Off the Cliff

by Becky Aikman

  Time was running alarmingly short. When tire tracks from rehearsal marred a field where a wedge of police cruisers would pursue the T-bird, the frantic crew ran out with brooms. “Stop,” Ridley ordered. He directed a helicopter to make low passes over the ground. The downdraft from the rotors smoothed out the dust to render it tidy enough, if the audience didn’t look too closely.

  The chase reached a smashing conclusion thanks to a police pileup at a railroad crossing. Then the car broke free for a momentary respite as it headed toward the lip of the canyon. The scene offered the last chance for the heroines to get away, Ridley thought, but if so, the legend would die instead of them. This had to be the final leg of the journey.

  Thelma and Louise pushed forward on that bit of road, grim, determined, with bursts of near-hysterical laughter, the car skirting the edge of the cliff. In ravishing close-ups, their movie-star faces looked burnished against the red-rock landscape, their eyes shaded by their battered hats. Geena’s strong jaw jutted out in profile under the bill of her trucker cap. They shared a cigarette.

  I guess I went a little crazy, huh? Geena said.

  You’ve always been a little crazy. This is just the first chance you’ve had to express yourself.

  Watching on video, Ridley thought them handsome, for want of a better word, handsome and strong. To him they seemed sexy, businesslike, heroic. Women would like to be like this, secretly, he thought. It killed him that time pressures didn’t allow him to film that scene in the car, that he had to watch it later, once removed: “I wanted to be there with them.”

  —

  CAST, CREW, STUNT DRIVERS, HELICOPTERS and multiple versions of the Thunderbird converged at the final location with only four days and a daunting thirty quick scenes to go. “It was sick how much we still had to shoot,” says Steve Danton, the first assistant director. That included shots of swarming police, a confrontation over tactics between the law enforcement adversaries Harvey Keitel and Stephen Tobolowsky, the last words of Thelma and Louise and, of course, the plummeting car. No one could be sure whether it would fly into the canyon as the production hoped, or tumble ignominiously to finish the epic with a dud. Only three vehicles were available to launch, one for a test run and two for usable takes. This had to work, and fast—everyone was booked to fly out to other commitments by the end of the week. Ridley had already scheduled prep work for his next project. If filming on Thelma & Louise ran over through the weekend, it would carry the production more than $600,000 beyond the budget.

  Dead Horse Point, with its glorious vistas of mountains, canyon walls and the Colorado River two thousand feet below, had once been used as a natural corral for wild mustangs, with a narrow neck of land serving as the only route in or out. The name stemmed from a legend about a herd that died there once, unable to find its way to food and water. The film unit set up on a plateau called Fossil Point, midway between Dead Horse and the river. It took five months for the production to secure all the permissions and permits to film on the parkland, including promises to roll camera only when rafting trips were halted on the river and to clean up the remains of the totaled cars. The crew arranged hundreds of bushy weeds to lend texture to the sandstone promontory.

  Plans for shooting had to be airtight. The temperature topped a hundred all week, which meant that the helicopters that appeared in some shots and carried cameras for others couldn’t take off without reducing their weight, carrying only enough fuel for ten-minute sorties. Everyone swallowed the red dust that gusted through the air. “It was physically taxing,” says Stephen Tobolowsky, who stood out amid the tumult in his standard-issue wool suit. “It takes a really experienced general to command this sort of thing. I remember thinking, Who better than Ridley to be at the helm? This is what he does. Geena and Susan were focused and professional, too. Given the brutal conditions, Tobolowsky says, “Thank God the people in the lead on this movie weren’t assholes.” He allowed himself to break his affectless character just once. Concerned that he would have to reloop his dialogue later because of helicopter noise, and frustrated at Harvey for stepping on his lines again, Tobolowsky yanked Harvey up by the lapels to shout at him.

  Ridley’s greatest concern was how to marshal all the moving parts to lift the final scene into a realm of nobility. Since his talks with Meryl Streep, he’d considered saving Thelma at the last, letting her emerge from a cloud of dust after Louise went over the edge. But he decided they’d earned the right to die together, and the stars heartily agreed. Now they would have to deliver on a tall order, investing their final scene with enough heart to grant the characters their immortality. Ridley was also determined that the car should defy the laws of physics and take off on an upward trajectory, which would look more positive than a dead drop or a stomach-churning somersault. The crew had to manage it all without the benefit of special effects, which the production could not afford. That car had to fly for real.

  The crew stripped everything of any weight, including the engine, out of the three Thunderbirds and built a ramp at the brink of the cliff to slingshot them off at an angle. The plan was to yank each one forward with a heavy cable. After looping through a pulley at the ramp, the cable would continue at a right angle to be hauled by a speeding sixteen-cylinder Jeep. If all went as planned, at the last moment the cable would release and the T-bird would soar.

  The first afternoon at the point, the production prepped for two hours, then cranked up the mechanism and let it fly. The car barely cleared the cliff top, wobbled at a weird angle and tumbled like a rock. There was a thud a long moment later, then a soft collective groan.

  Nothing for it but to try again the next day. “I didn’t believe we were going to pull it off,” Ridley says. At four o’clock, in perfect light, cameras in place, Thelma and Louise dummies in the front seat, the crew cranked up the whole Rube Goldberg contraption again. This time the car sailed away in a perfect state of uplift. One hubcap detached and trailed off behind. The crew never launched the third car.

  —

  THE LAST DAY OF PRODUCTION looked impossible, one of those “bloody huge quandaries” Ridley claimed to love. “We were going to have the plug pulled, and that was it,” Ridley says. “I think we had forty setups, which was insane.” First thing in the morning, he tried something he’d never done before. The son of the brigadier general gathered the entire unit, a sunbaked, disheveled gang, hardened by three months of down-and-dirty roadwork, in a circle around the car and insisted, “We are going to make this [deadline]. The light is going to go away, and we’ve got to be out of here by five—or else.”

  Among the shots to capture before the final scene of dialogue was one of the women grasping hands as the car careered toward the edge. Susan stepped aside for a stunt driver, but Ridley wanted Geena on board. “I’ll operate, so if there’s an accident, I’ll die, too,” he promised.

  It’s almost unheard-of for the stars’ last scene in a movie to be the last one filmed, but Ridley wanted them at the height of their golden-hour beauty. He played chicken with the sun by scheduling their final moments, when they would make the decision to die, as the last of the light threatened to disappear. With only forty-five minutes left and a few rays scarcely peeking over the hills, they had time for only two takes. “This was it,” Geena says. “There was no getting it another day.”

  It’s hard to imagine a moment when the emotions of a story and the people tasked with telling it would so mirror and magnify each other. Geena and Susan were saying good-bye to their characters, to each other and to the experience of making this extraordinary movie. So was the entire crew. Even after many years, Ridley couldn’t watch the footage without feeling a stab. “Everyone had become so close on this fabulous project, and now we would go our own ways,” says Anne Ahrens. “Thelma and Louise had become real people to us. It was devastating that they would be gone.”

  The hair-and-makeup team fluttered over them nervously and then cleared o
ut. Two cameras operated simultaneously, framing heroic close-ups that nearly burst the boundaries of the screen. With an army of police behind them and the canyon in front, the stars turned to each other, awash in russet light.

  Let’s keep goin’, Geena said, hope, fear and epiphany written on her wide-open, childlike face.

  What do you mean?

  Geena cocked her chin toward the cliff. Go.

  You sure? Susan dropped her shield and looked incandescent, as happy as she had ever been through the story. She reached across and kissed her friend on the mouth.

  Yeah, said Geena. Hit it.

  “We did two takes,” Geena says. “And then the sun went bip!” It was over. Just like in the movies.

  CHAPTER 26

  KEEP ON FLYING

  Ridley placed the raw footage in the hands of the British editor Thom Noble, an Academy Award winner for Witness who was known for his strength with character and dialogue, for placing the beats between the lines just so. Like Ridley, Noble was a foreigner who had fallen in love with the script of this extravagantly American and profoundly female story and was determined to keep it true.

  He knew right away that what he’d been given was gold. “A perfect picture is rare,” says Noble. “The two perfect pictures I’ve done are Witness and Thelma & Louise, because the material was fantastically good.” All that wonderful dust, the unforeseen beauty of Bakersfield, the performances—“the performances were rock solid,” Noble says. They fit together like a charm in the assembly, a first stab at putting all the scenes in order. Noble focused on hewing to the essential core of the story, which meant the first thing to go was much of the ad-libbing by the men. “Harvey was the most difficult to cut,” says Noble. “He loves to improvise, and the improvisations were just crap. I had to keep cutting it back and back until Harvey became this wonderfully sympathetic guy. If I’d let him run, he would just be irritating.”

  In September 1990, Ridley picked up and moved to London with Noble and the composer Hans Zimmer to fine-tune the director’s cut. Scenes of glorious desert sunshine tormented the director, editor and composer while they huddled in the perennially cold, damp Pinewood Studios. Ridley’s mind wasn’t on the picture much anymore. His head was into prepping his next epic, the story of Christopher Columbus—deciding whether to cast Michael Douglas or Gérard Depardieu in the lead—and filming a Perrier commercial on the side. “People make fun of me for making commercials,” Ridley said to Noble, “but then I show them the Bentley.” Noble laughed.

  Ease, confidence and a sense of humor had been hallmarks of Thom Noble’s career from the beginning. A native of London, the lanky editor broke into the movie business there by blithely asserting fluency in Swahili when it was required for a film-library job. No one would ever learn differently, he figured, and no one else would apply. He used similar guile when he made the leap from assistant editor to a prestigious editing job with the French director François Truffaut on Farenheit 451. Its producer had asked Noble to help find a woman editor (Truffaut preferred working with a woman) who spoke French. Noble sat on his hands but kept offering that he spoke French, which was true this time, until he got the assignment.

  He established a reputation for a relaxed approach to finding the heart in the footage. Noble was also a charming raconteur, so people enjoyed his company, which was no small thing in the tight quarters of a cutting room. “It’s a personality issue,” he says. “You are going to be with these people day in and day out, so directors want to know, do you have a sense of humor, are we interested in the same things? Then it all flows.”

  Because Ridley had used two simultaneous cameras so often on the shoot, Noble could match up the performances with ease, free to use the best take and still stay in sync. Then it was a matter of picking up the pace by removing redundancies. He cut a couple of conversations between Geena and Susan, including one about a TV movie that starred Linda Blair in a women’s prison. Callie had included it to show why the women wouldn’t want to go to jail, but Noble felt the point was already apparent. Otherwise, most everything he removed had derived from improvisation rather than the original script. His objective wasn’t to adhere to the screenplay per se, but when he selected the strongest, most entertaining material, that’s how the edit progressed, a testament to the quality of the writing. A few off-the-cuff lines made the grade, including Brad Pitt’s hitchhiker drawling, I’m kinda stuck here like stink on stink. But most of the acting flourishes that Noble kept were humorous physical bits that didn’t stray far from the text: Geena sneaking bits of the candy bar, Brad Pitt taunting her husband with a little bump and grind, and just about everything Chris McDonald ventured as Darryl. “That guy was perfect,” Noble says.

  Decisions got tougher with the sex scene between Geena and Brad. “When we first assembled it, you think, Okay, yes!” Noble says. “It was an extraordinary moment for Geena. It took her out of her body almost.” Noble, Ridley and Zimmer agreed it was a sex scene for the ages—incendiary, gritty, graphic yet grounded, with many appreciative views of Brad’s well-toned behind. But it did run on. “There was more about this than any other part of the picture,” Noble points out, and Zimmer agrees. “If we had left that scene the way it was, it would not have stayed on the story,” Zimmer says. “It would have become too big a moment.”

  With a scene that showy, that certain to galvanize an audience, it took discipline to back away, but Ridley and Noble decided to trim the encounter to its essence and move along.

  As for the problematic ending, Mimi Polk believed the final shot should be a freeze-frame of the still-buoyant T-bird after it took off from the cliff. Noble found the idea too similar to the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, when the heroes froze just before a hail of bullets struck. He fell in love with another scenario he pieced together. After the Thunderbird took the plunge and went completely vertical, he cut in footage of Harvey running to the edge, where he picked up the Polaroid the women had taken at the start of the journey, now blown from the car. As he studied it, the camera moved in, and the image faded and faded until it reverted to the blank exposure before a photo begins to appear. Thelma and Louise were . . . gone. “It was absolutely beautiful,” Noble says, and the magical alteration of the image seemed appropriate for a passage of the characters into myth. But Mimi remained convinced that the additional shot detracted from the women’s final, shining farewell. After Noble left the picture, she swapped out the actively falling car for the freeze-frame. Its finality left no place to splice in the Polaroid shot. She substituted some happy flashbacks from the past instead.

  —

  NOBLE, RIDLEY AND ZIMMER often repaired to the composer’s London studio that fall to listen to music and consider its placement in the film. Long before he began to shoot, Ridley had sat down with Kathy Nelson, the MCA Records executive in charge of putting together movie soundtracks, to ask her to choose songs that would help tell the story. Kathy adopted some suggestions Callie had made, including “Drawn to the Fire” by her friend Pam Tillis, and Ridley had listened to the picks to establish the mood during location scouting and throughout the summer of filming. The eighteen tracks they ultimately selected would support and reinforce most of the action in the final cut, because, while Hans Zimmer would compose an original score, the main theme wouldn’t be heard until the fourth reel of the movie.

  Nelson, the niece of Ozzie Nelson and cousin of teen heartthrob Ricky, had worked her way up from a receptionist job thanks to a good ear and a knack for letting the excesses of the music business roll off her back. Petite, with short, spikey red hair, she had kept her cool working with some of the eighties’ most flamboyant movie personalities, including Don Simpson, Jerry Bruckheimer and Ridley’s brother Tony. Regarding all the offscreen shenanigans she witnessed, Nelson says, “I knew everything, and I didn’t say a word. I’m not a crybaby.” Although sometimes she did allow herself a good ladies’ room cry, she played the voice
of reason among her colleagues. “We’re not curing cancer, guys,” she often reminded them. “It’s entertainment.”

  She found Ridley considerably politer than her usual collaborators, his vocabulary less prone to obscenity, but he presented a particular challenge with this film—finding music with punch on a bantamweight budget. Nelson rooted out artists obscure enough for the production to afford while seeking a country-rock or R & B sound that wasn’t sentimental or corny. If songs showcased a woman singer, so much the better. When Nelson had plopped down on the floor of Ridley’s LA office and hit the button of her cassette player to play him her first selection, it fit the bill perfectly: “House of Hope,” featuring the flinty, barking voice of Toni Childs over a driving roots-funk background. The song was little known, raucous with a rough edge. Later in London, Ridley placed it over the early scene when Thelma and Louise drove away from home. The uncompromising, almost dark lyrics—“Is there a house of hope for me and you?”—signaled that this would be no saccharine girlfriend getaway.

  The only original song, Glenn Frey’s “Part of Me, Part of You,” was a fairly ordinary ballad that would play over the closing credits, but that was standard for soundtracks. Others were more distinctive. Ridley chose the thoughtful, melancholy “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” by Marianne Faithfull for the scene of the women driving through Monument Valley at night. After fiddling with other options, Nelson was relieved to snare an obscure track that perked up the montage of the women packing before their journey began. It was “Wild Night” by Van Morrison, about dressing up for a night out, in a full-throated, barrelhouse version by Martha Reeves of Martha and the Vandellas. “I Can See Clearly Now” by Johnny Nash underscored the humor of the Rastafarian biker delivering a blast of marijuana smoke to the state trooper.