by Becky Aikman
Schickel’s five-page package in Time declared that Thelma & Louise had earned a place “in the honorable line of movies whose makers, without knowing quite what they were doing, sank a drill into what appeared to be familiar American soil and found that they had somehow tapped into a wild-rushing subterranean stream of inchoate outrage and deranged violence.” The occasion for all the ensuing big-think moralizing was actually a modest and very enjoyable little movie, said the article, which went on to present the thinking of all the best academics and feminist theoreticians. Another full page was dedicated to a by-now de rigueur dissent from his colleague Margaret Carlson, IS THIS WHAT FEMINISM IS ALL ABOUT? The movie didn’t improve on the male-buddy genre, she wrote, exaggerating that it had “almost as many chase scenes per reel as Smokey and the Bandit.”
Schickel let Geena Davis get in some of the last words. “Why,” she asked, “because it stars women, is this suddenly a feminist treatise, given the burden of representing all women?” But that argument had long since been left behind in a billowing cloud of dust. People saw what they wanted to see. By now, no thinking person could afford to be without an opinion on Thelma & Louise.
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THE MOVIE HELD ITS OWN on opening weekend, raking in just over $6 million, and placing fourth after Backdraft, a holdover Bill Murray comedy called What About Bob? and just behind Hudson Hawk, the Bruce Willis movie with four times the Thelma & Louise production budget. For Pathé, the news was not great, but not bad, either. Then word of mouth kicked in. The following Friday and Saturday, the take defied all movie-business gravity, actually rising 1 percent over the previous week, while Hudson Hawk dropped 43 percent. Greg Morrison, Pathé’s head of marketing, called it “a bloody miracle.”
As others flew high and then dropped by the wayside, Thelma & Louise kept soaring all summer. Branded a sleeper hit, naturally, it didn’t catch on in the Midwest or South but added new theaters elsewhere as late as the fall, eventually earning $45 million at the box office, more than double what the opening-weekend tally would have predicted. Had Pathé been able to marshal the proper marketing resources, Laddie thought, the proceeds would have reached $20 million more. The producer-showman Harvey Weinstein once boasted to Geena that he easily would have parlayed all the publicity past the $100 million mark.
But still, Thelma & Louise wasn’t finished. Somehow, with the passage of time, its popularity only continued to grow. The video seized the number one slot on the Billboard rental chart for the first eight weeks of its release, and then banked the kind of sales to the home market that were more in line with a movie that had earned twice as much in theaters. “The longevity of it was just insane,” says Greg Foster of the Pathé marketing department. Or as Louise notably said to Detective Slocumb in the screenplay, I think we got some kind of snowball effect goin’ on here.
Because, while the commentators dithered, a sizable segment of the public simply went wild for this movie. Or as an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer put it, “A lot of women love Thelma & Louise. It doesn’t matter who they are or where they stand on feminism, white males or housework. They just love it.” The reporter interviewed everyone from the provost at Bryn Mawr College to a lap dancer at the Fantasy Showbar, who said approvingly of the characters, “They didn’t back down.”
Oh sure, men loved it, too, especially in cities like New York and Los Angeles, where reviews held sway, but most men didn’t take it to heart and feel it right down to their bones the way women did. Newsweek spotted a couple of women on a Chicago street responding to an obscene catcall from a truck driver. They pointed imaginary pistols at his head as one yelled, “Thelma and Louise hit Chicago!” The Pennsylvania branch of the National Organization for Women did brisk business in T-shirts proclaiming GRADUATE OF THE THELMA & LOUISE FINISHING SCHOOL. Ticket sales at theaters spiked during the week because that’s when women skipped out on the men in their lives and went to see the movie with their friends.
Suddenly wherever Geena or Susan went, they encountered people who would grab hold and lean in to expound on how they had experienced the movie, how it had changed their lives, how they and their friends had acted out their own versions of the trip. “I’d be like, hmm . . . which part?” Geena says. “Was it killing a guy? Was it picking up hitchhikers and having sex with them? Was it holding up a liquor store?”
But for the women who loved Thelma and Louise, it was not so much about what those characters did as about what they were: women living their lives in the movies for all to see. Women who looked like real women and talked like real women, women who had more on their minds than “Good luck, honey!” Women who could laugh in the open at the too-recognizable foibles of men—and of women, too. Who understood what it meant to become that third thing when they were together, making choices—even bad ones—on their own. The identification that viewers felt with those two desperadoes went well beyond the mere mechanics of the plot. Thelma and Louise, the audience could tell, had sprung fully formed from a real woman’s perspective. However far-out their actions, the public recognized in them the texture and point of view of real women’s lives.
Like its heroines, Thelma & Louise had taken flight from the limitations of expectation and entered the realm of myth. The choice was a deliberate one. And women in the audience felt like they finally got laid properly.
CHAPTER 29
WHO KILLED THELMA AND LOUISE?
Gonzo ending and all, Thelma & Louise promised a bright new beginning for women in Hollywood. “Ten years from now, it will be seen as a turning point,” pledged the Boston Phoenix in May of 1991. Finally, the movie business would recognize that women liked to see themselves on film, that women’s stories were worth telling and that women had the talent to tell them. Finally, women would be heard. Yet surveying the Hollywood landscape in the years since, one might well ask: Who killed Thelma and Louise?
The extraordinary impact of the film did transform the destinies of the people who made it, some more than others. Armed with such a sterling credit, each participant made decisions going forward based on the options available at the time, but for the most part, the women made fewer, softer, smaller projects, often for television, often centered on feelings and moms. The men got slotted back into bigger-budget, big-screen vehicles, frequently featuring invincible, cold-eyed actors in bloody conflict. After creating such a genre-busting triumph, it was surprising—or perhaps not—how many of the Thelma & Louise collaborators steered back into the gender lanes they’d driven in before.
“It was like getting shot out of a cannon,” Callie says about her sudden notoriety, which called upon her to perform as a public spokesperson for any form of feminine discontent. She won a seat on the board of the Writers Guild of America to champion the right of writers to visit the sets of their movies. And she was in such demand as the hot new talent in town that she was the flavor of the month for at least a year.
An awkward chance encounter between Steven Spielberg and James L. Brooks demonstrated how far Callie had come since she recruited the dancers for Whitesnake videos. On a weekend morning by the picnic tables at the Brentwood Country Mart, each director-producer boasted that he was about to land a deal with the industry’s most in-demand screenwriter. Eventually they realized they were both talking about Callie Khouri. Brooks won the bidding war for her services, but the collaboration didn’t bear fruit. Preoccupied and uninspired, Callie says, “I just never found with Jim anything where we saw eye to eye.”
In truth, Callie had to admit that she was 75 to 85 percent happy with the outcome of Thelma & Louise—the truck driver still galled—but the commotion distracted her from other projects. Besides, Thelma & Louise had sprung so directly from her heart, it wasn’t easy to hit on another story that lit the same fire. She got by for a while as a writer for hire doctoring other people’s scripts until she was invited to write Something to Talk About, a 1995 southern family drama that wound up starring Julia Roberts
. Once again Callie lobbied to direct, but Lasse Hallström got the nod instead. “It didn’t turn out the way I would have liked,” says Callie. “It got rocky after that.” She didn’t want to believe that there was an inherent bias against women directors, but she says, “When you spend ten years seeing guys who’d made music videos get to direct features, you start to think, This is undeniable.”
Finally, she got a shot to write and direct an adaptation of the novel Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, a mother-daughter bonding saga with twelve roles for actresses, from Maggie Smith to Sandra Bullock. The film earned a solid $70 million at the box office in 2002. Callie’s second and final feature-directing credit was the less successful Mad Money, a 2008 heist movie that brought in $21 million. After that, she circled back to the comfortable milieu of country music to create the television show Nashville, which premiered on ABC in 2012, running for four years until it moved to the cable channel CMT.
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RIDLEY SCOTT’S REPUTATION got the boost he’d been hoping for once he demonstrated his versatility with Thelma & Louise. But instead of making other modest, character-driven features, he followed up with more characteristic epic and action choices like his Columbus movie, 1492: Conquest of Paradise, a notorious flop with a take of only $7 million, and White Squall, a guys’ sailing adventure that fared almost as poorly. He returned to a women’s story in 1997 with the earnest G.I. Jane, starring Demi Moore as a fictional first woman in a navy training program, a moderate success. But his career from then on usually revolved around brawny men in togas, battle gear and spacesuits—action pictures, but still informed by his serious intentions.
Ridley secured his place at the pinnacle of the industry with Gladiator, a high-toned revival of the old swords-and-sandals formula. It was an indisputable blockbuster that won the 2001 Best Picture Oscar, although Ridley lost out in the Best Director category. Asked later if he thought he was admired but not really liked in Hollywood, he replied, “Possibly. But that puts me on the cutting edge, which is useful.” His dogged work ethic propelled him through some dozen films and counting after that, from Black Hawk Down through The Martian, well into his seventies.
Mimi Polk set up her own production shop after helping Ridley produce 1492 and White Squall, but her solo projects didn’t achieve prominence. Other women continued to hold management positions at Ridley’s company, and it produced the female-centric television smash The Good Wife, but he was wise enough to decline when MGM proposed a series derived from Thelma & Louise. “Guess what, they made it,” the proposal had announced. It suggested that the characters survived their fall to become itinerant do-gooders atoning for their crimes. The pitch made sure to note that Thelma, who never seemed to wear enough clothes, would remain a lovable “Venus Fly Trap for men.” Fans of the movie were spared.
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HOLLYWOOD HANDICAPPERS AGREED that playing the now-iconic Thelma would launch the career of Geena Davis into the storied ranks of leading ladies. “Geena Davis will go the distance in the nineties,” proclaimed Mark Canton, the chairman of Columbia Pictures, in Vanity Fair. “She represents—along with Michelle Pfeiffer and maybe Julia Roberts, and one or two others—the top of the list.” Geena’s own production company, Genial Pictures, buckled down to develop projects built around her star power. Bigmalion would be a takeoff on the Shavian classic, and the company raised most of the money for Geena to play the British aviator and author Beryl Markham in West with the Night. Neither made it to fruition. The director Penny Marshall offered Geena her best post-Thelma role in A League of Their Own, an ensemble piece about women baseball players that scored one of the biggest hits of 1992. But her luck turned when her new husband, the director Renny Harlin, thought she could step into the lucrative action sector by carrying an expensive swashbuckling pirate picture, Cutthroat Island. When it failed in 1995, as did their collaboration in The Long Kiss Goodnight a year later, offers for Geena Davis to headline a picture slowed to a trickle . . . and then they stopped.
Why did the business quit backing her? No one doubted Geena’s talent, her beauty, her winning charisma. “Unfortunately, it was because she was getting older,” says David Eidenberg, who had left his position as Geena’s agent but remained a close friend. “There aren’t enough ongoing movies with parts for women. You can pick your end date—it’s forty or forty-two or forty-five. It’s horrible when it happens.”
Geena tried two short-lived television shows, first a sitcom and then a drama called Commander in Chief that allowed her to play the president. “I guess I thought my career would just go on the way it had,” she told a magazine. “But once I turned forty, I really did feel like I’d ceased to exist in Hollywood . . . it was noticeable and unmistakable. And painful.” Even years later, her eyes still register bewilderment when she talks about it.
As if she needed more examples, playing the part of the adoptive mother to an animated mouse in the 1999 kids’ movie Stuart Little drove home to Geena Davis the disparity in male and female parts. She saw an assistant director setting up young extras to compete in a race with remote-control boats. He picked out a little boy and positioned him with a remote by the side of a pond and then chose a girl to stand behind him and watch. One by one, all the boys got positioned down the line to operate the boats, and all the girls stood dutifully behind them. “Um,” Geena said in her ingratiating way, “what do you think about giving half the remotes to the girls?” The assistant director looked dumbstruck and replied, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
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SUSAN SARANDON HELD FAST to her strategy of ignoring the imperatives of stardom. She steered clear of participating in pictures with blockbuster budgets, cartoonish violence or anything that called for preening in front of a green screen until animators layered on special effects. It’s impossible to imagine Susan Sarandon battling aliens in a stretchy bodysuit, although it might be amusing to try.
By choosing roles based on the quality of the material rather than conventional Hollywood notions of status, by trying not to fly too close to the sun, Susan dodged the career flameout that consumed the careers of most actresses her age. She worked steadily in the ensuing decades, not necessarily as the lead, but in smaller films of merit and a few more prominent ones as well. In the three years following Thelma & Louise, she earned two more Oscar nominations—for a lawyer defending a young boy in The Client and a mother searching for a cure for her son’s rare disease in Lorenzo’s Oil. She finally won the big prize in 1995 by playing Sister Helen Prejean in Dead Man Walking, a meditation on the death penalty.
When Geena appeared with Susan for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Thelma & Louise at the Cannes Film Festival, she remained as outspoken as ever. “I don’t think the studios have had an epiphany about women in film, because after Thelma & Louise, it didn’t happen,” Susan told reporters. “And that movie made a lot of fucking money.”
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HARVEY KEITEL WON THE CHANCE to stretch as another sensitive man in Jane Campion’s The Piano. Afterward, he kept busy in a variety of films, but once he inhabited one of the ultraviolent criminals in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, most of the opportunities fell into the violent, scary-guy column. The same with Michael Madsen. He toned down the menace as a normal dad in Free Willy two years after Thelma & Louise, but the genres depicting mobsters and psycho killers were where the work—and the money—was. His talent for gruff intimidation earned Michael a whopping two-hundred-plus credits. “I played some nice people,” he says wistfully. “But never again did I get a romantic lead like Jimmy.”
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ON OPENING WEEKEND, Christopher McDonald drove a convertible down a Los Angeles street when two women pulled up next to him. “Oh my God, it’s that guy from Thelma & Louise!” one of them squealed. The other shrieked, “Shoot him!” Fortunately, they laughed instead.
And so did the audience. The first time he saw the movie, his fear of going over
the top vanished when the crowd started to roar. “I was thrilled to be a part of this thing,” he says. “It was huge.” But the next offer, to his chagrin, was “for the exact same kind of jerk-off guy.” His performance as Darryl was widely admired in the close-knit acting community, but after playing the butt of the women’s jokes, the options were narrower than might be expected for such a versatile actor who disappeared into his roles. Still, he worked constantly in a wide variety of parts, most prominently as the comic villain Shooter McGavin in the Adam Sandler movie Happy Gilmore.
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AFTER ALL THE ACCLAIM FOR Thelma & Louise, Stephen Tobolowsky still didn’t understand why the movie mattered so much to women. “I ask them what are their favorite movies of all time, and they say Thelma & Louise,” he says. “Because it gave them role models, they say. They’re murderers! They’ve been raped! Where are the role models? It’s a great movie and a brave movie, but it is a twisted film. I think people just ironed it out in their brains to make it not be so different.”
His irritating nebbish routine guaranteed him steady employment in vehicles like Groundhog Day and Memento. Stephen assumed that he’d been directed by women in some of them, but when he scrolled through his computer to check, it turned out that while he’d answered to a few women in television, he’d never worked with one on some hundred feature films. “It’s shocking,” he says. “I have to say, I’m relieved when I see a woman directing a television show, because I know she had to be good to get the job.”