Stars like Michelle Pfeiffer and Jodie Foster weren’t going to wait forever for Ridley Scott to get off the dime. They had careers to cultivate and other offers to consider. Jonathan Demme, who had directed Michelle in Married to the Mob, was wooing her for the plum part of Clarice Starling in the serial-killer thriller The Silence of the Lambs. Jodie was leaning toward joining Love Field, a melodrama with her Accused director, Jonathan Kaplan, about an interracial relationship. But when Michelle balked at Silence because she thought the violence was too grotesque, the opportunities flipped. Jodie signed on for the Silence part, and Michelle took Love Field. Thelma & Louise had lost its stars.
No stars, no director, no mojo—the production seemed stalled before it could begin. But, defying all logic, this latest turn transformed the project into something of a sensation. Not that long ago Callie and Amanda couldn’t get arrested with the script. Now the vacancy at the top of the cast set off a flat-out scramble by some of Hollywood’s biggest names to win the most substantial roles they had seen in years. It seemed as if every agent who represented anyone with a vagina and a pulse besieged Pathé and Ridley’s company for a shot. “Every day, you’d hear different women who were attached to it,” says Kaplan.
“It was a free-for-all,” says Diane. Once, no top star would have lowered herself to openly pursue a part. She wouldn’t meet for so much as a friendly drink without an offer on the table first. But by 1989 that taboo had yielded to a new reality. If actresses or their agents didn’t jump on the phone to ask for a prime opportunity, they were out of the game. Agents told their clients: “The only way you are going to get this role is to fight for it.” That went double for the two roles in Callie’s once-neglected script.
Producers and studios might have shied away from it, but actresses were desperate for the meaty, flawed, fully loaded roles it provided, with character arcs that would put the players’ skills to the test. “You would have to be a complete idiot to read that spectacular script and not respond to the material if you’re an actor,” says David Eidenberg, Geena Davis’s agent at the time. “It was overwhelming.” He continued to call Mimi or Becky on behalf of Geena once or twice a week, every week, trying to outflank the competition, but it didn’t look promising. On weekly lists that Pathé drew up of dozens of potential stars, his client appeared only twice, each time misspelled as “Gina.”
Script aside, you’d also have to be an idiot not to see another reason for the stampede. Good actresses wanted to work, in the broadest sense of pushing themselves to the limits of their abilities and being well paid to do it. But women captured only 29 percent of movie roles in 1989, and male actors were paid 60 percent more on average. Speaking at a Screen Actors Guild conference in 1990, Meryl Streep drily noted, “If the trend continues, by the year 2000 women will represent thirteen percent of all roles. And in twenty years, we will have been eliminated from movies entirely.” Her prediction proved overly grim: twenty-five years later, the percentage of roles for female actors remained exactly where it was in 1989.
With the ongoing rise of action movies and the fading of seventies icons like Fonda and Streisand, the new generation of actresses could barely crack the annual top-ten lists of movie stars in the mid- to late eighties, and none could sustain that stature as Tom Cruise, Eddie Murphy and Michael Douglas did year after year. Meryl Streep managed to make it in 1984 and 1985, Bette Midler in 1986 and 1988 and Kathleen Turner in 1986 and 1989, but Cher, Whoopi Goldberg and Glenn Close each secured a spot just once and then disappeared. No one else made the cut. Susan Sarandon, who first broke into movies as a seventies ingenue, says, “There were very few women who started with me who survived.”
Many men couldn’t get a break in action blockbusters, either, if they weren’t physically imposing enough, and those who did found their conservatory training wasted on the tasks of running, jumping, ducking and grunting. But at least there were plenty of minor roles and character parts for men—the guy who ran the deli, the boss at the office, the cop caught in the shootout, the third soldier from the left.
An actress often found herself the only woman on the set, a young, inexperienced girl whose only job was to be seductive. “By the time an actor was being given an opportunity to helm a project, he may have had fifteen to twenty little roles—the best-friend roles,” says Carrie Frazier, a prominent casting director in the eighties. “He kind of knew how things worked. The actresses at seventeen or eighteen were being given leads and told to get naked. Oh my God, how did they survive? How did they manage the craftsmanship of it, the comfort level of it?”
While actors could explore a wide variety of human shadings, the female lead was so similar in every movie that Frazier had a name for her: Katherine. As in “Oh, here comes Katherine again.” Katherine was attractive, of course, or “fuckable,” as she was so often labeled behind the scenes. But the leading lady in an eighties movie had to be classy, too, to be a worthy girlfriend of the star. “Katherine is sexy, but not a slut,” says Frazier. “She is smart, because the guy has to have an interesting woman, but not one that would surmount him in any way. She works in an art gallery—an art gallery is perfect. She can be a veterinarian but not a surgeon, a photographer but not an editor. She’s a little more refined than the girl with the orange hair who is her best friend. The best friend is funny, and she gets the funny lines, because it shows that our girl has a sense of humor, but not too much, because that’s not really feminine. Katherine can’t be even a little crass or laugh too much.”
It fell to men to shout orders and save the world from terrorists and maniacs. Actresses found their hopes for rounded and fulfilling careers stifled. The funny best friend offered an opening for someone like Bette Midler, who carried a couple movies as a lead but then later appeared in ensemble pieces. That left just about everyone else in the straitjacket of the Katherine role. Unless they landed Thelma or Louise.
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ONCE JODIE AND MICHELLE DROPPED OUT, Becky Pollack could have made a full-time job out of fielding calls from actresses’ agents. They told her Cybill Shepherd was interested. So were Daryl Hannah, Kelly Lynch, Rebecca De Mornay, Ellen Barkin, Theresa Russell, Nancy Travis and Madeline Stowe. Michelle Pfeiffer would become available again if the production could wait until the following July. Meg Ryan would do it in June. Kim Basinger, Kathleen Turner and Andie MacDowell would open up in August. So would Julia Roberts, who would outshine them all the next year as the lead in the enormous hit Pretty Woman, inhabiting Hollywood’s favorite female character, once again a prostitute. Most of the actresses coveted the arguably showier Thelma role. Oh . . . and “Gina Davis.” Files from Pathé note that her agent insisted she would play either part whenever, wherever. If all this happened in a movie, it would be called a catfight.
“Instead, it created a firestorm,” Becky Pollack says. And it generated a lot of drama around town as agents tried to poach clients from other agencies by slipping them the script, as in “He didn’t get you a hearing on Thelma & Louise, but I did.”
Laddie yearned for Ridley to cast Cher, who was also interested. She had scored an Oscar and box-office success by playing a shy bookkeeper who found love in Moonstruck. “Cher could have been quite good, I think,” Laddie says. “She could have played either part.” But Ridley didn’t think she would bring the humor he saw in the script. He kept dragging his feet, just as he did with choosing directors.
Then Laddie got a call that trumped them all. Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn invited themselves to Pathé, together, to pitch themselves for Thelma and Louise. They didn’t have their agents make the call; they did it themselves. No one would have expected the two friends, box-office champs and Oscar winners, to campaign for parts, but they showed up prepared to kill. “To sit in a meeting with Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn was spectacular,” says Becky. “They were enthusiastic and adorable and smart.”
The discussion was vigorous, especially when it came to the ending, which gave the stars some trepidation. They didn’t lobby to change it, necessarily, but they toyed with alternatives, like an escape to Mexico, for instance. Streep suggested it might work if her character, Louise, pushed Thelma out of the car at the last moment, saving at least the life of the one friend who hadn’t committed murder.
Laddie was smitten, eager to capitalize on the oomph of such A-plus-plus-list stars. “I think that Meryl could do anything,” he says. As for Goldie, “it would have been more of a comedic turn. When you think about it, it’s a very dark movie, it’s not a happy piece of fluff, which was how Goldie was thought of at the time. But I had worked with her on a number of pictures, and I did dramas with her, too.” He was concerned that with Goldie as a lead, the audience would come in with false expectations of lighter material, but still he suggested that Ridley set up meetings with them both.
That two such prominent stars were willing to get out there and hustle for the parts spoke volumes about the state of their careers. Meryl had dazzled Hollywood with her technical mastery since she’d made the leap from Shakespearean roles on the stage to Oscar wins for Kramer vs. Kramer in 1980 and Sophie’s Choice in 1983. She had the classy Katherine thing down, although some directors groused that her off-center beauty and all those proficient accents in her early roles limited her sex appeal. (Remember, Katherine can’t surmount the man in any way.) Silkwood (1983) and Out of Africa (1985) burnished her sterling reputation, but by age forty in 1989, she was reaching a difficult phase. She’d taken on some middling comedies like She-Devil, and she said, “Every actress will tell you they have maybe two things per year that they can possibly stand to put themselves into.”
Goldie had pulled off a loopier but still stellar course. She’d won a supporting Oscar in 1970 for her first movie role as a giggly girlfriend in Cactus Flower. In 1981, she made the list of top-ten box-office stars on the strength of the lead in Private Benjamin and went on to headline other popular comedies with infectious, giddy charm. At age forty-four, though, she could no longer count on ingenue roles, and what else was there? Thelma & Louise represented a career-making (or career-saving) opportunity for any actress at the time, from beginner to the most acclaimed.
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WITH THIS EMBARRASSMENT OF RICHES and high-profile stars awaiting answers, the movie needed a director more than ever. After Ridley left Richard Donner hanging, Laddie called. “You just keep rejecting people,” he said to Ridley. “You keep finding reasons why everybody is wrong. Why don’t you do it yourself?”
Mimi kept up the pressure, too. The script for Isobar wasn’t coming together as Ridley had hoped. Black Rain had hit theaters with underwhelming force that September, generating another so-so reception for one of Ridley’s films. The critic Roger Ebert accused the crime thriller of being “all look and no heart,” and wrote, “the screenplay seems to have been manufactured out of those Xeroxed outlines they pass out in film school.”
“I needed to step off, step out of the perception of what I was as a director,” Ridley said, “because I was really becoming pigeonholed. I felt I needed to emphasize that I could do a film really about people.”
Ridley was pleased when Michelle Pfeiffer asked to sit down to talk about Thelma & Louise again at the Four Seasons. “I’m busy and can’t do it now,” she told him. “But I thought it was so good, I have to ask: Why don’t you come to your senses and do it yourself?”
She’s bloody right, Ridley thought. I’m going to do it. This is ridiculous.
At that moment, the best script in his quiver was the one that made him the most uncomfortable, the one that most got under his skin—but the one he couldn’t let go.
Thelma & Louise was going to be a Ridley Scott film after all. With his usual workaholic precision, he threw himself into finding its stars.