How Thelma & Louise Drove Hollywood ‘Off The Cliff’
How the Making of Thelma & Louise Drove Hollywood to the Edge
Hardcover, three hundred five pages |
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"I don’t get it. It’s two bitches in a car."
It’s the least surprising thing in the world that a nameless Hollywood executive had this reaction to Callie Khouri’s script for Thelma & Louise. It could be a line from the movie itself — there’s no shortage of boys with that attitude. (Thelma and Louise pull one of them over and deepthroat up his truck.) It’s more surprising that, in a town where million-dollar business is shaped by such opinions, the movie ever got made.
Becky Aikman’s Off the Cliff is subtitled How the Making of Thelma & Louise Drove Hollywood to the Edge. That sounds like hyperbole, except that this book crackles with frustration on all sides. Khouri bristled at the workplace chauvinism in music movies (which inspired her to write a script about fighting back); Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon were fed up with Hollywood misogyny; Ridley Scott bristled that Khouri didn’t fully trust him with her script; the marketing department panicked at selling a two-woman film that starts as a weekend romp and completes with its vigilante heroines driving into the Grand Canyon.
Aikman cautiously chronicles the minutiae of production for nosey readers. There’s casting near-misses (George Clooney almost swept Thelma off her feet), the woes of set decoration (Bring Your Own Tumbleweeds), technical nitpicks about lighting, and the logistics of sending a car off a cliff. It’s always fascinating to read about the combination of intensive planning and blessed accidents behind any movie, and Aikman has done the legwork — almost every stage of the process, from script agent to editor, is accounted for. At very first it feels a bit rose-colored, and Aikman seems more interested in the process than in deconstructing the product. There’s relatively little about the film’s legacy: whether the film is feminist, whether it meant to be, whether it matters.
. in ‘Off the Cliff,’ you get the sense that Aikman isn’t just taking note of the feminist ire at the heart of this movie: She’s out to display how much of a fight it indeed was.
However, while effortless answers aren’t required, there’s no way to talk about Thelma & Louise without talking about those things. And in Off the Cliff, you get the sense that Aikman isn’t just taking note of the feminist ire at the heart of this movie: She’s out to showcase how much of a fight it indeed was.
The studs in the book seem determined to help. To be clear, a host of dudes championed the movie — producer Alan Ladd, director Ridley Scott, editor Thom Noble. But Aikman collects some doozies from her subjects. Khouri’s ex-husband David Warfield gives her the rousing endorsement, "She could play pool with the boys . Her attitude was essentially professional. She’s not so fragile that she can’t be around dancing bimbos" — a brief but sweet summation of what "professional" means in showbiz.
That feeling pervades the book; there are dozens of cringeworthy asides from industry women, and the way Khouri, Davis, and Sarandon talk about each other sits at an interesting angle alongside the ways the dudes speak about women. Harvey Keitel witnessed a movie about "[women’s] difficulties, our difficulties as guys, what we have to confront within each other and within ourselves." Madsen and Sarandon argued against an over-the-top lovey-dovey scene inbetween his character, Jimmy, and rape survivor Louise; Madsen says: "Because I’m a heterosexual masculine, and I know a little bit about women . I don’t think that Louise would have anything to do with anybody who wasn’t a little volatile," he explains. Ridley Scott suggested to Davis on set that Thelma might feast freedom by taking her top off.
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But amid the frustration, there’s also illuminating introspection. Aikman crafts a narrative of Thelma & Louise bringing out everyone’s most introspective instincts — and their fighting spirit. Even amid the friction (Khouri and Scott in particular butted goes), Aikman assures us it was because everyone was so invested in a project they felt was significant.
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