favorite design trick, so he draped it over the Dickinsons’ perpetual construction work to pick up shine. Anne Ahrens packed the set with recipes taped on the stove, a TV game show playing in the corner and motley flea market finds. “Thelma’s life was out of her control,” Ahrens says. “She was trying to control the chaos with ruffles.”
The set decorator shopped in the mind-set of the Thelma character to pick out one-of-a-kind pieces, but once, at a store that specialized in zany Lucite furniture, Ahrens spied the one thing, a lamp, that she thought Darryl might have chosen. Under the shade was a clear base filled with water, where pretty live fish swam around and around. “That’s how I saw Thelma,” Anne says. “She was trapped in there.”
The scenes before Darryl departed for work dispelled any concern that the formerly engaged Geena and Chris could work together. They conveyed good-natured respect for each other’s skills as they invented comic business that supplemented the script. Geena snatched a candy bar out of the freezer, took a guilty bite, returned it, then repeated while she talked on the phone. And Chris, preening in front of a mirror, perfectly executed the script’s instructions for fussing with his hair.
On camera, they played off each other with finesse, as when Geena, all innocence, commented on Darryl’s suspect plan to stay out late:
Funny how so many people wanna buy carpet on a Friday night. You’d almost think they’d want to forget about it for the weekend.
Chris blinked hard before delivering a reprimand: Well, then, it’s a good thing you’re not regional manager—he twirled a jumbo set of keys like a cowboy with a six-shooter—and I am.
Geena, done up in one of those floral print bathrobes that seem to be sewn together out of terry cloth towels, managed to make Thelma not only amusing but also poignant as Darryl found exasperating her every effort to please. And Chris located the core of his self-absorbed jerk right in the text. He saw Darryl as a man who had let himself forget that he loved his wife as he took her sweet nature for granted. From there, Chris had fleshed out details with research, flying on his own dime to Arkansas, where he hid behind sunglasses to observe a guy at an airport, the very model of Darryl. “He was on the make with some woman, and he had a big key chain with him,” Chris says. “He’s saying, ‘this one is for the Porsche’—it’s obviously a GM key—‘and this one’s for the beach house, and this is for a couple apartments I own.’”
A truly important man, Chris decided, must flaunt it with a bloated batch of keys. Tacky jewelry added to the effect, he says, “because that makes a lion like me even more spectacular.” He capped the Darryl look by growing a mustache and asking the stylists in the hair trailer to duplicate the airport guy’s do, a big blowout, combed over and sculpted into a helmet. Darryl, Chris knew, was very proud of his hairline, and somehow he managed to anticipate the self-regarding aesthetic of Donald Trump. Ridley was delighted when he checked in on Chris in the makeup trailer. To encounter him off camera in his full Darryl regalia was to laugh.
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CHRIS MCDONALD KEPT THE DIRECTOR, cast and crew entertained through the rest of the Los Angeles shoot, which skipped ahead in the plot to the police investigation while Thelma and Louise were on the run. That meant that for two weeks, the story line of Thelma & Louise veered into the exclusive territory of men, and the production switched to a typical movie shoot, a bunch of guys horsing around and yukking it up. Ridley brought in rain machines so the audience would understand it was back in Arkansas when he cut away from Geena and Susan. “The girls,” as everyone referred to them, had some time off.
Harvey Keitel cracked up so often while playing scenes with Chris McDonald that Ridley gave up and used the takes, deciding Detective Slocumb might as well react naturally to such a dunderhead. Darryl in a fuzzy blue bathrobe, Darryl swatting at an invisible fly, Darryl taking a beat to flash a look of vacant incomprehension before delivering every line, Darryl playing the dick, switching the channel while the cops watched a soapy late-night movie at his house. When Darryl carried on a conversation with his feet planted in stale pizza that littered the floor, Harvey, Ridley and everyone else bit their lips to keep from cracking up completely.
“I kept falling off the dolly at the end of every take, laughing,” said the director, “and not a lot makes me laugh.” Ridley hadn’t anticipated just how funny Chris McDonald would turn out to be but happily let him run with the ball. The director stuck to his principle that if he cast well, he should let the actors do their thing.
Chris, for his part, worried about going too far over the top. “Ridley was the best audience an actor could dream for,” says Chris. “He’d say, ‘I love what you’re doing,’ but otherwise he left me alone.” The actor had to trust that Ridley, who wasn’t known for his comedy expertise, would pull Chris back if he skirted too close to making a fool of himself. The script provided his only other assurance. For all the added funny business, Chris kept to the dialogue in that script. “So often you have to work overtime to bring a script to life,” he says. “It wasn’t work with this one.”
In some respects, Ridley granted even more license to Harvey Keitel. Insisting he drive himself, Harvey called the production office most mornings when he got scrambled on the way to the location. He kept his own dialogue coach at hand, and he ate up time parsing the motivations of his character with Ridley, who preferred his actors to hit their marks and make their own choices. Harvey took seriously his responsibility to represent the more caring end of the male spectrum. He stopped Lucinda Jenney during rehearsal for a scene when he questioned her character after the shooting to suggest that she act friendlier to Hal, the better to establish his bona fides as a good guy. Ridley let Harvey diverge from the script to ad-lib lines like Excuse me, you’re standing in your pizza or an incongruous Happy birthday, lady when he spotted a photo of Louise in her apartment.
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WITH CHRIS AND HARVEY CUTTING UP all over the place, the character actor Stephen Tobolowsky resolved that his role as the FBI agent Max was to keep the investigation, and the story, on track. “Chris’s performance did a lot; it set a parameter,” Stephen says. “It set a fence the other actors could work within. If you didn’t have Chris out there, you might have thought Brad was too big, Michael Madsen was too big. But now those performances were right down the middle, because you had Chris out there holding down the edge.” Stephen chose to calibrate his performance by playing the kind of law enforcement official who showed no emotional response to events, a guy just doing his job. His deadpan delivery would create tension by virtue of juxtaposition.
A tall, bald, pop-eyed actor with a nudgy demeanor, Stephen, thirty-nine years old, played such a recognizable type that he worked constantly, everything from Caveman Carl in the TV show Alice to a Klan leader in Mississippi Burning. In 1991 alone, he appeared in twelve projects—playing, for example, a cop, a lawyer, a baker, a warden and the alternative healer Tor on Seinfeld. Lucinda Jenney, in contrast, had worked twice. Stephen understood that gender played in his favor. “It is a business that is unkind to women,” he says. “It chews up and spits out the young. They don’t have as many good roles.”
No one could accuse him of sucking up to get the part of Max. Stephen may have been the sole auditioner, aside from Susan Sarandon, who openly crit
icized the script.
“I don’t think it’s bad,” Stephen had said to Ridley, “but I find it odd.” He thought it was brave to make a movie so out of the Hollywood mainstream, and the writing was out of the box, but the idea that it was a traditional buddy movie with women in the leads? “I just thought that was horseshit,” he says. He saw the screenplay as a Greek tragedy in which, instead of following a typical three-act structure, events were set in motion so that little changed through the course of the film. Once Louise shoots the rapist, he said, “the women are cooked.”
Ridley smiled and asked, “So how do you see yourself in it?”
“I see myself as the undertaker,” Stephen replied. “I am strictly professional. You send the corpse to the undertaker and he dresses it up, because that’s what he does. I am not a character so much as a force that moves from state to state and fulfills the job of catching the women, regardless what anyone thinks.”
He didn’t admit as much to Ridley, but Stephen objected to the tone and morality of the script as well. He was sympathetic to the quandary the women found themselves in—up to a point. “The underlying violence between men and women was something that I experienced a lot growing up in Texas,” he says. “You see it in the country-western mentality of women being honky-tonk angels and getting knocked around, and guys getting too much to drink and being violent, and a woman’s place is in the home and keep your biscuits in the oven and your buns in bed.”