The sound of desperate banging broke Callie’s concentration. Heavy metal throbbed and wailed outside the thin walls of the production trailer where she had been toting up the budget for a music video. She cracked open the door. One of the backup dancers stood in the frame, chilled and trembling in little more than a Band-Aid.
“I’m really sorry.” The dancer shuddered. “I have to leave. I was hired to dance, and people are putting their hands all over me. I feel like this whole experience is degrading.”
Callie’s heart bloomed with pleasure. Finally, someone speaking her language! It was the first time she’d heard anyone say, “What the fuck is going on here?” she recalls.
“It’s terrible, because I really need the money,” the dancer said.
“No, no,” Callie said. “I’m paying you. I’m writing a check right now.”
Years later she still savors that moment, the one when she paid a modicum of reparations for all she had witnessed in the trenches of music video.
Degrading? Welcome to the rodeo.
For the most part, if a woman wanted to break into the movies in the 1980s, she put on blinders and plowed ahead, whatever she might think of the lame or skanky entertainment product she was called upon to enable. So it was when Callie Khouri worked her way through the ranks of video production. Stifle the outrage, avert the eyes and get the job done.
Those who weren’t stars like Barbra Streisand and Jane Fonda could rarely attack the industry head-on. Video production was a viable flanking maneuver, a side entrance for somebody who could tolerate the drugs, the inanity and the groping of women who were hired to slink around behind the musicians while sparsely attired in a mockery of 1980s dress for success.
Around the time Callie left the comedy scene, she signed on as a receptionist at N. Lee Lacy, a tony commercial production outfit. To get the job she had to promise that she would never try to move out from behind the reception desk, swearing on her life that answering the phone was her highest ambition. The company had just launched a division to crank out music videos for the record industry, which was bankrolling attention-grabbing clips to break bands on MTV.
Callie started by greeting visitors in the serene white foyer at Lacy’s on Melrose Place. The job was classy but dull, seemingly another dead end. “I was literally running out of ideas,” she says. Eventually she did push her way into the fun part, working on commercials and videos, climbing the ladder through a jumble of titles—runner, production assistant, production coordinator and production manager. By 1987, she was freelancing as a line producer, which meant she delivered film to the lab, ordered the lighting, scouted locations, juggled schedules, arranged casting sessions—you name it—all in the service of the creative visions of the directors. “It was incredibly unsatisfying,” Callie says, “but I learned a lot.”
Young film school grads who worshipped at the altars of the auteurs jumped at the chance to direct those music videos, which could serve as a ticket in. With their flamboyance, visual flair and utter lack of restraint, the quick clips offered ripe canvases to showcase the talents of comers like David Fincher and Michael Bay. Yet while video production may have functioned as the minor leagues in Hollywood, the milieu matched or even exceeded feature films for lurid, outrageous behavior, on and off the set.
“Everyone was snorting through their days, coke everywhere, and everyone was just out of hand,” says Amanda Temple, an English-born friend who produced a number of videos with Callie. “I have to say, we did have a lot of fun. We did laugh.”
Directors basked in what there was of cachet in the genre. But production people, the women especially, felt conscripted into the coal mines of long hours, low pay and dismal taste. One night, when Callie was cleaning the soundstage as other PAs took off, one of the guys announced, “For a hundred a day, these people can go fuck themselves. I’m out of here.” A hundred? Callie thought. I’m making seventy-five. Callie worked on clips for a lot of bands that went nowhere and a few others that did—Robert Cray, Brian Setzer, Iggy Pop, Billy Idol. Having never studied film, she soaked up the process of how to tell a story visually, how all that mattered was what happened when the shutter opened wide. But ultimately the work seemed trivial, just this side of artistic—and worse.
“There were really talented directors making beautiful images,” Callie says, “but still nobody was saying anything. It wasn’t important. Some of it was beautifully crafted. Some of it was cheaply crafted and culture destroying, which was the other side of it. I got exposed to the objectification of women in a whole new way.”
She and Amanda often quarantined themselves in the production office, but still they could hear the male directors and crew routinely snickering and commenting on the bodies of the dancers who stripped down to underwear or less on the sets and in auditions. Directors bellowed: “Not big enough tits! Next! Next!”
“We were both mortified a lot of the time by the work we were doing,” says Amanda. “It was Mötley Crüe, it was Whitesnake, it was all those spandex-pants and big-hair guys with girls in bikinis.” Watching directors film women’s asses shaking from a foot away, she and Callie cut glances at each other: What the hell are we doing? “What we were doing was, we were paying bills,” Amanda says. “We needed to work, so we kept our heads down and we did it.”
Those casting sessions got to Callie. Sometimes they enraged her. Sometimes she spoke up. “The thing that was so powerful about Callie was that she had a really strong sense that this was wrong, that it was time for a change,” says Amanda. “She got up people’s noses.” Some of the guys complained that Callie had a mouth on her. Amanda stood up for her colleague, and they became tight as only allies become tight if they’re trapped together behind enemy lines, surviving on nothing but camel jerky and gully water. Callie devised an expression that kept them going: “You get what you settle for.”
“It was like having a warrior queen at your side,” says Amanda. “I felt like I could fight every battle with this woman.”
On balance, Callie was tactical enough to put the paycheck ahead of her opinions. “She could play pool with the boys,” says David Warfield, who dated Callie at the time and often worked on shoots with her. “Her attitude was essentially professional. She’s not so fragile that she can’t be around dancing bimbos.”
The relationship with David provided sweet relief and proof that not every guy working in show business was a cad. In a classic California interlude, he became smitten with her when they shared a hot tub at a party, where she torpedoed the customary mellow vibe to hold forth on all the sexist and patriarchal sins of society. “It made me fall in love,” David says, “just because it was so smart, so deeply authentic, and because so few people are eloquent enough to express such a meaningful statement on the human condition that way. A couple of years later it manifested itself in Thelma & Louise.”
Callie was pulling herself together. She was happy in her house near the beach, happy with David and not altogether miserable at work, where she had caught a serious case of the movie bug. In fact, she had acquired a profound sense of mastery from her job. If a crewmate got a motor home stuck in a ditch, Callie would say, “I got this,” and drive it out. Despite the tedium of production work, the ridiculous inequality and lack of respect, she became fascinated by the craft or, in rare instances, the art of telling stories on film. The work she’d witnessed from the sidelines had all the substance of, let’s face it, an MTV video, but it was enough of a taste that she fixed on this as something she might be able to do, and do well—telling stories, expressing something that mattered for a change, with images, words and music, creating a vision that was beautiful and true. Ever since the loss of her father, she’d been grasping for the accomplishment that could satisfy his ambitions for her. Filmmaking? There were crazier ideas.
One night she flew with a load of camera equipment to Monument Valley to work on an Estée Lauder commercial. All alone, Callie packed up a van and drove toward the motel where the crew awaited. A full moon lit the fabled rock formations. Stretching toward the horizon, they towered like silvery apparitions in absolute clarity and perfect silence as she guided the van down the empty highway. It was both hyperreal and otherworldly, a visual spectacle that sent her thoughts spinning.
Callie felt that she understood herself in a way that had evaded her for ten muzzy, cluttered—frustrating—years. She considered how glorious it would be to communicate that sensation in a movie, that feeling of facing who you are, perhaps for the first time, in a grand, impassive space that opened the mind to reflection. She had something to say, something that mattered, and she knew it belonged on film.