Off the Cliff

by Becky Aikman

  But when Thelma and Louise locked a state trooper in his trunk, he says, “It shocked me; it beyond shocked me. It horrified me. I’m thinking, These women are monsters.” The same with killing the rapist in the parking lot, bedding a hitchhiker and blowing up a truck. The underlying rage of the main characters disturbed Stephen. He didn’t get the point.

  All of this fed his portrayal of the relentless Max and his annoyance with Harvey’s Detective Slocumb. “He didn’t seem to be doing his job protecting the public,” Stephen says with visible irritation. “He wanted to protect the women at the expense of his job. I felt he was like so many of the men in the script—not true. They’re all cheaters and liars. Thelma and Louise are desperately looking for something that is pure.”

  His first day on location he could appreciate the art direction that Ridley brought to the story. Stephen walked onto the set and thought, This is an ugly kitchen. It is not a female kitchen. There is no place for a woman in this house. The temperature soared over a hundred degrees that week, and Elizabeth McBride, the costume designer, had fully embraced his undertaker take on the part by encasing him in an anonymous dark blue wool suit. He would wear that same suit with the same striped tie every day in every scene, another nod to his view that he was playing a force rather than a character.

  His objections to Harvey’s Detective Slocumb spilled over into the work. At that point in his career, Stephen wasn’t comfortable with improvisation, and he didn’t find Harvey as approachable as the other actors or as generous during close-ups. A couple of times Ridley told Stephen that Harvey wanted to improvise, and then with the camera running Harvey took some of Max’s lines. “I tried to use my frustration over the fact that we didn’t have the easiest relationship with thinking that this was perfect for the part,” Stephen says. “He was trying so hard to be sympathetic, I thought it tilted the film in an odd way. As Max, I didn’t trust him. I felt like he was a loose cannon. As my character, I went, This is a guy I have to watch.”

  Every morning Ridley assembled the guys like a general coordinating troops for an assault on a beach. “What are you going to do?” he asked everyone in turn. When the cops hunkered down in Darryl’s house, hoping to intercept a call from Thelma, Ridley turned to Stephen, “What are you going to do?” he asked. “I want you to come in and take over the room.”

  “Absolutely,” Stephen said, racking his brain for some standard-issue Law & Order dialogue. In rehearsal, Ridley looked vaguely displeased when the actor barked out some fake cop talk along the lines of “Okay, you get on channel two; you stay on channel seven.” But waiting outside the door for the camera to roll, he thought, FBI guys would already know how to do their jobs, but they wouldn’t know where their next meal was coming from. So he burst in and started taking deli orders—Okay, who wants turkey? Who wants corned beef? From then on, Ridley instructed Max to eat while the action swirled around him in almost every scene. The self-interest played into Max’s heartlessness. So did the line he delivered when the cops advised Darryl to sound affectionate toward his wife if she phoned, the better to buy time to trace the call: Women love that shit.

  “You read a line in a script like that,” Stephen says, “and you know if you just say that line it will be funny.” He gave it Max’s standard deadpan delivery. “You don’t have to do anything more than that.”

  Ridley approved of Stephen’s take. “Steve talks in the film as if he knows about women,” Ridley says. “Clearly, he was a virgin.”

  The spirit was festive on the set during the guy scenes at Thelma’s house. A shift to the Water and Power Building in Burbank, selected as the location for Hal’s police department, would bring a new, completely unseasoned performer into the mix. Some kid playing a hitchhiker, a third-string player after the first two choices fell through. The men on the varsity team had never heard of him. They wondered if he had what it took to play in their league.

  CHAPTER 20

  THE KID ENTERS THE PICTURE

  When Lucinda Jenney stopped by the production office for a costume fitting the week of June 18, a male figure had just slipped out, dissolving like a ghost as he turned a corner at the far end of the hall. Elizabeth McBride and four or five of her female costume assistants poked their heads outside the office, tittering as they watched him go. “If you run after him, you can see him,” one of the dressers urged Jenney.

  Jenney felt deflated. How typical, she thought. Cute guy in Hollywood, and all the girls are behaving like ninnies.

  They chattered and teased each other about him throughout her fitting, exalting a Polaroid they had taken that was pinned to a board. Jenney dutifully took a look. He wasn’t even famous.

  “Okay,” she admitted, “he’s good-looking, but can we get off it now? I mean, he’s blond and sort of Midwestern, but he’s not even very original good-looking.”

  “There’s something about him,” the others insisted.

  “I certainly experienced what a movie star’s effect is on people,” Jenney says later. “I saw the electricity that followed behind him. I saw the damage he did.”

  Callie happened to visit the set during the actor’s first day on the picture. Somebody said, “The guy who’s playing J.D. is here.” She knocked at the tiny honey wagon where he’d been assigned to dress. In full wardrobe—skintight jeans and a flannel shirt open over a fitted T-shirt—Brad Pitt answered the door.

  That’s good, Callie thought. She took a step back and let out a long, slow breath. She reconsidered and spoke aloud: “Perfect!”

  —

  THE GUYS WEREN’T SO SURE about Brad Pitt. “Nobody knew him from the bellman,” says Michael Madsen. “He was just this guy walking around.” They often got stoned together waiting for the van to take them to the set. “I just thought he was a good-looking kid. I don’t see what the big deal was about. I still don’t get it.”

  This scruffy kid, this Pitt, showed nothing but deference to his elders, calling them sir, offering to serve them, cowboy hat in hand. “Would you like to sit in my chair, Mr. Tobolowsky? It’s very comfortable.” (Really!) Or “Would you like me to get you some tea from craft services?”

  “I never felt so old and ugly in my life as when I was sitting next to Brad Pitt,” Stephen Tobolowsky recalls. “But I didn’t know if he was an actor or if he wanted to wash my car for extra money.”

  In his first scene, shot out of sequence on July 5, J.D. got hauled into the police department for questioning after he’d split from Thelma and Louise. Shy and understandably nervous, Brad said, “I dealt with staying focused, knowing I was in a new league.” A league with Harvey Keitel, no less, the master improviser, determined to cut loose. Harvey wanted to demonstrate his growing protectiveness toward Thelma and Louise, “not necessarily a show of extreme violence,” he said in some notes, “but a demonstration that Hal does not intend to be ‘fucked with’ by this kid.”

  The tension mounted when Brad met the grilling with brazen insolence, and Harvey did his thing. “By the end of the day, Harvey was beating me over the head with my own hat—unscripted,” Brad said, “and I was having as much fun as I’ve had on a set since.” By now he had figured out the nature of a sociopath. His eyes drifted off, disconnected, even as he turned all fake polite and started to cooperate.

  The next day the crew moved to a hallway for a setup that called for an accidental encounter between J.D. and Thelma’s outraged husband. Everyone expected some more ripe histrionics from Chris McDonald, but the guy playing the petty thief almost managed to steal the scene.

  I like your wife. J.D. smirked as he passed by Darryl next to a stairwell. Brad’s sly tone left little doubt that he’d cuckolded the dumbstruck Carpeteria manager.

  Come back here, you little shit! Darryl bawled.

  Chris was supposed to lunge toward J.D., with Harvey Keitel and an extra playing another cop holding him back. But Chris knew that for Darryl, the cock of the walk
, someone touching his wife—touching his property, the woman he really did love (after his own self-involved fashion)—would be the ultimate provocation. Chris’s history with Geena, the broken engagement, fresh again after they’d just worked together, flooded his brain. His face flushed purple. Steam blasted out of his ears. He dove for Brad headlong down the stairs, heedless of injuring himself or anyone else who got in his way.

  “I was vicious, like a rabid dog,” Chris says. “I would have ripped his clothes. At that moment, I really wanted to freaking kill him.”

  Harvey was truly alarmed. “He was too strong,” he says. “He rolled over me like a car.”

  Ridley swapped Harvey out for two beefier galoots, and they went at it again. After four more takes, Chris was sore and gasping for air.

  Then Brad capped the scene with an improvised coup de grâce, a sneaky taunt. He jumped down the stairs, just out of Chris’s reach, and rocked his hips in a lascivious humping motion, a blissed-out look on his face. The kid had more than held his own.

  The guys had to admit they were impressed, even if they still didn’t grasp the sex-appeal thing. Ridley thought Brad’s intuition was the key. “He’s got great taste, he’s very smart,” Ridley said, “but again, it’s intuition. I think with actors, intuition is probably everything.”

  —

  INTUITION. RIDLEY CERTAINLY LET the actors run with it. The scenes between the men turned more and more into displays of dominance that weren’t necessarily spelled out in the script. Sometimes they went overboard, as when Michael Madsen’s Jimmy turned up at the precinct for some unscripted questioning from Harvey. “What are you going to do?” Ridley asked them.

  “We were like, ‘Let’s just fuck around,’” Madsen says. They tried a number of variations—Harvey flashing some mug shots, improvising questions about the missing “girls” and missing money, asking if Jimmy loved Louise. Michael refused to turn on her, as befit his character. Bit by bit, both men upped the attitude, and the tone turned increasingly hostile. Then Michael lit a cigarette and started flicking ashes around.

  “You’re not going to smoke in here,” Harvey ad-libbed.

  “Why the fuck not?” Michael leaned back toward a window. “Is that better?”

  Harvey flipped out and leaped on top of his desk, prepared to launch himself at the sulky antagonist.

  “Okay, guys, that’s enough,” Ridley broke in. “What are you going to do, get in a physical fight?” The scenes had allowed the actors some showy fronting, but they were starting to divert from the central story, where the Jimmy character needed to occupy the more sensitive portion of the male continuum. When it came time for the final edit of the film, none of those interrogation scenes made the cut.

  On the set at least, Harvey got the last word. He spun toward Michael with a good-natured growl. “You know, if this was a real situation in a police station, you’d be eating that cigarette butt by now.”

  —

  ONE MONTH INTO THE SHOOT Ridley felt relaxed. Gone was the screamer from Blade Runner and other high-pressure productions. He felt looser, even playful, on this smaller, simpler lark. “Ridley was generous with people, and people were generous with Ridley,” says Stephen. Sometimes it seemed the director wanted to perform every job on the set himself—moving the props, setting up craft services. He chatted with the guys, talking to Chris McDonald about how well he thought Geena was doing so far, telling Michael Madsen how the studio felt about the ending: nervous. Ridley puffed on his Macanudos and Partagás and handed them out to the actors to smoke offscreen. (For Ridley, a cigar was never just a cigar—the excess smoke veiled the shots in his favorite blue haze.) The actors bonded. Michael later appointed Harvey godfather to one of his sons and signed on to Reservoir Dogs, where the actors could put their sinister rapport to good use, so they could work together again.

  The guys loved Ridley, and so did the crew. “Ridley’s a really masculine guy,” Madsen later told a magazine. “I thought, Wow, somebody like him—I need to be with him. We guys were: ‘We’re here to do this chick flick, but don’t forget when the testosterone comes into play.’”

  For a couple of weeks, they had been taking the script and making it theirs. On July 9, “the girls” would return, and the estrogen would come to the fore. Then everyone would find out how comfortably Ridley Scott could pivot back to the women’s point of view, or if Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon were forceful enough to wrest it back.

  CHAPTER 21

  WHAT THE FUSS IS ABOUT

  Geena Davis peered out the window of her trailer at a lineup of Playboy Playmates outside Ridley’s adjacent door. He was screening for someone to serve as a body double in Thelma’s sex scene at a no-star motel.

  Inside, the women stripped down one by one and spun in a circle. One of the hopefuls, Julie Strain, knew the director wouldn’t object if she kept her underwear on. “But it’s just easier to show the whole thing,” she said, “because if they’re going to shoot a love scene, they need to see there are no scars or marks.”

  “Very nice,” Ridley said to each in turn. “Thank you very much.” He settled on Strain, a Penthouse Pet who billed herself as “Six Feet Tall and Worth the Climb.”

  Geena had never appeared nude on-screen, but something about this procession of voluptuous beauties galled her competitive nature. After a couple hours of this, she marched over to Ridley saying, “Goddammit, nobody’s going to double my body. I’ll do it.” Once she committed, the bashful newcomer playing J.D. could hardly demur.

  —

  DISCOMFORT WITH SEXY SCENES WAS one of the reasons Ridley himself had nearly demurred from directing Thelma & Louise in the first place. Now there was no getting around it, and he had to hope that the sizzling chemistry between those two at the casting session would carry the day.

  To add to the challenge, the encounter would be filmed out of sequence, before any other scenes where the actors might have a chance to meet and kindle a little rapport. The three days scheduled at the motel would be their very first together, starting on what was only Brad Pitt’s third day on the entire shoot. Oh, and the action had to be mind-blowingly, convention-shatteringly hot, beyond anything Thelma had experienced before, just in case the stakes weren’t forbidding enough.

  “Oh my God, this is going to be weird,” both players agreed when they sat down with Ridley. The action wasn’t really spelled out in the script, Geena said. “Ridley just blocked out two days and said, ‘we’ll make stuff up, we’ll make stuff up.’”

  Anne Ahrens had recommended the location, the Vagabond Motel near USC, for its down-market retro vibe. Palm trees and skyscrapers showed in a couple of quick shots of the exterior, but such was the price of keeping the budget in check. For other shots, Adrian Biddle masked the urban view with a large overhead mirror that reflected the sky.

  Ridley chose to make it rain while the characters holed up inside. Perhaps due to his Northern England upbringing, he saw wet weather as comforting, adding to the coziness indoors and a sense of a temporary respite from the wider world. Ahrens dressed the room in womblike, fleshy colors and gold-flecked wallpaper, so far out of style that she snapped it up on sale. Mismatched furniture filled out the glowing cocoon along with a weird assortment of junk-shop lamps that were never in style, in particular a timelessly horrible one with a base like a stone fireplace and a fake flame flickering inside. Ahrens figured it would comment on the hot situation. Ridley opted to let it share the screen with Brad during the much-anticipated hair dryer scene.

  The actors emerged from their trailers on the morning of July 12 knowing they had to heat up fast. They had put in a couple of days filming preliminary dialogue in the scene, but this entire day would cover just about an eighth of a page in the script. (Direction: “J.D. turns out the light.”) That’s when the music would crank up and all but the essential crew got lost. Susan sent her ward off with best wishes. “You go ahead, hon
ey, you have the sex scene,” she told Geena. “I’ve had plenty.”

  “Lovemaking scenes are always a little tricky,” says Steve Danton, the assistant director who was charged with making everyone comfortable. He assured Geena and Brad that the atmosphere would be professional, that only half a dozen people could access the closed set, that robes would be at hand to whisk on between takes. Ridley would operate the camera. He lit the room based on where the actors would start and where they would end, leaving it up to them to figure out the rest.

  For the early buildup, Geena wore panties and a T-shirt, and Brad went shirtless in his jeans, but eventually they both got down to full-body makeup and little else. “It’s a long day when you’re running around with a patch on your personals,” Brad told a British publication afterward.

  Such forced intimacy was pretty much standard procedure for a movie love scene, but just about everything else in this one cracked the mold. Jaded crew members had seen all the typical elements before: slam-bam, foreplay-free sex; a younger, less experienced female actress paired with a veteran man; plenty of close-ups of the woman’s body while he took cover under the sheets.

  But in this scene, Callie’s dialogue stoked a seduction where the characters actually talked to each other, with humor, affection and interest. Geena and Brad, for their part, devised foreplay that was literally play. A hand-slapping game gave Brad an opportunity to slip off Thelma’s wedding ring, and a take when he jumped on the bed as if it were a trampoline flaunted his tantalizing physique.

  Even more unusual, the ingenue here was the guy for a change. On-camera lovemaking represented a career first for Brad, and he seemed so shy that Geena felt protective toward him. “I’m sweating, oh I’m sweating, and she’s actually sitting in my lap,” he said. “We’re basically naked, which is a really odd experience with everybody standing around doing their job like it’s another Monday. I just remember her talking to one of the guys about the shot and where they needed her to be. And all of sudden she just looks at me and goes—” He demonstrated a smile and a shake of the head. “She was just really cool about it.”