Amanda Temple didn’t waste a minute getting Thelma & Louise into the hands of anybody who could help, delivering the pages on three-hole-punched paper held together with little brass fasteners. During the fall of 1988, she sent out ten, then twenty, thirty, maybe even forty copies. Usually she delivered them in person, the better to plead, and kept up the pressure with a demoralizing burden of daily phone calls. Sometimes Callie dropped the script off herself. Most of the time, the response was no response. First, they solicited agents in hopes that one would represent Callie as a screenwriter. No one would. Then they tried to find some tony little art-film producer to put up some money. No one did.
“It drove me mad,” Amanda says. “We were these two blond girls walking around with a script. It was like we were invisible or a joke.”
Callie couldn’t have asked for a more fiercely determined ally. Amanda’s belief in the screenplay was unshakable, and she enjoyed some helpful film-biz cachet. Besides her music video production credits, she was married to Julien Temple, a young English director who had made the British feature film Absolute Beginners. Amanda and Julien touched down in Hollywood during the mid-eighties, when Warner Bros. put them up at the Sunset Marquis, a hotel near the clubs along the Sunset Strip. The place attracted a mongrel mix of rock ’n’ rollers and other entertainers who lounged by the courtyard pool. After Julien left for the studio on their first morning there, Amanda faced the question of where she, a production secretary back in London, could secure a place for herself in this tantalizing town.
She peeked out the window. “There were these girls by the pool in micro-bikinis with these enormous breasts,” she says. “I was twenty-five years old, and I had never seen breasts like that, all pumped up. There were guys with big hair and chains and the whole thing, and they thought it was just so funny to push these girls into the pool. The girls would giggle and get out of the pool, and the guys would do it again and again and again. I was like, ‘Where have I landed?’”
One of her first outings was a dinner where she was seated next to Joan Rivers. “She was hilarious,” Amanda says. “I was the youngest at the table, and she took one look at me and saw raw meat.” “You’ve moved to LA?” Rivers asked. “Well, first thing, we’ve got to give you some tits. And look at that little button nose, it’s just off-kilter. Yeah, we’re going to do that, too.”
Amanda played along, but she was shaking by the end of the meal. “Everything was so surface, so about the way you look,” she says. “My God, I had to toughen up, I really did.”
But she also perceived that in contrast to England, where people regarded her as “a little blonde behind a typewriter,” Los Angeles was a city where someone could reinvent herself, given enough energy and conviction. Hollywood appeared so wide open, so thrumming with enterprising zeal, that it seemed possible to turn herself into something more, a little blond producer. It was heartening that men and women there were unashamedly passionate about everything to do with film and fearless about seizing opportunity. They galvanized her to muscle her way into music video production, eventually starting her own company.
Until she and Callie started working together, Amanda felt like an alien in Southern California, set apart by her self-deprecating British humor and her refusal to take everything seriously, but the two clicked right away. “Her being from the South, we really connected,” Amanda says. “We were both refugees, able to poke fun and see through a different lens. We could see that this place was . . . ridiculous.”
—
HER HUSBAND’S CONNECTIONS and Amanda’s own resourcefulness got her nowhere with Thelma & Louise as fall and winter rolled by. She walked the script into the office of Julien’s agent, Jim Crabbe at William Morris, but he told her later that he didn’t remember it crossing his desk. Harvey Weinstein’s office got a copy, but she never heard back. The same with Amy Pascal, a new production executive at Columbia. Amanda theorized that the bolder tastemakers in town might get what she was peddling, but she couldn’t slip it past their minions who didn’t have the authority to challenge the standard molds.
A British producer, Stephen Woolley, a partner of the writer-director Neil Jordan, assigned one of his development executives to take a meeting, the first of three that Amanda and Callie snagged at small-time indie companies. Each time the objections were firm and always the same: no one would take a liking to women who committed violence, and no one wanted to watch them drive off a cliff. “Can’t they just shoot the guy in the leg?” posed one executive. Another asked, “Don’t you think you should have a guy shoot the guy and the women should just run?”
The absolute deal breaker was always the ending. “Maybe the Grand Canyon should be more like a ditch,” someone said, “and they floor it and land on the other side.”
Callie wouldn’t entertain suggestions; she wouldn’t play the game. “I wasn’t interested in telling anybody else’s story,” she says. The goal wasn’t fame or riches—she wanted to make Thelma & Louise.
“Let’s go, we’re out of here,” Callie would say to Amanda before turning to address the executives in a flat, dismissive tone. “We’ve got nothing to talk about. You’re not going to talk me into anything, and I’m not going to talk you into anything. So we’re done.”
The first couple of times, the two friends broke into laughter as they headed out the door, vowing, “We’re not going to change a thing.” But after their third and final impasse, at a company called Palace Productions on Third Street, dejection trailed them as they trudged home along the wide, flat Santa Monica beach. It seemed increasingly farfetched that anyone would be willing to make Thelma & Louise the way it was written. No one saw what Callie and Amanda saw.
“This whole issue of the women being unsympathetic—come on!” Amanda railed, her voice rising with exasperation. “Guys can be unsympathetic and violent and unpleasant and abusive, and they get away with it. But you put trousers on the women and they’re outrageous?”
The disappointment made her frantic. By now it was the spring of 1989. Months had passed on their fruitless quest, and a clock was ticking. Amanda was heavily pregnant and would soon return to England for the birth, with Callie stuck behind, still churning out godforsaken music videos.
Callie stopped short. “We were sure there would be plenty of people who don’t understand this and say no,” she assured her partner. “We only need one yes.” If they tapped out all their resources in Los Angeles, maybe they could find some foreigner who hadn’t wised up to the ways of Hollywood to put up the cash.
“I was savvy enough, as was Callie,” Amanda says, “to know that as soon as you start diluting something you are passionate about, it will dissolve into nothing. I’ve seen what happens when people get stuck in the Hollywood machine and their movies morph into something they don’t recognize. If you stick to your vision, you can at least sleep at night. You may not be the biggest hotshot, but at least your conscience is clear.”
—
AMANDA SOUGHT ADVICE FROM SOMEONE she had met through friends: Mimi Polk, a thirty-year-old American who ran the Los Angeles production company of Ridley Scott, the British director best known for the science fiction features Alien and Blade Runner. They sometimes worked with foreign investors, Amanda had heard.
“Mimi,” she said as she turned over the precious bound pages, “am I going mad? Why do I think this is such a brilliant thing? Why doesn’t anybody get it?”
Six weeks passed without a word. When Callie said good-bye to Amanda just before she left to have the baby, the mood was glum. “I can’t believe it,” Amanda said. “Not even Mimi is getting back.”
But when Callie picked up the phone a few weeks later, Mimi Polk was on the line. Callie heard a crisp, professional voice cut through all the layers of rejection and indifference and say the magic words: “I loved your script.”
You . . . what?
“I love the characters. I think they would be accessible to a lot of people.”
Callie absorbed this news with as much outward composure as she could muster. Finally . . . the kind of reaction she had been expecting all along. Finally . . . a believer, a believer with some connection to people with clout. But she froze at Mimi’s follow-up. “Is it all right if I let Ridley see it? Not to direct, but maybe he would be willing to produce.”
“It had all gone so well,” Callie says. “The momentum had started with the idea and then kept up through the writing, and now I was coming to the moment when a real director was going to read it.” Oh my God, she thought. Is this where the whole thing ends?
She consented, then steeled herself for more rejection and delay, but Mimi called back about a week later. “Ridley loves it, too,” she said. “He’d like to meet with you.” Callie froze again. “The only difficulty is that you would be a first-time director,” Mimi continued. “You are going to have to make a choice. Do you want to take a shot at directing it yourself? Or do you want this first movie to be with bigger stars and a bigger-name director, which would really put you on the map?” Ridley had no interest in directing this script, she said, but he might produce it for another director.
Callie rang Amanda straightaway. The news stirred up a monsoon of emotions—justification, joy, relief and, for Amanda, irritation that Mimi had cut her out of the picture by contacting Callie directly, but Amanda didn’t flinch. She knew that she could speak up for a producer credit, but she also felt the most righteous action she could take for her friend, for the script, was to let it go and walk away.
“Callie,” Amanda said, “this could be a magic wand. They can wave it and make the movie happen. You’re an idiot if you don’t do this with them. It’s going to get made.”
Perhaps, but in what form? “Oh my God, the Scott brothers,” Amanda says later, conflating Ridley with his brother Tony, the hotshot behind Beverly Hills Cop II. “Yes, of course, you think, Tits and Bullets—perfect!”
Ridley’s work had more taste, the two friends agreed, but could he understand this profoundly female story? His movies were overwhelmingly commercial sci-fi epics, strong on action, light on character, guy movies, except for his casting of Sigourney Weaver in the lead of Alien, a part originally written for a man. Callie knew the gamble she’d be taking by relinquishing this exquisitely balanced script.
Take this opportunity, Amanda advised, and the story would benefit from the kind of clout they couldn’t hope to summon on their own. “Callie, it’s now going to be a Ridley Scott movie,” she cautioned, “which is a completely different animal than what we envisioned. It’s going to get a lot of attention. It’s going to be a movie that everyone is talking about.”
They couldn’t be sure what else it would be. Back and forth, they tried to parse just who Ridley Scott was and what his intentions were, little considering that Hollywood had been working the same puzzle for the previous ten years.