Off the Cliff

by Becky Aikman

  So much so that she walked off the set, clearly upset, a stunning departure for the usually accommodating actress. All these years later, she is still reluctant to discuss it, beyond saying that she felt genuinely terrified, and Carhart still expresses regret that she was placed in such a hostile scenario. They parted without speaking after the scene. He called her later to apologize.

  —

  “I WON’T GET A DATE FOR A YEAR,” the actor Marco St. John bemoaned to Ridley before they shot his scenes as the truck driver.

  Ridley looked at the actor with pity. “Try five,” Ridley said.

  If Harlan the rapist was the movie’s most thankless role, the trucker wasn’t far behind. When Ridley first met with Callie, he hadn’t believed there were guys out there who made such lewd, crude, rude remarks and gestures to female motorists. But after Callie assured him this was an everyday occurrence on American roads and Mimi Polk weighed in with her own examples, Ridley was now fully on board, doubly sold because there was an explosion involved. The truck driver, and that photogenic fireburst of his gasoline tanker truck, would provide welcome relief to the grim endgame with the police in the final section of the movie. The script called for several encounters with him along the road before the women flirtatiously suggested he pull off to the side. They would spar with him before shooting out his tires, then shoot the tanker to make it explode in a ball of flame. “I think Ridley did the movie to blow up that truck,” Susan Sarandon says. “He loved that scene.”

  Ridley told Marco St. John to let it rip, the lewder, cruder and ruder the better. This was hardly the sort of direction St. John was accustomed to receiving. “I was mortified that I was such a dork,” he says. He had been a New York theater actor, Shakespearean, no less, until a horrific tragedy derailed his career in 1971. Playing Alcibiades in a production of Timon of Athens at Shakespeare in the Park, he was summoned offstage midperformance to the news that his wife had been brutally assaulted and shot in their Greenwich Village apartment. The crime was never solved, but St. John believed she died fighting to save herself and their seven-year-old son, calling out to him to stay outside while she struggled to fend off the attacker. Afterward, St. John left New York and its acting opportunities to take their son to live with family in Mississippi. His career never regained its former trajectory.

  Lou DiGiaimo called St. John in for the part of the FBI agent, but Ridley liked the actor’s comic delivery and suggested he read with all the leathery-looking guys up for the trucker. He was pleased to be offered a role, even this one, in a film that broke the mold for women. “My wife was very courageous,” St. John says. “She fought to the death for her son. She fought for her life. So I have great respect for women. Susan and Geena were the real deal, and the way Callie dealt with men, nobody had done that before.”

  St. John followed instructions and kept it broad—too broad, according to many critics when the film came out. He waggled his tongue at the women as they passed him on the road. Like some cretinous good ole boy in a Smokey and the Bandit movie, he delivered lines that were slipped into the script on the spot, like Hey baby, I’m your Captain Muff Diver! and You ready for a big dick? Geena and Susan amused themselves by suggesting raunchier ad-libs that didn’t make the film, like “How would you like a come shampoo?” The art department gave the trucker the shiniest possible chariot, a chrome gasoline tanker with silhouettes of naked women on the mud flaps and an interior perked up by just enough gold spray paint to give off little kicks of sparkle. Gold mirrored sunglasses completed his look.

  “I thought he pulled it off brilliantly and outrageously,” Ridley said in defense of the performance. And St. John says, “I know guys who make that look like I was underplaying.”

  Brett Goldstein, the assistant casting director who suggested St. John for the part, offers a more nuanced justification for the trucker. “Yes, there is something clownish about it,” he says. “I think men are broad when it comes to the prospect of easy sex. This is not a subtle country. Men can be big, dumb, loud idiots in a lot of ways. And it’s like the gravediggers in Hamlet or the porter in Macbeth. People need a little escape, to lose some steam before you go back into the drama. Ridley instinctively got that in terms of film structure. It was justified.” Goldstein gives it a beat. “And people love explosions.”

  But Callie was still visiting the set during the scenes, and she couldn’t stomach the cartoonish version of the statement she wanted to make. Her demeanor on location struck others as withdrawn, “like there was a glass case around her,” St. John says, but everyone understood that she had wanted to direct the movie, and they knew she would have ditched the Rastafarian and toned down the truck driver if she could. Callie didn’t mind the Rastafarian so much after she saw the finished film, but she could never reconcile with the troglodyte trucker. “He was a caricature,” Callie says. “Any woman on the set could have told them that a guy like that is a real guy, but the way it was played wasn’t real. It was disappointing because it engendered criticism of the movie that it was making fun of male characters in a way I didn’t intend.” She ends on a wistful note. “I still wish there was a way to fix all that stuff.”

  Callie had no power on the set, but Susan Sarandon did, and she objected to the trucker scenes for reasons of her own. The sequence fed her ongoing concern about the film skewing toward a revenge fantasy. She opposed a script direction calling for Thelma and Louise to “howl at the top of their lungs” after the explosion—too celebratory. “I wanted to be somber in the moment,” Susan says, which wouldn’t have been music to the marketing guys’ ears. And she wanted the dialogue with the trucker to be more thoughtful, more an attempt to understand than to lecture. “She’s trying to figure out,” Susan says, “why men think that sticking out their tongues or talking about your body parts would in any way be a positive experience for a woman.”

  The script already hit some of those notes.

  We think you have really bad manners, Thelma said when they confronted the driver.

  We were just wonderin’ where you think you get off behavin’ like that to women you don’t even know, Louise added.

  But Susan insisted on a line she devised: How would you feel if someone did that to your mother or your sister or your wife?

  Ridley suggested St. John respond as if he didn’t understand what she meant. Huh? What are you talking about? When he refused to apologize, they let the bullets fly.

  Ridley appreciated the businesslike quality of the two actresses in the scene. “It’s not threatening,” he said. “It’s authority. It’s equality.”

  Even with flashy pyrotechnics in the offing, the designers still dressed the set. Geena and Susan would stand in the T-bird to shoot, but to keep the background interesting, Ridley asked the art department to build an awning of some sort behind them. The crew slapped together an odd metal structure, then attached scraggly pieces of gauze, aged with paint, to flap in the wind, and some splinters of Norris Spencer’s signature plastic sheeting for the requisite shine.

  On August 20 a couple hundred crew members and locals gathered to watch the big conflagration, positioned well back because of the real danger. With only one $79,000 tanker to blow up, Ridley stationed half a dozen cameras behind safety barriers to catch every angle. St. John took his position closest to the blast, about fifty yards away. “You don’t have to do this,” Bobby Bass, the stunt coordinator, told him. “We could use a stuntman.”

  St. John replied, “Hey, today is as good a day as any.”

  Geena and Susan were the next closest, about a hundred yards back. “Um, you’ve cleared everybody away for miles,” Susan said to Ridley. “Why are we so close if it’s dangerous, and the camera’s behind us so you can’t see us anyway?”

  “It’s not safe for the camera here,” Ridley answered.

  “Well, get stunt people or figure out how to make it safe,” Susan said, drawing on her best no-nons
ense voice. “This is the only time we’ll see this, and if you put a camera in front you can get our real reactions.”

  Ridley spent another hour with the safety coordinator, setting up a view of the actresses’ faces and telling them what to do if debris flew their way. Then the director crawled under the car to get near the action himself. He told St. John he’d call, “Ready, steady, go,” but the blast was rigged to detonate at “steady.” “It had to go before he knew it would happen so it would scare the shit out of him,” Ridley says.

  The truck blew on cue, flames licking well over a hundred feet in the air. St. John rocked on his heels, mouth gaping, and felt the heat smack his back. Later he realized he’d lost some of his hearing. Geena and Susan were so stunned that they looked completely blank.

  “What the hell was that?” Ridley asked after he saw them on the monitor. “You didn’t do anything!”

  “It was just too amazing to react to,” Geena responded. “I think we forgot.”

  The crew had to set up some fans and flashing orange lights, and the actresses went wide-eyed for close-ups, Susan keeping it on the solemn side, as she had planned. But first they filmed her whipping the car in circles around St. John before the women peeled out under the smoke, Geena delivering the final insult by swiping his hat. It was the beat-up cap that Ridley had bought off the woman trucker on the scouting trip to Arkansas, and Thelma would wear it in the penultimate scenes.

  Back at Pathé in Los Angeles, Laddie invited the nervous marketing guys to the dailies. They couldn’t contain their joy. “It was a giant explosion like you’d have in Beverly Hills Cop,” Greg Foster says. The sharp script, the humor and now this. “At that point, it was like having your cake and eating it, too.”

  Meanwhile, Marco St. John flew out to his next gig at an arts festival in Pittsburgh. He played the title role in that most poetic of Shakespeare’s love tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra.

  —

  IT WAS A TOUGH SHOOT, everyone agrees, what with the six-day weeks, the heat, the scour-proof dirt and the long drives to remote locations. While the cast and crew baked between takes, a second unit tooled around the area for added beauty shots with a matched set of Thelma and Louise doubles in another car. After long days of shooting, Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon had to sit still at night as a makeup artist made plaster casts of their heads, models for the dummies that would be sent over the cliff in the final scene. Tony Scott, on location to shoot a Marlboro commercial, joined his brother for a few days. Otherwise, Ridley, recently divorced, mostly kept to himself when he wasn’t on the set, watching dailies over takeout food and keeping his focus. Occasionally he went horseback riding on a day off.

  The rough conditions nurtured a general camaraderie. “It was like an extended camping trip,” says Mimi Polk. Geena and Susan hosted a party at the local bowling alley, where Ridley obsessively perfected his initially pathetic game. He threw gutter balls until an assistant director approached with questions about the next day’s shoot. As soon as Ridley’s mind clicked back into his usual world, he started throwing strikes. On the set, laughter and practical jokes prevailed, with water balloon fights and competition to find phallic references in the rock formations.

  Susan enjoyed her kids visiting Moab, at times with Tim Robbins, and she was always laughing and happy in the makeup trailer. “It was something I hadn’t done before,” she says, “and I felt very open and expansive and energized and had a lot of fun.” But members of the crew detected spiraling tension between her and Ridley as the shoot progressed toward its controversial conclusion. Some say the two barely spoke from the trucker scenes through the end of production.

  The differences seemed inevitable given their polar-opposite sensibilities. One of Ridley’s favorite lines was to tell an actor after a shot, “Oh, you’re one of those one-take Johnnies.” It was intended to make the player feel confident while letting Ridley move on. “I’ll interact to a point,” Ridley says. “I’m like Clint Eastwood in that way.” He’d heard that when an actor asked Eastwood for another take, the director liked to say, “Yeah, if you want to continue wasting everybody’s time.” Ridley favored actors like Matt Damon, who worked with him years later on The Martian. When Ridley told Damon, “I tend to do two takes. Is that okay?” the actor answered, “Whatever.”

  With Susan, the issue wasn’t that she wanted endless takes but that she tossed out so many opinions before the cameras rolled, and so definitively. Geena stayed true to the text and had already planned her scenes when she arrived each day, but Susan was a dynamo about asking for changes and making sure her point of view came through. There were members of the crew who thought her shadow direction kept the performances just where they needed to be. “Because this was a women’s film, and Ridley is about as far from a feminist as you could get,” says one, “Susan was leading the way.”

  None of this struck her as unusual. “I’m always like that,” she says. “I don’t feel like that’s being a director necessarily. The director has so many other things to do.” She likens a movie shoot to a car trip, with the director driving and the actors in the backseat saying, “Let’s take this road. Or how about that one.” The actors aren’t responsible for getting the movie where it has to go, she says, “but we throw out suggestions. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they lead to a third thing.” Given how much else Ridley had to worry about, she said at the time, he didn’t have the luxury to think about whether a line was too sentimental or it was appropriate for her to have a sex scene. “Sometimes I would have to be the one who said, ‘No, I absolutely won’t.’”

  It wasn’t that the two of them weren’t speaking by the end, she says. “I don’t remember it that way at all. There was so much technical stuff, and because there was a time factor and it was the end of the movie, there was not a lot of conversation.” She suggested lifting some dialogue about friendship from the final scene and putting it during an earlier driving scene, and Ridley agreed. “So we ended up fine. We would kid him and he would kid us. It wasn’t like he was finishing my sentences, and there was definitely a divide between the men and the women—the guys were hanging out together. But Ridley listened, and we contributed when we could.”

  Most of her coworkers admired her forthright style. Some of them, accustomed to working with actresses who were insecure about their looks or their lack of authority on the set, got a kick out of Susan’s crystal confidence. “Susan Sarandon is like the tough woman actress,” says Ken Turek. “There is no stepping on her. Both on camera and off, she could go head-to-head with any of the guys. She was not going to be some female who would sit in the car and look pretty.” She was never apologetic about expressing herself, but she also never raised her voice, and she often took the edge off with well-timed humor. No one remembers the actress and director having words on location.

  “I didn’t notice her bossing anyone around,” says Michael Madsen.

  Ridley Scott’s feelings about her seem to vary depending on when he’s asked. “With two very collaborative actresses,” he told a reporter who visited the set, “I keep everything open. They chuck in their ideas, and it all goes into a melting pot. I’m having more open and, I think, better discussions with these two than I’ve probably ever had.” But years later, during a moment of reflection, he says, “I listened, yeah, yeah, yeah, but I knew exactly what I’m going to do.” He added, “She just knows more about anything than anybody.” He agrees that they never had words at the time.

  His views may be colored by interviews Susan gave when the film was released, including an article that quoted her as saying, “The only way to find out what was going on was to batter him, just completely abuse him. And that’s what Geena and I did.” According to Ridley’s account, he called her up and gave her an earful after one such feature appeared.

  Susan’s opinions about the script and interviews about her role in making changes led to some frosty m
oments with Callie, too. “Susan saved the picture,” Callie says in a moment of sarcasm. “We’ve marveled for years at what kind of a ham-fisted mockery we would have made of it if it had not been for Susan.”

  As Ridley Scott movies went, though, the tension wasn’t all that notable. And it was understandable that emotions would crest as the final days of August loomed and the crew rigged the precipice of Dead Horse Point for the much-debated end of Thelma and Louise.

  CHAPTER 25

  OFF THE CLIFF

  The last week of August. Time to settle the argument that had bedeviled everyone who came into contact with Thelma & Louise since Callie brought the screenplay into the world. By now one or both of her leading ladies had shot a rapist, robbed a store, blown up a truck, had sex with a stranger and drunk Wild Turkey while driving a car at a ridiculous speed, but would they be allowed to gun that car off a seven-hundred-foot cliff? If so, they would play out Callie’s vision of liberation, sacrificing themselves as an ultimate act of resistance to the place they’d been dealt in society. Staged grandly enough, they’d fulfill Ridley Scott’s concept of a passage into legend. But there was no getting around it—they would also be killing themselves. The scene would test all known limitations on what was acceptable for women on-screen.

  Laddie spoke with Ridley again two days before. Had anyone come up with another ending, if only to give them options in the editing room? The answer was no. The two men agreed: they would let the movie be what it was supposed to be. If preview audiences rebelled, that might be another story.

  On Monday, August 27, the production descended on Dead Horse Point, thirty-five miles outside Moab over rocky, barely graded roads, following an exhausting three-day shoot of a car chase. It had taken more than sixty complex setups to film some dozen police cars, a cavalry in hot pursuit of the Thunderbird, barreling through an old ghost town, home of the old prospector and his attack chicken. A stunt driver handled some of Susan’s chores, although she sometimes had to steer for close-ups. Geena often hung on for dear life as the passenger.