Callie Khouri: Against All Odds

Having finished the script in late 1988, Khouri showed it to a friend who showed it to producer Mimi Polk to get Polk's opinion on which companies might be interested in such an "offbeat" project. Polk read it and took it straight away to her own boss--Ridley Scott. Polk has worked with Scott for eight years and, for the past four, has served as the executive vice president of Scott's company, Percy Main Productions. When she showed Thelma & Louise to him, he loved it. "Ridley felt really strongly that he wanted to make a break from the kind of movies he's been doing," Khouri says. "Directors run the same risk of getting categorized as actresses or writers or anybody else does."

Scott could have easily turned Thelma & Louise into a romp, two wacky dames with guns running wild in the Southwest--Bonnie & Bonnie. But he didn't. He worked with Khouri on the script, consolidating scenes and so on, but filmed it essentially as written, respecting her purpose.

At their initial meeting, Khouri says, she sat down at the table with Scott and he said, "I want you to understand that I know the ending can't be changed." Khouri replied, "Keep talking." In a manner that is probably as mysterious to his fans as to his detractors, Scott clearly feels deeply for Thelma and Louise. His empathy is palpable on the screen. The film is vivid and stylish without being slick (Utah's Canyon Lands at night are breathtaking, but the beauty is pertinent); it moves with grace and energy without sacrificing dialogue or revelations of character. Scott is sensitive but not too; he never cheapens the action with that giggly, maudlin "just us girls" tone you often get when films try to portray women's intimate secrets. And he gets stupendous performances from his stars. Davis and Sarandon don't act like they've got their monthly female trouble. They act like they should, like they're neck-deep in life-changing shit. Davis's Thelma grows visibly from a gawky, uncertain housewife into a person seeing herself and the world for the first time; Sarandon, in the middle of her transition to character actress, gives Louise a grim, doomed weight as she heads for a new life in Mexico.

Khouri says she loves film and the visual aspects of moviemaking, but that her artistic influences are more literary than cinematic. She admires J.D. Salinger and Frederick Exley because they peel away psychological layers of their characters to get at the bitter, bitter truth of life. Critical and audience reception of Thelma & Louise will depend, I think, on how people react to the film's bitter, bitter truths. It expresses women's anger, their sense of being persecuted, chased, monitored and stalked by violent men, whether it's the husband who won't let them go away for the weekend or the roadhouse Romeo who can't take no for an answer. And the film's also pessimistic about the possibility of women being whole and free in this society. Although Khouri criticizes the kind of women we see in films, and wrote Thelma & Louise in reaction to those images, her characters aren't exactly shining role models for women--unless, of course, you hanker for the life of a fugitive or want to make armed robbery your career.

For Thelma and Louise, freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. But Thelma and Louise are novel and inspiring anyway because, unlike so many female protagonists, they drive the action solely through their own decisions. Caught in life-or-death events, they assume responsibility for their crimes and their lives, taking their fate in their own hands like true heroines of an existential tragi-comedy. And in doing so, they and their movie express a radical opinion about the limitations on a woman's freedom in a man's world.

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Helen Knode is a staff writer for the L.A. Weekly. This is her first piece for Movieline.

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