by Becky Aikman
The one audience member whose reaction seemed to intimidate Ridley most was Callie Khouri. She wasn’t invited to screenings—filmmakers weren’t required to invite writers back in the day—but Diane escorted Callie to one in New Jersey, sharing a New York hotel room to save money. Diane and Sam Cohn claimed seats on either side of the outspoken writer to provide a buffer from Ridley in case she didn’t like what she saw.
Seeing Susan and Geena inhabit the roles, hearing the audience laugh, feeling the surge of emotion in the theater, Diane whispered to Callie, “Ridley really did get this movie.” When Susan played the shooting scene perfectly and the audience clapped and even cheered, the agent and client exchanged a bug-eyed look. “They cheered,” Diane remembers. “That never happens, never!” She stifled a laugh at the Rastafarian scene, knowing that it still annoyed Callie. Afterward, Diane leaned toward her client and said, “It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks now. This movie plays.”
For Callie, the experience was overwhelming. Tears streaked her face. She had been afraid of feeling embarrassed at how much the movie revealed about her, or upset at how much Ridley had altered her vision, but she knew that as a movie it worked, with or without the Rastafarian and the vulgar trucker. This being a Ridley Scott version of her work, the majestic imagery and sheer commotion of it astonished her as much as everyone else. The director, she thought, had made the most commercial possible version of the script, and for that she was glad. “It wouldn’t have been the movie that I would have made,” she says, “just because I never would have had those resources—a helicopter and all those stunts.” More than that the writer couldn’t put into words.
She felt shell-shocked at the screening, she told her friend Amanda Temple later. “It was so much more heightened than we’d ever pictured it, it took some adjusting,” Amanda says. “After a while it was possible to chill and go, okay, the movie is still there, the heart is still there.”
Diane planned to scoot with Callie out of the theater to avoid any dicey back-and-forth with Ridley, but they did speak for a moment before she left, and he saw the tears. “I’ve been waiting a long time to see this movie,” Callie said to him, which was just enigmatic enough to leave him wondering.
For more than two decades afterward, Ridley remained unsure of her real feelings. “When she saw the cut, she was very emotional,” he says when he recalls that night in New Jersey. “I could never work out whether she was disappointed or whether she loved it.” ICM offered to pay Callie’s way to the Cannes Film Festival, where Thelma & Louise would cap the closing night on May 20, 1991, but it was up to Ridley and Mimi to decide whether to include the writer. Mimi reported back to Diane that Callie wasn’t invited.
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THE STUDIO HAD BIGGER WORRIES. After the joint entity of MGM and Pathé flirted with bankruptcy in April, the chief creditor, Crédit Lyonnais Bank Nederland, put Laddie in charge instead of Parretti and started to parcel out just enough cash to keep things afloat. The release of Thelma & Louise was back on, even though there wasn’t even enough money at one point to pay for the poster. Ultimately, the company was able to spring for some all-important television ads, but the publicity budget was still 60 percent less than it should have been.
More critical was the release date, which had now been pushed to Memorial Day weekend, the kickoff to the 1991 summer season. Over the next few weeks, Callie Khouri’s everyday women would face a murderer’s row of fully loaded action and comedy summer blockbusters, including Terminator 2 with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves with Kevin Costner and City Slickers with Billy Crystal. On opening day alone, Pathé’s little genre buster would run smack into its longtime nemesis, the $75 million Backdraft, not to mention Hudson Hawk, a $70 million Bruce Willis spectacular. Thelma & Louise was showing up in the middle of a circular firing squad armed with nothing but a slingshot budget, a couple of midlevel female stars and one exploding truck.
CHAPTER 28
THE SNOWBALL EFFECT
Thelma & Louise landed in theaters like a depth charge on May 24, 1991. The shock waves rippled out for weeks, months, even years. Watching the movie proved a profoundly riveting and personal experience for the American audience. It entertained, but also electrified.
And divided. The film touched off a catharsis for viewers who identified with the heroines, and a roil of controversy for everyone else. It was possible to encounter couples who actually split up after arguing over whether Louise should have fired that pistol. Feminists debated into the wee hours whether driving off a cliff was a defiant statement of self-determination or a capitulation to the view that the only way for women to win was to lose.
Critics showered the picture with raves, at long last proving that somebody out there would celebrate the idea of women carrying a film that delivered some shocking twists. Variety led off with praise for the movie’s “reckless exhilaration,” saying, “Even those who don’t rally to [the] pic’s fed-up feminist outcry will take to its comedy, momentum and dazzling visuals.” Janet Maslin of the New York Times wrote, “It reimagines the buddy film with such freshness and vigor that the genre seems positively new.” She heaped accolades onto every element—Callie’s “sparkling screenplay,” Ridley’s “previously untapped talent” for “exuberant comedy” and the performances of the stars, “whose flawless teamwork makes the story gripping and believable from start to finish.” Newsweek labeled the film “a genuine pop myth” that “goes way beyond the Butch [and] Sundance syndrome in warmth and complexity.”
In New York magazine, David Denby got the movie’s intentions completely. “I don’t know why it took so long, but this is the first feminist buddy-buddy movie, or at least the first one that matters,” he declared. “The relationship between the two women is the central thing, volatile and always funny, and a triumph for both actresses. The movie itself, coming at a time when Hollywood has just about abandoned such essentials as experience and character, is like a gasp of pure oxygen in a vacuum-pumped room.”
In the Washington Post, Rita Kempley delivered a backhanded slap to other women’s pictures, insisting that “this is one chick movie that isn’t about to whine, bitch or backseat drive.”
Even the critics who demurred found much to praise. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times withheld half a star only because he thought the cheery flashbacks followed the final freeze-frame with unseemly haste, as if the filmmakers were afraid of their true intentions.
Standing apart from the general love bomb, a minority of reviews found some measured fault with the feminist implications. Terrence Rafferty of the New Yorker praised Geena’s and Susan’s performances to the sky, along with Ridley’s masterly vision. “The movie has the look of a mirage, a jeweled shimmer that keeps us half hypnotized,” Rafferty wrote. But he also called it “a crazily overstuffed Hollywood entertainment” that used “dopey ideas” to drive an implausible plot. “The feminist justification that the script provides for the heroines’ behavior doesn’t make their actions any less preposterous,” he said.
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AND THEN CAME THE BACKLASH. After critics had their say, cultural commentators went to town, scandalized and outraged by visions of man-bashing killer women on the loose. On opening day, the Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan had praised the movie for being “provocative, poignant and heartbreakingly funny,” and managing “to seamlessly blend political concerns with mainstream entertainment.” But a week later, the paper ran lacerating side-by-side he-said, she-said critiques, both of them negative. Such a film was inevitable, allowed the writer Peter Rainer, because it plugged into the anger and frustration of women working in Hollywood and beyond. But he called it a “sisterhood bash-a-thon,” “as vague and negligent as any macho shoot ’em up.” Next to his takedown, Sheila Benson, the paper’s critic at large, wrote, “Please don’t call it feminism.” “As I understand it,” she pleaded, “feminism has to do with responsibility, equality, sens
itivity, understanding—not revenge, retribution or sadistic behavior.”
Indignation kicked into overdrive with headlines like the Toronto Star’s “THELMA & LOUISE” RAISES QUESTION WHY RECENT MOVIES CAN ONLY SHOW WOMEN MAKING PROGRESS BY MAKING MEN LOOK LIKE IDIOTS. “Horrible role models,” tsk-tsked Liz Smith, the gossip columnist in Newsday, lamenting that no one in the movie “worries about AIDS, using condoms or encountering a serial killer”—concerns that certainly never made an appearance in Tom Cruise or Sylvester Stallone movies, either. Her counterpart at the New York Daily News, Richard Johnson, joined the conga line of scorn by suggesting the movie be banned from theaters. “It justifies armed robbery, manslaughter and chronic drunken driving as exercises in consciousness-raising,” he fulminated.
The fury reached a crescendo with TOXIC FEMINISM ON THE BIG SCREEN in U.S. News & World Report, where columnist John Leo labeled Thelma & Louise “about as morally and intellectually screwed up as a Hollywood movie can get.” It reflected the influence of “the most alienated radical feminists,” he declaimed, naming the writer Andrea Dworkin, who was best known for asserting that pornography reinforced male authority over women. “With this repeated paean to transformative violence,” Leo continued, “found in none of the male-buddy movies, we have left Dworkin and entered a Mussolini speech. Here we have an explicit fascist theme, wedded to the bleakest form of feminism and buried (shallowly) in a genuinely funny buddy movie. Whew! No wonder the critics worked so hard to avoid confronting what is really going on in this film.”
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“PEOPLE ARE OUT OF THEIR MINDS!” Callie exclaimed in a phone call with Geena. “What movie did they see?”
The actress who’d appeared in Earth Girls Are Easy had learned long ago that part of her job was to absorb bad reviews, but this was a level of blowback she couldn’t comprehend. “I was just hoping they wouldn’t hate that we killed ourselves,” Geena said. She and Callie couldn’t figure out what set off the rest of the vitriol.
Male bashing, for instance. “After all the shit women put up with going to see any movie?” Callie fumed. “Seriously? If you have a problem with the men in this movie, you’re identifying with the wrong characters.” It was a line she and Geena would both use in interviews as the controversy continued to rage.
As for poor role models and excessive violence, since when were movie characters required to be nonviolent role models? Given how frequently male action-movie killing machines mowed down anyone who got in their way, it was hard to see why anyone would be overwrought by the actions of Thelma and Louise. Those male stars didn’t show remorse, Callie and Geena knew, the way Louise did after she shot someone, wrongly, as she was the first to admit.
“My God, now the women have guns,” Geena said in mock horror. “It’s the hallmark of society being ruined!”
“Go watch a Marty Scorsese movie and get back to me,” Callie snapped.
In Thelma & Louise, Geena Davis noted, “Three people died, and two of them were Thelma and Louise.”
In contrast, movies starring men were locked in a well-armed combat for maximum body counts. Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo had personally shot, strangled, incinerated, eviscerated or otherwise dispatched 137 people in three movies during the previous decade, and that was counting only clearly visible deaths, not innocent victims who no doubt cowered inside blown-up vehicles or buildings. The number of fatalities in 1990’s Die Hard 2 reached 264, including 230 in a plane crash. Total Recall the same year treated viewers to 74 souls meeting their ends in explicit detail, 47 of them at the hands of Arnold Schwarzenegger himself. There was no national outcry about female bashing when he blasted Sharon Stone in the head while delivering the line Consider that a divorce.
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WITHIN A FEW WEEKS, the ruckus over Thelma & Louise amplified to such an extent that the only people who could tune it out must have been holed up in monasteries under mandatory vows of silence. The controversy went about as viral as possible in an era that preceded social media and the ubiquitous cable news pundits of easy outrage. Given the double standard at play, something more than repugnance toward violence or the depiction of buffoonish male characters was obviously at work.
Soon multiple forms of media put forward their theories in a more measured and thoughtful backlash to the backlash. Newsweek wondered where the outraged moralists had been when Eddie Murphy slept with a woman and then shot her in Harlem Nights, or when Brian De Palma made just about every movie he’d ever made. And as for proper role models, “Well, compared with the prostitute played by Julia Roberts in last year’s megahit Pretty Woman, who wins big by selling herself to Richard Gere,” Newsweek said, “yes, Thelma and Louise are fabulous role models. They’re modeling power, not lingerie.”
New York Times critic Maslin stepped back into the fray with an analysis of why this movie left a segment of the public so unhinged: “It’s something as simple as it is powerful,” she concluded, “the fact that the men in this story don’t really matter.”
Soon the filmmakers themselves were called upon to defend their work. Callie had to point out that she’d written a work of fiction, not an instructional video. And she told one reporter that the movie wasn’t hostile toward men—“it’s hostile toward idiots.” Ridley found himself an unlikely feminist spokesperson. “I don’t believe the male species is that black,” he told a British newspaper, “but because the film can only run two hours, there’s a limit on what I can show.” The guys were meant as archetypes, he insisted, and as for the violence, “if you want something that’s violent, go and see Terminator.”
Even Brad Pitt, in an interview about becoming a star in the making, was asked to weigh in. “I don’t think the movie has some big moral the way a lot of people are making out, and I don’t find it controversial,” he told an interviewer. He saw the story as a slap in the face “for us guys,” he said, “and we deserve it.”
Susan Sarandon said to anyone who would listen, “I think people were freaked out and they didn’t even know why. We had completely underestimated how strongly the territory was held by white heterosexual men.”
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IN RETROSPECT, it was hard to believe that none of the filmmakers saw the controversy coming. But whether or not they intended it, a well-made movie about a couple of imperfect women breaking free from cultural norms resonated because it tapped into the powerful social forces that Hollywood had succeeded in ignoring but had been building to a flashpoint everywhere else. Feminism in the eighties had been rattling both personal relationships and public discourse with fresh debates over equality in the workplace, the recognition of date rape and other forms of sexual violence as crimes and the private power dynamics between men and women in their daily lives.
Some of this was already playing out in real time in the public arena. Just two weeks before Thelma & Louise opened, William Kennedy Smith, the nephew of Senator Edward Kennedy, had been arrested for raping a woman who said he had attacked her on a beach after she drove him home from a nightclub. The heavily publicized case kept so-called date rape in the news until he was acquitted in December. The Supreme Court ruled the day before the movie’s release that it was constitutional to ban federally financed family-planning clinics from providing information on abortion. Later that fall, Clarence Thomas would win a contentious confirmation to the Supreme Court after Anita Hill testified that he had sexually harassed her at work. It was the first time that the widespread problem of hostile environments on the job had received such pointed public scrutiny.
It turned out that the moral ambiguity of Thelma & Louise made it the perfect vehicle at the perfect time to amplify the hopes and fears of people still deciding where they stood on these debates. It stirred up already messy emotions among women who might have wanted greater autonomy but were afraid of paying a price, or men who were adjusting to changing expectations but resented being portrayed as bullies or jerks, perhaps even fearing
what angry females might be capable of. The movie wrapped these clashing concerns into an artistic little package that exploded on delivery. Thelma & Louise was a certified cultural force.
If there was one moment that stamped that certification, it was when Time magazine put Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon on the cover of the June 24 edition with the headline WHY THELMA & LOUISE STRIKES A NERVE.
Although Pathé’s marketing resources might have been scarce, it did have a secret weapon in Kathie Berlin, the publicist behind that coup who worked out of New York for both Pathé and MGM. Berlin had a brazen, get-the-job-done attitude sharpened over years of pulling the levers in a brash business. She got her first publicity post back in the late sixties by claiming to know the bookers at all the television shows and magazines. Assuming that the people interviewing her didn’t know the real names any more than she did, Berlin tossed out those of friends and college roommates as the gatekeepers for Dick Cavett or The Tonight Show. Once she’d spent a few years guiding stars and directors around to appearances, she’d seen it all and knew enough not to succumb to the tawdrier expectations of publicity girls. When she had to fetch Charlton Heston from his hotel room for an interview with Mike Wallace, Heston emerged from the shower naked and tossed her a towel. “Wipe my back,” he said. She kept her distance and got even by neglecting to tell him he’d left his fly open until they’d walked several blocks to the studio. Berlin knew that the men in the business weren’t particularly interested in films with women, so she always invited secretaries to screenings, figuring that they would nudge their bosses if the movie was good.
When Berlin saw everyone debating in the lobby after an early screening of Thelma & Louise, she may have been the first person associated with the movie to fully recognize its potential as a media phenomenon. She asked prominent feminists like Gloria Steinem and Marlo Thomas to host advance screenings to jump-start the conversation. But most of all, Berlin wanted that cover of Time, the ultimate mark of cultural significance back then. She spoke to the magazine’s intellectually oriented film critic, Richard Schickel, and his wife, Carol Rubinstein, who worked with him on documentaries about film. The movie was important, Berlin told them, a breakthrough far exceeding previous women’s films in its potential for controversy. After she lured him to a screening where women in the audience yelled and clapped, he was sold.