Off the Cliff

by Becky Aikman

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  AFTER HIS NINE DAYS OF shooting wrapped on Thelma & Louise, Brad Pitt wrangled some day work as an extra until word of his performance leaked out. Otherwise, what can be said that hasn’t already been said about his career? That he’s starred in films that have earned $7 billion worldwide? Or that his production projects have topped $2 billion? Suffice it to say, it’s been a while since he’s had to audition. As for George Clooney and his unfortunate reading for Thelma & Louise, word has it that he managed to find other work.

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  SOME MEMBERS OF THE CREW died young: the art director Norris Spencer, the cinematographer Adrian Biddle and the costume designer Elizabeth McBride. Others cycled through the usual assortment of hits and misses, Thelma & Louise a source of particular pride that delivered their longest-running residual checks. Anne Ahrens gradually shifted more toward television. Kathy Nelson oversaw needle drops that pushed the limits of soundtracks on films like Pulp Fiction, High Fidelity and the Bourne movies, winding up as president of film music at Universal Pictures. Hans Zimmer became a regular fixture at award shows, having composed the scores for a long list of blockbusters, including Ridley’s Gladiator.

  Following the Thelma & Louise release, where Amanda Temple received “special thanks” in the end credits, she sometimes ran into people she had known in the grindhouse of music videos. “Can you believe that Callie?” they marveled. “Can you believe what she did?” Amanda would answer coolly, “Yes, asshole, of course I can.”

  People elsewhere in the industry met a range of fates. ICM pushed Diane Cairns out after a shake-up in 1996. She landed at Universal Pictures for a year before she left the business. Becky Pollack continued to nurture the writer Randall Wallace as he developed the battle epic Braveheart for Mel Gibson. But after Becky’s children were born, the twenty-four-hour pace of the job and the craziness of dragging a baby around on planes overwhelmed her. She resigned to become a full-time mom. Greg Foster, the young market researcher who collected comment cards at screenings for Pathé, eventually ascended to the post of CEO of IMAX Entertainment.

  New moneymen fired Alan Ladd Jr. from the beleaguered MGM-Pathé entity in 1993. He was allowed to take one project along to produce on his own—Braveheart, which won Best Picture in 1996. In his modest office on Sunset, the poster for the movie hangs along with the ones for Star Wars and Thelma & Louise.

  CHAPTER 30

  A FILM OF THEIR OWN

  It looked as if women filmmakers might finally be stepping into the spotlight the year Thelma & Louise lit up theaters. In 1991, Kathryn Bigelow found her way onto the commercial radar by directing the surfing-crime-caper mashup, Point Break, as did Barbra Streisand with The Prince of Tides, and Randa Haines with The Doctor. Martha Coolidge finally broke out of the teen-comedy ghetto to make the independent drama Rambling Rose, and Jodie Foster directed her first film, the mother-son story Little Man Tate.

  A few female protagonists demonstrated real clout at the box office, too: Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs and Julia Roberts in Sleeping with the Enemy. And Callie Khouri wasn’t the only woman screenwriter to make it rain for studios. Nancy Meyers cowrote Father of the Bride, while Fannie Flagg created Fried Green Tomatoes. The screenwriter for the year’s number two movie, Beauty and the Beast, was Linda Woolverton, who had started out in kids’ television cartoons back when their male and female writers were segregated into “squishies” and “toasters”—squishies meaning cute stories for girls and toasters being boys’ stories equipped with hardware like robots, ray guns and other means of destruction.

  But in the end, the achievements of these women didn’t signal much of a shift in the big picture. “The media narrative was that everything had changed,” says Geena. “After Thelma & Louise came out, everyone said, ‘Now we will see a flood of female-buddy movies, female road pictures, female action movies.’ But nothing changed. And after A League of Their Own, because it was a huge hit, the press was saying, ‘Well now, beyond a shadow of a doubt, there will be all these movies about women—women’s sports movies!’ And then nothing changed . . . again. It happens over and over, every two or three years.”

  The overall numbers don’t lie. They barely budge. Of the top-fifty movies at the box office in 1991, four were directed by women. Twenty-five years later, in 2016, there were none directed by a woman alone—one woman codirected Kung Fu Panda 3. Four women without male partners wrote top-fifty movies in 1991, the same number as in 2016. Women as leading characters managed to move the needle a bit more. Nine movies featured them in 1991, and nine in 2016, but thirteen if you count films with men and women as equal costars.

  Watching family movies with her kids, Geena Davis got so frustrated that she founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which lobbies the industry for more visibility for women. Ever prepared, Geena keeps studies and statistics at the ready to buttress her case that Hollywood, visible as it is, remains stuck in the dark ages when it comes to balance in the workplace. She points out that male characters have steadily outnumbered female by three to one in family films for fifty years. Fifty years! That women consistently make up less than a third of all speaking parts, and that in 2014 not a single woman over forty-five starred in a top-one-hundred movie—Meryl Streep played supporting roles that year. Even crowd scenes show only 17 percent women. The argument could be made that we see more of them—women and girls are more than three times as likely as men or boys to be shown in sexy attire, even in movies for kids. On the other hand, women working in occupations and positions of authority are rare in any kind of movie and almost unheard of in family fare.

  What most impelled Geena Davis to turn activist was that she thought children rarely got to see women and girls portrayed in movies as persons of consequence and agency, limiting the choices viewers might envision for their own lives. Polls show that little girls want to be Kim Kardashian West when they grow up, Geena points out, “because that’s who they see. They have to see more to aspire to more.” The woman who played Thelma wields her visibility to bring attention to the issue, but the road can run uphill. Once, when she hosted a seminar on gender for Hollywood casting directors, one hundred people showed up. Ninety-nine of them were women.

  Most often the blame for Hollywood’s listless gender progress gets pinned on the economics of foreign markets. They are less likely to support women’s films, the argument goes, and, more important, foreign entities that increasingly provide the financing for movies work off algorithms that favor male stars. (Brad Pitt—yes. Susan Sarandon—no.) It comes down to money, no surprise—projects for women can’t raise it under the prevailing system.

  Perversely, all this flies in the face of industry recognition that women and girls are actually driving the box office more than before. The once-reliable audience of teenage boys has turned toward other forms of entertainment on their many devices, while young women still like going to the movies with their friends. Some of the biggest blockbusters in the last couple of decades have starred women and girls and targeted that audience, earning billions along the way: Titanic, Twilight, The Hunger Games, Maleficent, Bridesmaids, Frozen, Moana. Their filmmakers want to tear their hair out when their triumphs get cited as anomalies or slapped with that perpetual label for breakout movies about women—sleeper hits.

  “Now it’s so expensive to make a movie,” says Jane Fonda, who has witnessed the dance since she was a reigning star and producer back when no one talked about any of this. “There is so much riding on it, and the people who run the studios—their jobs are on the line. They don’t take a risk with anything that’s not familiar, and what’s familiar looks like them. They are white men. So they are going with white men.”

  There is still no central break room or human resources department to address these matters in a sprawling entertainment complex full of freewheeling impresarios, but at least today the Tumblr blog Shit People Say to
Women Directors lets the aggrieved share rants on the endless comments about their breasts or being asked which male subordinate is really in charge. Filmmakers finally are making noise about such affronts, and journalists are writing about them. That’s why we know that the thirty-seven-year-old actress Maggie Gyllenhaal was told she was too old to play the love interest of a fifty-five-year-old actor, and that Catherine Hardwicke, after directing the $400 million–earning Twilight, still couldn’t get her next project set up for a year and a half. When she did, her salary went down. It took the infamous Sony Pictures email hack to reveal that Jennifer Lawrence, who headlined the worldwide $3 billion Hunger Games franchise, still got paid less for American Hustle than Jeremy Renner, who filled a smaller part.

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  IN RETROSPECT, the new hard look at the odds against movies by and for women highlights just how remarkable it was when Callie Khouri, Ridley Scott, Geena Davis, Susan Sarandon, Becky Pollack, Alan Ladd Jr., Mimi Polk, Diane Cairns, Amanda Temple and the rest of the band pulled together to make Thelma & Louise. How rare it was that women got to drive the narrative, drive the car and crash the barricades. How much could have gone wrong that for once went right. Callie could have sold out and taken the sting out of her script. Ridley could have stuck with the smart money and directed a futuristic train movie instead. The stars could have pushed for more “likable” characters, and the studio could have swapped out the ending for something that wouldn’t rattle the folks in the multiplex. But in a cynical business, the key players in the making of Thelma & Louise had just enough stars in their eyes to stay true to a story they loved.

  “I think Callie didn’t know what she was doing, and that’s what saved her,” says Hans Zimmer. The same could be said, to varying degrees, for everyone else who played a role.

  Critical appreciation for Thelma & Louise only grew as the tenth, twentieth and twenty-fifth anniversaries passed. The Atlantic in 2011 called it “the last great film about women.” A new selfie of Susan and Geena together went viral on Twitter in 2014, and members of show-business royalty that year named the film one of their one hundred favorites of all time in a survey by the Hollywood Reporter, which put the two stars on the cover. Treatises by academic and pop-culture pundits have parsed the text, subtext and ubertext, as well as a lot of other text that the filmmakers never intended.

  At special screenings in theaters and intimate ones at home, the film still plays and plays. Mention of Thelma & Louise can still touch off a row at a dinner party, and parents debate when daughters should see it for the first time, because it still feels fresh, its critique of American culture and relations between the sexes still sharp and current. As viewers wait—and wait—for another movie like it, Thelma & Louise seems destined to stand alone, like Nora slamming the door in A Doll’s House or Aretha belting out “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” a touchstone for all that follow, with a force, originality and impact that the timid will never duplicate.

  EPILOGUE

  SANTA MONICA, MARCH 30, 1992

  There are many ways a Hollywood story can end, from a script in the waste bin of somebody’s assistant to the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. When a film becomes a classic, it simply rolls on. But as good a place as any to pause in the story of Thelma & Louise might be Oscar night of 1992.

  It gave the filmmakers a chance to reunite, walking the red carpet as the underdogs of the occasion. Ridley, ever his mother’s son, felt “bloody silly” in his starchy tux. Geena embraced the spectacle and cheerfully vamped her way onto the Worst Dressed lists in a white dress by a costume designer that made her look like a cancan dancer with the front of her skirt hitched up. Susan, serene and beaming in a simple black tunic, was eight months pregnant with her third child. Laddie had begged and scrounged for tickets so everyone on Pathé’s young and giddy team could crash the party.

  Callie made it an occasion. She brought her husband, her mother, her brother and her agent, and they all dressed beforehand in a snug Santa Monica house that Callie and David Warfield had bought with her earnings from Thelma & Louise. This was back before Oscar attendees served as walking billboards for designers, so Callie wore a vintage beaded navy blue dress that a friend had reconfigured with a different skirt. She and her little entourage didn’t have far to travel in their limo, but traffic was so jammed that they barely made it to the hall in time to see the host, Billy Crystal, make an entrance trussed up as Hannibal Lecter in a spoof of the evening’s favorite, the sinister thriller The Silence of the Lambs.

  It was Thelma & Louise that most of Hollywood had been too spooked to make, but the community rewarded the movie with six nominations. Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis both were up for Best Actress, their performances so equally matched that they were sure to split the vote and hand the prize to Jodie Foster for The Silence of the Lambs, which also carried off the statue for Best Picture, as expected. Adrian Biddle was nominated for cinematography, as was Thom Noble for editing. Both lost to Oliver Stone’s JFK. Even though Thelma & Louise didn’t make the list of Best Picture nominees, Ridley Scott did for Best Director, but he was spared his heart-popping terror of public speaking when Jonathan Demme won for Silence instead. A scandal of the night was the snub of Barbra Streisand for directing The Prince of Tides, even though it was nominated for Best Picture. “Seven nominations on the shelf,” Billy Crystal sang in his introductory medley. “Did this film direct itself?”

  That left the former waitress and video producer from Paducah, Kentucky, to carry the banner for Thelma & Louise. Callie was thrilled, nervous and happy to share the moment with her family. But even as she settled in a forward section just behind Hollywood’s biggest power brokers and stars, she didn’t realize that if she did take home the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay that night, this one would be historic. Beginner that she was, she would be the first woman working without a male partner to win in sixty years, filling the long-empty footsteps of the pioneering Frances Marion.

  Callie had been borne along through some warm-up contests—the Golden Globes, the Writers Guild—oblivious to the possibility that she could prevail, and then she did. Each one took her so much by surprise that she hadn’t prepared an acceptance speech and had to wing it onstage. This time, Callie had drafted some remarks, in case of an emergency. But still she couldn’t wrap her head around the possibility that the stodgier Oscar voters would choose her over veterans like James Toback for Bugsy, Lawrence and Meg Kasdan for Grand Canyon, Richard LaGravenese for The Fisher King and another newcomer, John Singleton, who wrote the groundbreaking Boyz n the Hood.

  Okay now, here’s the big one, Callie told herself as Robert Duvall and Anjelica Huston took the stage to present her category. This is where they give it to the real writer.

  When her name rang out, nobodies and literary renegades everywhere could delight in Callie’s triumph. So could anyone who wanted to see movies that weren’t easy to categorize, or hear what a woman might have to say. Even the fainthearted souls of the movie industry let out a shout that reverberated from the first parterre to the nosebleed seats of the auditorium. Laddie, Ridley, Geena, Susan, Becky Pollack, Greg Foster, Diane Cairns—all scattered throughout the hall—led the cheers, most of them thinking how fitting it was that the person who had started their whole wild ride would be the one to receive its crowning honor.

  Callie bounded to the podium, steadied herself to face millions of people watching around the world, glanced down at her crumpled notes and then realized her rookie mistake: she had written the speech in pencil. It turned to invisible ink under the lights.

  Her remarks were endearingly unpolished but from the heart. “Ridley, I couldn’t thank you in forty-five years, let alone forty-five seconds,” she began, “so I won’t try now.” Once again her words could be read as cryptic, but her smile in his direction was warm. She told Geena and Susan she loved them and thanked her family, assuring the crowd that her husband hadn’t been the model for any of the ch
aracters. She got a laugh with the quip “In fact, my brother was—just kidding.”

  Then Callie Khouri withdrew to the wings, trailing all the unresolved issues her movie had raised. One line lingered in the afterglow. “For everybody that wanted to see a happy ending for Thelma & Louise,” Callie said, “this is it.”

  Callie Khouri brought her southern style to Hollywood.

  Her friend Pam Tillis, model for Thelma.

  Khouri (center) with would-be producer Amanda Temple and her daughter, Juno.

  Players who sealed the deal included the D-girl turned studio executive Rebecca Pollack

  . . . Pathé Entertainment studio boss Alan Ladd Jr.

  . . . and ICM agent Diane Cairns.

  Sigourney Weaver shook the status quo in Ridley Scott’s Alien.

  Jack Nicholson in The Witches of Eastwick with top contenders Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer.

  Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin in the outré Beetlejuice.

  Louise, Thelma and the original selfie.

  Harlan (Timothy Carhart) and Louise in the movie’s second most controversial scene.